Also, are malware-free cursor applications still a thing? Or does it make me an old man to want to do it in 2023?
Dude, Lubuntu is not made for gaming. For gaming, you would want either KDE (preferred over GNOME due to, among others, VRR/FreeSync/G-Sync, HDR and tearing support) or GNOME.
Regarding the distro:
Fedora and openSUSE Tumbleweed are great options if you don’t usually play for hours, as they are more aimed at general use.
Nobara and Bazzite (both Fedora-based) are the best of the best, for ease of use, performance, etc., with the biggest difference between both being that Nobara is mutable, while Bazzite is immutable.
If you want an Arch-based gaming distro, there is CachyOS, but I don’t like it very much.
Yeah I know Lubuntu isn’t much of a gaming distro. I chose it because it’s so lightweight and stable that my ancient and unreliable laptop actually became useful for a sort of dress rehearsal for taking the plunge on my main.
I was trying to make it install and run really old games as proof that, with the right tools and advice from people who’d made them work, I would be able to run the games I usually play on the main in Pop OS or something. After several days of collecting and following advice, I got as far as knowing to use bottles for the install and “add non-steam game” in Steam (with Proton) but couldn’t get bottles to install in a way so that the directory would actually be findable for Steam or even myself outside of the bottles sandbox afterwards.
After a couple days of a bunch of trial and error following all advice on that to the letter failed miserably, I finally reached “fuck this” and decided to save myself the frustration of continuing to do what everyone said works without having it work.
At least on my end, changing Bottles’ permission settings using Flatseal or KDE Plasma’s integrated Flatpak settings to make it have access to all users’ files makes it work correctly.
Remember to always use the Flatpak version of Bottles, because the native versions are usually very outdated and broken (the RPM version, for example, is totally broken and in a version from mid to late 2022).
That’s just it: I AM using Flatseal and as far as I can tell it gave me all of the confirmation that it’s been installed correctly and works…and nothing else. No functionality changes
As for KDE Plasma, a cursory search seems to indicate that it’s not compatible with Lubuntu, which is kind of a deal breakers unless one of the compatible ones is as lightweight AND as stable AND as newbie friendly as Lubuntu, which would be a minor miracle IMO lol
