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livredorMostly playing games has been so easy I hardly even noticed it.
I downloaded Steam from the orange shopping bag with a capital A. And lovely SteamOS means many of my games Just Work.
My first experience was a negative one; I've been playing Civ VI on a computer that isn't really powerful enough and tends to overheat. And Civ VI claims to be Linux compatible. I downloaded it, but it doesn't actually run. I quacked for
On the other hand, Stellaris installed and ran with almost no trouble at all; the only issue was that the graphics on the landing screen are a bit messed up, which made me nervous, but once you actually start the game it works perfectly.
Another minor issue was game-adjacent. I tried to install Mumble as voice chat for playing online bridge. I found two versions of Mumble in the app store, with no clear information about what the difference was. So I picked one at random. And that seemed to work just fine, but the voice detection wizard was picking up loads of background noise and I couldn't really find settings to prevent that. Eventually I managed to get it just about working but with the output volume so low that you had to strain to hear the other people chatting. I tried just gradually nudging it up, and at some point lost audio altogether. This is an experience several people have had with Mumble under Windows, so I think it's probably not Ubuntu's fault as such, but it was frustrating when lots of people were gathered to play cards and I had to wait ten minutes to change back to my old computer.
The only serious frustration was trying to run the GloomHaven helper app in order to play GH with people in a different household. The page has helpful step by step instructions, which however assumed knowledge I don't really have. It says it runs on Windows, MacOS or Linux, but when I downloaded the latest version I got a bunch of stuff with very Windows-looking file extensions likejack suggested using tab-complete to make the terminal essentially guess the file path, but I'm sure that can't be the right approach!
I think the general conclusion is that searching for stuff via the app store, and then downloading it, just works by magic though I don't understand what's going on under the hood. But clicking links on webpages to download software results in files being put on my computer in some arbitrary location, and the next step is some kind of tacit knowledge that nobody ever bothers to explain.
Next steps:
Determine the file path in a way that can be entered into a terminal
Figure out search terms to find how to install software (from the command line?) once downloaded
Further investigate running Civ VI under Steam and Linux.
I downloaded Steam from the orange shopping bag with a capital A. And lovely SteamOS means many of my games Just Work.
My first experience was a negative one; I've been playing Civ VI on a computer that isn't really powerful enough and tends to overheat. And Civ VI claims to be Linux compatible. I downloaded it, but it doesn't actually run. I quacked for
Civ VI Linux, and found a lot of message boards from two years ago saying that yay, Civ VI works in Linux. But further investigation suggested that only the Epic Games version works out of the box, and I have the Steam version. There were a few suggestions for settings to make Steam!Civ run, but I didn't understand them well enough to implement, so I set this task aside for a while.On the other hand, Stellaris installed and ran with almost no trouble at all; the only issue was that the graphics on the landing screen are a bit messed up, which made me nervous, but once you actually start the game it works perfectly.
Another minor issue was game-adjacent. I tried to install Mumble as voice chat for playing online bridge. I found two versions of Mumble in the app store, with no clear information about what the difference was. So I picked one at random. And that seemed to work just fine, but the voice detection wizard was picking up loads of background noise and I couldn't really find settings to prevent that. Eventually I managed to get it just about working but with the output volume so low that you had to strain to hear the other people chatting. I tried just gradually nudging it up, and at some point lost audio altogether. This is an experience several people have had with Mumble under Windows, so I think it's probably not Ubuntu's fault as such, but it was frustrating when lots of people were gathered to play cards and I had to wait ten minutes to change back to my old computer.
The only serious frustration was trying to run the GloomHaven helper app in order to play GH with people in a different household. The page has helpful step by step instructions, which however assumed knowledge I don't really have. It says it runs on Windows, MacOS or Linux, but when I downloaded the latest version I got a bunch of stuff with very Windows-looking file extensions like
.zip and .exe. Trying to click on the downloaded file to uncompress it seemed to work but then threw errors. So I tried the advice of using the command line. Except that the example instructions say cd /path/to/gloomhaven-helper, and I know what cd means, and I understand that I need to replace the path with the actual file path, but... I couldn't figure out what the file path is. You can sort of see it in the GUI file manager, but there seems to be no way to copy-paste that into a terminal, and manually copying led to mistakes, and I got frustrated with it. Again, I probably shouldn't have tried installing and setting up new software when my friends were waiting to play with me. jack suggested using tab-complete to make the terminal essentially guess the file path, but I'm sure that can't be the right approach!I think the general conclusion is that searching for stuff via the app store, and then downloading it, just works by magic though I don't understand what's going on under the hood. But clicking links on webpages to download software results in files being put on my computer in some arbitrary location, and the next step is some kind of tacit knowledge that nobody ever bothers to explain.
Next steps:
