Here’s the guide I used: https://www.standingpad.org/posts/2024/06/affinity-on-linux/

The only thing I did differently was I used this yaml to make the container: https://gist.github.com/gnat/8b69cf49b68e2349afe5e8cb5af49bf8

There’s a bit of tinkering afterwards, but it runs.

Pretty stable from my testing, outside of a few crashes when I was asking too much of it.

That said Inkscape/gimp/kirta are good alternatives if you are in the market.

While it’s a pain to setup, Affinity does work in Bottles and a specific build of Wine. Not easy to do, but it’s possible.

Arch isn’t too hard with the AUR offering packages that said I only stuck out with Manjaro. They had a GUI to help with the install.

I personally wouldn’t advise using it if you are new to Linux. I use Linux Mint and it’s been amazing for my work load. (Cad video editing and games.)

While the safe bet with Linux is AMD, it’s not like Nvidia or Intel are bad options for Linux. (,running RTX 3050 and 12100f).

It just depends on your platform and how comfortable you are with tinkering.

From my testing, Ubuntu based, is the easiest to get up and running while Fedora and arch can take a bit of work.

For my recommendation, look at the games you wanna run and see what they recommend for hardware. An in general safe bet, 12th gen Intel i3/i5 or 3rd gen Ryzen is a good bet for cheap hardware still in stock in stores or online. Upgrade is good (12-14th on the same socket & 1-5th gen Ryzen on the same socket).

Graphics cards works on both, and AmD and Nvidia works on Linux, though Nvidia is behind on support, but not by much games will be stable.

Only if you live in the US or UK. Lol I didn’t realize Amazon’s international kneecapping of their products moved to include hardware along with software.

For context if you are Canadian you don’t get access to overdrive or audiobooks on Kindle. Fun fact this also includes their fire tablets.

Because printing in Linux both works and is supported and not supported and hope that there are drivers and they work.

For example, I have a brother printer and in both arch and Ubuntu/mint the printer worked out of the box. But I was missing features like double sided printing. So I had to download drivers for it.

In arch the drivers were on the AUR, so I was printing is seconds.

In Ubuntu/mint they weren’t in my package manager, so I had to go to brother’s website and hope they had drivers. Brother did and while it took a bit it did work too. No worse than windows.

Pro: Price, Convenience, Looks

Cons: Much like buying an “iPhone” from Temu, the price is usually reflected in the quality.

Don’t get me wrong, there are cheep smart watches if you look for them or go second hand. But what you’ll find advertised on Temu isn’t it.

Build quality is usually the first to suffer, but you’ll find mislabeled battery info a 500mah instead of the promised 1000mah. Or an LCD instead of an OLED.

But those are things we can adapt too. The biggest problem is software. That’ll do and close enough has been the name of the game for years now. And sometimes “smart” just means it can (badly) track your steps and pretend to check your heart rate with a led pretending to be a sensor.

Alternative

If you are looking for any budget electronics try looking for last years or a few years ago models. I got a Garmin Forerunner 235 in 2022 for 1/5 of its asking price because I found a deal on eBay.

I’d also look into the landscape of the market you are buying into and seeing who is actually making these things, and what is running on it.

For smart watches I found the answer was

Apple

Android with Watch OS (Samsung google and many more)

Garmin

If the watch isn’t running android watch os or is made by Apple or Garmin. Assume its good too be true and look into it more, or look elsewhere.

Good news China is lazy and one clone usually is made by many factories and someone else made a video about it. Might not be the same name, but it’ll be close enough.

Honestly since the New 3DS screen is so small, the slight blurring is negligible to my eyes. So long as there isn’t certificating in the image, like shimmering and or screen tearing, I don’t noticed it.

My first system I could call my own (not sharing with siblings) was the fat Nintendo DS. It will always be my favourite out of nostalgia.

But my primary DS is my New 3DS, does everything want and plays everything.

For me the DS is the Pokemon machine, from the mainline series to the spin offs. Such a good time to be a fan of Pokemon. Even the knockoffs were fun like Fossil fighters.

The DS was also a good rpg power house the first system I beat Chrono Trigger on.

