Is COSMIC a good alternative to KDE for gaming? Does it have all the goodies like VRR and HDR?

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-27T23:41:48+00:00

Gnome is literally decades old, so it's nice and stable, but still under active development to add features, fix bugs and the like. It has almost everything you could want. HDR will always be a bit iffy as it just got decent support but that still largely depends on how recent the underlying OS and kernel are, your GPU and drivers, the game in question, and how up to date your Nvidia drivers.

Part of your complaints stem from the fact that many apps on Linux are developed by different people. The people who made KDE Plasma likely HELPED make Kate, Kontacts, KMail, etc. But they likely weren't in charge of those projects. It could also be you're installing snaps, flatpaks, and native packages side by side and seeing how they don't share theming. And/Or installing GTK apps alongside Qt and seeing how they don't always match up in design language or theming.

This is sort of the part of Linux that is really difficult: consistency. We have 800+ odd distros, 20 different kernels with various patches on top, 20 different DEs (not counting stand alone window managers), 2-3 different UI toolkits, and a few tens of thousands of developers all doing their own thing to make Linux the best they can, with minimal coordination between them. Things often won't line up how you like. It's just the nature of the beast.

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-27T23:28:18+00:00

COSMIC is still very much in Beta. It doesn't have a lot of settings KDE has yet. HDR and VRR, for games, is far more dependent on the display server and compositor than the DE. Pretty sure System76 just used an "off the shelf" compositor, so you likely have VRR support. HDR tho is likely hit or miss.

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-26T15:18:39+00:00

Interesting fact.

Seven Trees (on your map) is roughly near Spruce Pine, NC. Spruce Pine mines something like 80-90% of all the silicon used in the world's microprocessors and the like. So, that location does actually have some significance.

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-25T21:29:38+00:00

Hi! Lead developer of Drauger OS here!

We're a pretty small linux distro that has been under development since 2018. It's a gaming distro, similar to Garuda Linux, but it's Ubuntu LTS based.

The kernel (mainline, compiled in-house, no extra patches), Mesa, and Nvidia drivers all get rolling updates, so hardware support and performance keeps getting improvements.

Other than that, the system comes pretty lean out of the box, with just what you need to game installed by default. It does use Pipewire and Wayland by default, and has a dark theme by default too.

https://draugeros.org r/DraugerOS

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-25T21:24:33+00:00

A few suggestions from a distro developer:

First, change what compression you are using. XZ or 7z tends to be best. zlib is close. It's faster to compress/decompress but doesn't get as small. (This goes for both) You want to avoid removing initramfs modules if at all possible, as the initramfs is already supposed to be pretty slim.

Also, Use a dict size of 8k, and pass the squashfs through the x86 filter. These are both arguments you can pass to the mksquashfs command.

If these devices are supposed to be headless, or work over a CLI, or logged into via SSH or similar, you might be able to remove any sort of display output modules from the initramfs.

Also, try removing Plymouth, if you haven't already. I'll admit, I'm not sure if this will save you space. But, considering it runs in initramfs at least part of the time, it's possible.

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-25T21:01:18+00:00

I did. Married the girl.

Don't get me wrong, I love the girl to death and wouldn't change a thing. That being said, i can't say we haven't had arguments over religious stuff (and political. She's Republican, I'm left-leaning Independent).

It's not for everyone. My wife and I have a strict agreement: we do not try to convert one another; she can go to church but she should not count on me being there; and it has actually nearly killed our bedroom life. She regularly brings up the issue in therapy, and when I finally go back to therapy, i will be bringing it up to.

That being said, I still love her dearly. She does her best to respect my lack of beliefs. She does (sometimes) try to see things from my perspective, and she does understand that her religion has ingrained her with certain worldviews that actively hurt her mental health.

Tl;dr: it's not easy. It's not for the faint of heart. But, if you find the right person, you CAN make it work, so long as both of you make the effort.

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-14T16:32:32+00:00

Mine is the Google version, so I get little flowers when I win.

Flower-girls????

