Yes, and every single time, it was because filesystems have ways to recover when things go wrong.

But make no mistake, things went wrong. Every time. Even if no files were damaged, the next system accessing the volume would run into a file system that wasn’t exited properly.

And while “never do it while it’s being accessed” improves your chances, due to write caching you can’t actually know if the medium is still writing or reading. Or internally in the middle of a process organising data structures. Or being checked for damage by a background process because the filesystem was flagged for repair due to inconsistencies. Or in the case of spinning rust, in the middle of a background defrag. Or in the case of flash storage in the middle of a trim.

If you have a forgiving boss you could tell him “fuck you” to his face every morning… But why would you? Maybe one morning he’ll be cranky, and that one time he’ll take offence and actually fire you.

It was always a problem. On all systems.

Filesystems are resilient, but one that is actually designed to reliably survive being physically disconnected without warning, does not exist.

Windows has always had a “make safe to unplug” button, too.

Not that it matters if you were discarding the drive.

Don’t do that.

fstab is just a config file so the computer knows what drives and storage volumes its supposed to have when it boots.

You can add and remove drives without ever editing fstab. Plugging something in should give you the option to mount it in your file explorer, and in the same place you should be able to “eject” it before disconnecting the actual cable.

Pacman is the actual system package manager.

Yay is an AUR helper, a program that automates all the steps of installing something from the AUR.

The AUR or Arch User Repository is a way for individuals in the community to easily distribute software, or create software installers, without going though the work of getting something into the official repos.

Here’s the first thing I do on a new system, yay -S pamac. This will install pamac, a GUI for browsing, installing and uninstalling packages. (Both normal repos and AUR)

Generally, packages from the AUR get compiled by your system and then installed. This can be really slow, hence there is often a “-bin” version of packages that installs a pre-compiled binary.

You can also find “-git” versions of packages, these install the very latest version directly from the development repo.

Not really. Just install bottles, usage is extremely self-explanatory as the UI is very good.

But if you need more details, the bottles docs are great.

Bottles has a wine manager that allows you to install various wine versions, and switch between them. You can also use the system installed version or even more versions installed by protonup-qt.

Winetricks is included.

No, actually.

Your game files do not need to be inside a prefix, and I generally do not set things up that way.

Same as on windows you can have your c drive, but then install games to a different drive. You can mount any file location as an additional drive in wine. There is usually already a “z” drive mounted, which gives the prefix access to the filesystem outside the prefix.

This means there’s not actually any need to place things inside the prefix, except for save files which need to be in specific locations like appdata or documents.

So to move things over and run them, you’d just copy the game files anywhere you like. To run a game, instead of a location on the c drive, you’d use the corresponding z drive path to the exe.

With bottles, this is super easy. Set up a bottle, and copy any save files into the prefix. Easily done with “browse files” from the config page of a bottle, which will open the fake c drive in a file browser.

With a configured bottle, simply navigate to the game .exe. Right click it, and select run with bottles. Bottles will ask which bottle to run it with, and that’s that. Alternatively, use the “Run executable” button found on the config page of the bottle. For ease of use, add the exe to the bottle as a shortcut.

Shortcuts can then also be added as start menu items, or even added to steam.

No need to fiddle with putting all the game files inside the fake c drive.

Setting things up this way means you have your prefix, with save files and such, separate from the game files. You can easily delete or add games, without touching the save-file-containing prefix, and move games around to wherever you need and still have them work.

You can re-use the same bottle for many games, and keep the save files for those games in one prefix.

If a given game needs a bit more massaging to work, bottles makes it very easy set up and manage additional bottles for any such games.

Well, Endeavour is just arch. If you want, you can achieve the same install that has only the things you need, by removing things instead of just adding.

IMO it starts off closer to the config most people want, so it’s less work to take it the rest of the way.

Not even close, if you actually install barebones arch, then barebones arch is exactly that, barebones. You wont even have a DE.

Endeavour is what you want. It’s just straight up arch, but with all the stuff you’d want to set up anyway done for you.

And if you want an “app-store” style app to browse packages with, and not fiddle with the command line to manage packages, install pamac. It can be expanded with AUR and flatpak support.

With AUR it’s as easy as installing any other package, actually.

You just install the git version from AUR.

No clue. Haven’t used it in years. I was done when I went looking for a fix for the compositor thing and found a years-old open bug report.

I do want to add that new games can also require new packages, the way Alan Wake II did at launch. Even on Arch you had to compile the development version of Mesa for it to run.

Cinnamons compositor doesn’t turn off for games (it’s supposed to but has been bugged for years) which costs you fps.

Playing Alan Wake 2 at launch was only possible with the latest Mesa drivers compiled from the AUR due to some graphics features that it required.

I think OP is looking for a desktop application, not a selfhosted cloud platform.

Apple’s “private cloud” is a thing. Not all “Apple Intelligence” features are “on device”, some can and do utilize cloud-based processing power, and this will also be available to app developers.

Apparently this has additional safeguards vs “normal cloud” which is why they are branding it “private cloud”.

But it’s still “someone else’s computer” and apple is not keeping their AI implementation 100% on device.

You should be able to get most games to work with some extra tinkering.

Got Armored Core running in HDR with this.

Also, I found it was enough to run the just the game in gamescope, no need to run the entirety of steam in a gamescope window. Just set the launch options for the game you want to enable HDR on.

I recall that at least on KDE, in the audio settings you can enable the ability to go WAY past 100% volume.

Depends on the malware.

With total access, nothing would prevent the malicious code from modifying the task viewer itself to make it ignore the resources it is using.

Accounting for every way malware might be discovered is difficult, but with enough system access, it’s all possible.

Because they only work on one distro/package manager.

Distributing software is simply transitioning to work in a distro-agnostic way. It’s only a matter of time until distros start updating flatpaks along with system packages. Many already do.

And some apps distributed as appimages self-update. (RPCS3 for example)

Not to mention that Ubuntu itself has basically ditched apt for snap.

The idea of using lutris as a launcher is appalling to me. I have a library of thousands of games, the thought of setting them all up in lutris, is anxiety inducing. Its library management and browsing features, do not exist.

Bottles seems more aimed at software.

It is not. Though it can still do that, too.

I’ve not found a single thing only lutris could do. It’s a single app that tries to do everything, but IMO the result is that it does none of it well. Least of all function as an attractive and functional everyday way to access my games library.

Bottles gets my game installed and running, and then added to steam, which actually does have tags and categories, as well as various other management tools, as well as a good-looking UI.