revelator

hmm seems that is also the way it is done on clang so it might be the way to go forward. biggest hurdle is that the autotool based build system would need some changes so that it can be made optional like it is on clang. sadly while i can make some changes with autotool based build systems im far from an expert on it .

Perhaps to some extent i would argue that it is usable, though it does have some rough edges and not being able to kill a stuck process reliably is a big nono in my world . further development might fix that eventually though. X11 is getting long in the teeth i agree on that but it still works reliably enough that i cant rule it out completely. Most games will run fine on linux except a few that rely on kernel level anticheat mechanisms like world of warcraft or the division 2 which go ape on the online checks. i would say especially the division 2 suffers from that while wow can be made to run with some elbow grease. Got system shock 2 running on solus with newdark and it works quite fine so thief 2/3 should also be doable.

Or both ? Seems theres a good chance we can have our cake and eat it to . Wayland does behave better on modern hardware so it seems the big problem if you are on a modern pc would be tailoring stuff to interface with it properly. X11libre keeps compatibility with older tech so might be an option for those who cant afford the latest and greatest .

hmm looks like theres quite a furor on wayland vs X11. while it does yank out some of the cruft X11 had accumulated over the years it does not work to well and makes it harder to interface with the DE. this has sprung up in the meantime https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver as a revitalization and modernization effort for X11. Theres also been a rather hefty debate on whether to just scrap it all and rewrite a new DE from scratch. Im not sure but it might seem to be the better option in the long run as X11 is getting really old and wayland seems to have to many problems.

For gnome desktops the key combination is alt+F2 then enter r to reload the process. Seems like wayland wants window managers to handle system calls so while being simpler itself it makes things rather hard for anyone else The replacement for xkill is called wkill but so far only works for certain programs, mainly plasma.

Not as such. Kde versions with wayland can use ctrl+meta+esc and then click the frozen window but there have been some changes between kde versions. Theres a discussion about it here with some pointers https://askubuntu.com/questions/1378412/what-is-the-equivalent-of-xkill-on-wayland A variant of xkill is being worked on but has not yet been released.

True openbox itself is not really a standalone DE. it does play well with Xfce on nomadbsd (which is pretty minimal). I would say Xfce can be minimal dependent on what other stuff you yoke it up with, but so can many other DE's. I like both KDE and Xfce but for different reasons. For KDE plasma is really fun to toy with though it kinda ends up feeling like an advanced phone UI mostly because the interface works allmost the same as on my samsung S20FE just with mouse support instead of touch (in retrospect QT was engineered by nokia so it should probably not be to surprising). Xfce has a small footprint and is pretty fast but yeah calling it minimal may be stretching it. though distros can use use it in such a way. MX linux seems to be based on Xfce.

wayland is probably the way forward in the linux world (X was simply getting to crowded with unnessesary stuff). Xfce or OpenBox if you want to go really minimal. Yeah gog installers usually tend to work well on linux . For those games not on gog it can be a bit of a hazzle at times since many older games dont work with proton/dxvk (pre dx8 games). For those you still need to toy with wine's internals (runtimes DX flags etc.) and for games who only support upto dx6 you need a really old version of wine. Nvidia cards can also be a bit hit and miss with certain distros, generally AMD does way better with linux because they tend to be more amenable to open source.

Hmm theres also Arch Linux if youre into toying with the latest and greatest (and potentially unstable ) features. Arch has pretty much abolished 32 bit as a target so take this into consideration to. The Msys2 build environment is based on Arch's and has also pretty much deprecated anything 32 bit except packages that rely on msvcrt (standard mingw-w64) in favor of ucrt. I did use OpenSuse at some time which was great for crossbuilds. not sure how it does today as it was some time ago.

Solus works great but its up to personal preference . I much prefer it to some other distros but that said its not the only one that just works. Pop is pretty great to havent tried cachy so cant comment ubuntu and derivates also works fine though im not a fan of the ui. Mint seems popular though my stint with it ended because of some problems with lutris and the ui was sadly rather broken for me but that may have been a glitchy release.

aye lutris has several problems handling physical cd drives it would seem. diablo II has the same problem so needs some mucking around copying files to get it going. The old thief before TFix(TFix is basically newdark) relies on dx6 so would need a somewhat old version of wine i reckon so no vulkan wrapper stuff eg. dxvk/proton wont work.

Ah bah its a known problem with wine and some discs . It refuses to release the drive which leads to being unable to switch because even if you manage to swap the cd the explorer still shows disc 1. The reason why i havent run into it is that im using an emulator which seems to bypass wines problem with releasing the disc. As mentioned you could also just copy the content to your harddrive which should also work. Strangely not all discs are affected by this bug but call of duty is one such. And apperantly also thief it would seem.

I seem to remember the original discs used some kinda drm crap that royally f... up some later windows versions. Not sure if wine also gets hit by the same crap but possibly. Datiswous idea might actually be the easier part since mucking about with the drm crap can be detrimental to your pc's health BOOOM ! . I usually use a cd emulator since most of my original cd's have long since been imaged and i have luckily not run into that problem atleast.

ok read a bit about this on the above forum and 16 bit mode is no longer supported but can be emulated with a sample shader which is included with newdark. the reason it looks wrong is that 16 bit uses dithering but this is no longer supported with modern gfx cards and has to be emulated. I remember 16 bit games tended to look like shit on a geforce tnt but strangely rather good on a voodoo card. This is also a problem with the older lithtech games like blood2 which look rather bad compared to back then on my voodoo 3. If you have the guts to do some hex editing of the executable it can also be forced but will look rather bad so the sample shader is probably the best bet if you absolutely must have 16 bit mode. as for other old games that i have running on lutris heretic II runs quite ok as well as many of the early opengl games based on idtech.

should be possible to copy of steams workarounds for use with lutris in case someone does not have the game on steam. otherwise using newdark might help since it is somewhat more modern so should atleast work well with proton or dxvk (system shock 2 on newdark runs well with dxvk atleast). only problem is if you prefer thiefs old 16 bit gfx mode since im not even sure if it is supported anymore on newdark (it is not supported with system shock 2 atleast it seems ?).