I remember a year or so ago when I switched from Pulseaudio to Pipewire, best decision I’ve ever made in my entire life!

You can manually remove all of the previous drivers and their GL32 counterparts, your flatpaks will still run as long as you have the newest drivers.

I’m not sure why they don’t get caught by the --unused flag, but they are definitely not needed from the flatpaks I’ve tested with.

Sand-boxing only works fully if you have the Flatpak; Thanks for mentioning this as I forgot to specify!

No problem!

The pursuit of knowledge is endless; It’s good to ask questions, but always do your own research too, as myself or anyone else could not know what they’re talking about.

I hope you have a great day as well!

You can use virustotal for any game/file under 650MBs; This meme was created as a joke, good security practices should always be followed.

No anti virus will be 100% accurate, viruses get missed all the time, while legitimate software can acquire false flags.

I would never recommend just running a random .exe you find on the internet with wine as any non-root protected files could potentially be damaged; With Bottles (the application) all files outside of the created bottle are not visible to programs ran/installed inside the bottle.

If you really want to try something, throwing caution to the wind, running it in a wine BOTTLE that’s created just for that program, has a low chance of damaging your computer. (This does not mean “safe”)

https://docs.usebottles.com/flatpak/expose-directories/use-system-home#sandboxed-userdir-homedir

I have a secondary discord account I use primarily for streaming, It works pretty well and I haven’t had any issues.

I used to use the secondary account in a web browser and manually patch in the audio to it’s mic input with pipewire and a patch bay.

The main reason I use discord-screenaudio is because I’m lazy and it’s slightly faster than manually doing it; Also it allows you to actually have the audio come out from the stream like on the standard windows client, as opposed to using the mic input for audio.

Oh yeah for sure, I just thought it was funny. I explicitly install most things through my primary package manager, but for some things in my use case, Flatpak is definitely the call!

Treat others as you wish to be treated!

Yeah. . . basically lol, I only use it for a handful of things; Bottles (To run windows software and non-steam games in a sandbox), discord-screenaudio (To easily stream movies and shows to friends who refuse to leave discord), and Protontricks (To VERY easily install mods for steam games that have a .exe installer).

Seriously Protontricks is amazing, no more extracting exe files to install mods just a simple

protontricks -c ‘wine ~/Downloads/nameOfModOrPatchToInstall.exe’ steamid#forgame

and you click through the installer like you’re on windows.

So, I only have 3 applications installed through Flatpak (Bottles, discord-screenaudio, and Protontricks), but for compatibility sake Flatpak will have a few different NVIDIA drivers and their 32bit versions installed for application functionality.

Most of the time, between updates I will have 3-4 different ones installed at any given time. It’s nothing super upsetting, but it is “Mildly Infuriating” as its a slight loss of a couple gigabytes of space.

I second this, I also use arch (btw) on all of my personal computers, gaming rig, media machines; But when it comes to my work machine, it also runs Windows because it needs to.

I love Linux and want it to prosper. Hopefully one day windows specific software like that won’t be such a hurdle, but unfortunately it is; If your livelihood depends on it, you cannot afford to risk hard breaks in compatibility. There will be days where as a less experienced user, issues could take hours to fix.

If you get a secondary computer in the future that you only use for personal activities, that is when I would reconsider installing and learning Linux. It’s rewarding to learn, you have more control over your system and better privacy, but it takes time and effort.

Also besides them being extremely shady; I refuse to use any VPN that makes me create an account past a generic account number. If you don’t log my data, why do you need me to sign up?

Thanks for the information, I will definitely look into those! I used to use Mullvad for torrenting for a number of years, the Linux client worked very well, no leaks, and the Killswitch was effective through manual testing.

Oh yeah. I’ve used them for a couple years, I’ve just been out of the circle for 4-5 months. I also know things can change in the snap of a finger, so I figured I’d ask around. Good to see mullvad is still so highly recommended.

Thanks for the info!

Yeah, still I can only take the company’s word to any of these claims. After further research it looks like IVPN doesn’t have port forwarding anymore either; If I do go the VPN route, I may still test my seeding speed with Mullvad as I’ve used them for a number of years.

Sorry to spam the instance with a FAQ. I may of been misinformed, I was under the impression it was difficult to seed easily with Mullvad now. Also I was curious if anyone had recommendations with good Linux clients, not just the service itself; It seems IVPN or Mullvad will be the best all around option for me, if I do go the VPN route.

Thanks for the information; I already use proton mail plus to have all of my email domains under one, easy to sort inbox. However, I don’t wish to perform illicit activities on something with my legal name attached!

Is setup similar to a VPS where I can just connect from the command line and set everything up on the remote box?