Then there was the slog of platformers, from new Mario bros, to license of game dubious quality, nicktoons unite anyone?

The 3DS was just an overall disappointment in comparison, game selection was limited and 3rd parties just didn’t give it the time of day. Don’t get me wrong love my 2d Zelda and Metroid revivals on it, but outside of Nintendo games, it didn’t offer me anything.

I love Emulation since it can be on completely different ends of the spectrum. On the one hand you have ROM collections on modern system, like Capcom Arcade Stadium, or TMNT Cowabunga Collection.

On another you have complete reverse engineering project like PCSX-Reloaded, and community developed emulators with retail games are based on, all open sourced and technically legal, so long as you have the hardware, and tools to back the ROMs, BIOS’s, and other material required.

Then you have the complete black market, where the ROMs are illegally obtained, the BIOS’s are just downloaded from a random server, and the emulators are paying to get access to the latest retail games patches like Yuzu.

All 3 of these interact and play off of each other, like arcade collections using MAME, being able to extract the ROMs from collections to use in emulators, and Nintendo using someone else’s ROM dump of their own game for Wiiware. That it’s just interesting that emulation works at all.

I personally love it, and try my best to get my ROMs, ISO, and BIOS’s without resorting to downloading it.

They

Can’t remember any more, either it was installed along side another package, or it was installed because of intel openCL support. Either way it’s been over a year since my last Manjaro install borked, and I’ve been running (and upgraded) Linux Mint.

For me it was installing apps from the AUR, like Intel Compute. Had dependency issues and errors every time other packages updated and when I tried to fix it, other modules would uninstall, and break my DE, or put my machine in an unrecoverable state.

It’s not as bad as that time my btfs file system broke randomly in Fedora, since I was able to recover my data. But it always felt like an endless battle with the distro to keep it going. Which is why I moved to mint.

I know it was a Manjaro issue since when I attempted to move to EndevorOS the issues were gone… though I dont like it as a distro (I.e. why isn’t a package manager gui installed by default)

Manjaro, its a clean and simple way to install Arch with lots of good GUI for all the tasks a user needs to do on their system… Then it crash and bricked the install… 3 times.

Anyways I’m on Mint now.

Setting up Linux is a pain for most distros from my experience, Steam deck makes things easy in comparison. I personally run Linux Mint as it’s easier to setup and run.

Depends on the game, depends on the power. You can get a decent mid range PC for the price, I’ve seen a 3050 8GB for $275 CAD or $360 CAD for a 3060 12GB, and with a $959.99 CAD Price tag you can easily buy a Case for $60 CAD, 16GB of RAM for $50, $80 for a 550w Power Supply, $85 1TB of RAM, $100 for the Motherboard, and $200 for a Ryzen 7 5700, with $25 to get a cheap keyboard and mouse, or more if you get the 3050.

This is from a quick search, you can probably optimize it more if you go used, use PC Part Picker, or wait for better sales.

Please NOTE: I never claimed that this PC would be better than the PS5 Pro, I said it would be better to build one. Especially since you can upgrade the machine later, and have access to a larger library of games including Sony.

Though if you wanted to cheap out you could get a Steam Deck for much, much less.

Parts list:

https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=43_557_559&item_id=246995

https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=43_557_559&item_id=243386

https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=4_64&item_id=251518

https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=179_4229&item_id=244895

https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=6_6004_5959&item_id=088547

https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=33_1938&item_id=235375

https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=24_311&item_id=188579

https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=26_1832&item_id=140923

Ooooo, I hope it comes from yet another Ubisoft government subsidy scam

Yikes, that’s not a good price, or look. And with most devs targeting PS4 (or Steam Deck) hardware these days, I’d say the new GPU will go underutilized outside of the AAAA sphere.

At that price point I’d say it’d be better to build a PC than get this thing.

Depends on usage. If I have 2 hands available Firefox, u lock Origin is a must on a modern web. But if I need one hand free for… let’s say holding an umbrella, then cromite, based on the chrome fork based off of bromite. As much as I don’t like chrome, on Android it’s the only browser that has gestures, which makes one handed usage perfect. Cromite, just has adblockers built int and lacks many of the tracking stuff too.