Linux



Confucius says: "A person who prefers Linux on their home computer is like a person who prefers to be under the hood of their car instead of driving it." This is probably why /tech/ies prefer Linux, but we're abo/v/e that. Linux has been a favorite of neckbeards everywhere since the 90s, but now it's really been catching on: when people do a 360° and moonwalk away after seeing the unholy abomination of Windows 8, or their jaws drop in shock when they see how Windows 10 went full 1984 on the users' privacy, yet realize they can't afford an iComputer, they look at Linux and say, well, why the fuck not.

But you may ask: "What about the vidya?" True, Linux has fewer games than Windows. Other than a short porting fad back in the 90s, it just didn't seem commercially viable. But things are changing: all major engines are now designed with multiplatform in mind (thanks in large part to the growth of mobile platforms), so ports have become easy and cheap to do. Digital distribution also helps reduce costs, and even Valve pushes hard for Linux gaming because they got afraid of Windows' app store.

Although the amount of commercial games is still modest, there's a bunch of online stores that offer them:


 * GOG
 * Humble Store
 * IndieGameStand
 * Itch.io
 * Steam
 * PenguSpy not an appstore, but not a review site either

Other than native games, there is Wine, a compatibility layer to run Windows applications (it's recommended to use the PlayOnLinux frontend).

Also known to the free software support crowd as "GNU/Linux". And be sure to pronounce it correctly.

Free games from repositories
To download and install programs on Linux, one typically does not download .exe files from various websites and run them by hand; instead, distros provide a software repository or package manager. If something is not in your distro's manager, you can still port the package over but you might need to puzzle out some missing dependencies. For those of us who love to tinker on the engine more than driving the car, you can get the source code for each of these and compile it by hand.

Free games in distro-agnostic packages
These are still typically free software (or at least freeware), but do not use your easy-peasy package manager to install itself deep in your system. Most of the time, they are just binaries (or executables in Windows parlance) in downloadable tar.gz archives (which work like .zip files). Though, in some more rare cases, these may also include games that come as source code only -- you need to hunt down the right libraries through your distro's package manager, compile, and install manually (while trickier, this has the added bonus of increased optimization for your computer hardware, however marginal).