linuxmemes

me?

okay so sometimes you need to run a twenty year old game made for another OS or cpu architecture

which.. weirdly, easier in Linux than win7; Linux has better backward compatibility with windows than windows. was like three clicks to install.

but sometimes that game uses broadcast UDP packets for LAN multiplayer.

and this is where our problem comes from, because broadcast UDP packets are deprecated, and also most modern routers don't love them, I don't think.

so, I needed to find a way to manually readdress outgoing UDP packets from broadcast to a specific set of multicast addresses, which...

also, some issues running USB as serial for some exotic peripherals. and by 'exotic' I mean 'I don't know for sure the PC is the problem; I might have soldered this wrong'.

also some issues in qubes, but that's literally all virtualization, and not a distro for anyone who hasn't both been using Linux for a while and considered the cost of making their apartment a Faraday cage.

a few issues with bare arch, which is the 'do everything from scratch 0 automation bleeding edge tech nerd, no, seriously you need to manually download a file system' distro. don't use arch if you don't know what youre doing.

A lot of the people who are drawn to Linux want to be able to tinker with things. For your use case you would probably be perfectly happy with installing Ubuntu, getting the apps you need, then not messing with it.

I don't really have to fix anything in Linux, I do a lot of advanced things though (I'm a software dev) where I will manually change executables' paths, swap them out with symlinks, use custom newer GCC compilers, etc, but even with all of that I still rarely ever have to "fix" anything. I have been waiting, prepared, for when this Ubuntu install craps out so I can finally wipe it out and switch to Arch for this PC.. but it still keeps going and going without a hiccup.

I'm not sure what people are referring to that they have to fix all the time, but no two people have the same experience overall obviously, and there are so many variations of a linux system. like take 10 different desktop environments or window managers or different pieces of software or hardware and every permutation is going to have either more problems, or less problems.

Ultimately I would recommend anybody just giving all of the distros and DE/WMs a try. A good try, give it a few weeks and see how each of them feel, you're not going to know what you've been missing, or if anything ever has bugs or quirks at all period, until you do.

You don't need to tinker so much Linux if you are just gonna use it for Internet and Movie stuff. We tinker with it so much because we want to make our desktop the way we want it

I know you probably mean newer Xbox games, but check out xemu if you like retro titles.