Depends on what mode you’re playing.

Primarily, there’s casual matchmaking, which actually is full of new players. Sadly, especially in off-hours, there’s also a lot of bots hosted by some mentally unstable script kiddies (no joke, they buy in a bot hosting framework and just pop that on a VPS somewhere) dedicated to ruining the game for everyone with aimbots, mic and chat spam etc. They abuse the fact that Valve hasn’t updated the anticheat in what feels like years. Regardless, there are still tons of healthy games to be found and bots usually are kicked within seconds.

Additionally, there are community servers which, depending on the actual community playing there, can have bonkers veterans or absolute noobs. These servers often are modded, too.

Ooooooo, I didn’t know about that project! I’ll definitely spin up a VM and check LMDE out. Thanks!

I run Ubuntu on my home servers, simply because I always used it, resources and help are plentiful and it’s well documented. I thought.

Took me a while to realize that after moving to a new machine and upgrading to 22.04 docker was installed as a fucking snap and a bunch of my apps didn’t work because of that. I got it all running now, but every VM and LXC I’ll install going forward will be running Debian instead. Fuck this annoying shit.

Edit: Or I might try out Mint Mate, since it’s what I know best (aka Ubuntu) without snaps. What would you guys recommend for a basic homelab?