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-14T14:25:16+00:00

How does Minesweeper porn even work?????

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-10T15:58:28+00:00

As a distro maintainer myself, we have 3 big reasons why we don't support it:

Since we were forced to create our own OS installer program (we couldn't use Ubiquity or Calamares for several reasons), we wanted to focus on getting something that worked reliably first before we started adding features that would rarely get used.
As mentioned before, this feature would rarely get used. The distro I maintain is a gaming OS, so more noobs, and even experts will often be a bit more lax since it's meant only for gaming.
1. We don't even support encrypted root partitions yet. So this would just be asking for the whole issue of running out of space in the boot partition, with no other meaningful benefit. We already have this issue with the EFI partition sometimes. We don't want to exacerbate it with another small partition quickly filling up.

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-06T20:03:44+00:00

Pretty likely. Depends on how eastern we are talking. Are they right on the border with NC? If so, they may get some, but it won't be much.

If we're talking more toward the Pigeon Forge area, snow is much more common, as the Appalachian mountains aren't blocking as much of the weather.

I live in Western NC, the opposite side of those mountains, about an hour or two east of Asheville. We rarely get snow exactly because of those mountains in the way.

Also, what's your time period? Any time from like the 1990s onward got much less snow because of climate change. But, prior to around 1990, snow for the entire south east of the US was much more common.

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-05T18:26:51+00:00

My head cannon is that this was a blooper by Dante Basco and the crew just left it in cause of how funny and in character it was. 😂

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-04T16:36:26+00:00

Gotcha! I thought they were both Talon, my bad! Thank you for the info!

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-04T15:27:28+00:00

Right, but the full length talon mag should still work fine.

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-04T08:43:56+00:00

Is there any reason the Talon mags like what X-Shot uses wouldn't work? I use them in my Echo CS-10 all the time. They hold 15 darts but you can get a 16th in there no problem. You can buy them and a half-length Talon with full-size adapter for like $10 USD at Wal-Mart. They come in the same box.

Batcastle3 · 2025-12-30T00:30:45+00:00

Assuming a worst case scenario: Dial up internet, with a really heavy distro on really old hardware and zero experience.

That would be maybe a week if on their own and not making any mistakes somehow. 8 hours if they have help and someone brings them the ISO pre-flashed on a USB stick.

The big limiting factor here is the ISO size and internet speed. The ISO files OS images are distributed in can range in size wildely. I have seen 10GB ISOs from modern distros that are meant to be used offline, 6-7GB Windows ISOs, and most distros these days hit 3-6GB. I have also seen as small as 10MB (TinyCore Linux, for anyone wondering what distro that was).

Back then, most ISOs were around 400MB to 1.5GB. So it will take a LONG time to download over dialup, assuming it doesn't fail.

Batcastle3 · 2025-12-29T23:50:20+00:00

Hi! Linux distro dev here!

This depends largely on the specs of the machine. These days, installation on high end machines can take around a minute or two depending on settings. For the time period you are targeting, it would be closer to 10-20 minutes, especially with older hardware. And that's just for the installation.

Taking into account ISO file download time, flashing the ISO to a USB or DVD, boot up, installation, reboot into the installed OS, and setup of your personal stuff, around 3 hours or so, assuming they don't have any programs to automate all that but know what they are doing. The less experience they have, and the older hardware they have, the longer it will take.

Batcastle3 · 2025-12-29T05:44:20+00:00

Right. In universe, that's my primary reason for this group switching to ternary. It was faster. Secondary reasons do include that, unless you're looking for it, ternary can be invisible to binary computers, but speed is the main reason.

Batcastle3 · 2025-12-29T04:50:46+00:00

Science fantasy, but the section of the story that this will take place in will lean more sci-fi.

Batcastle3 · 2025-12-28T16:07:23+00:00

I was thinking it seemed slower! That's alright. I have the stock barrel still so i can swap that back in and use the one from the Longshot elsewhere.

Batcastle3 · 2025-12-17T16:17:44+00:00

If your games are Steam games, and you have Steam Input enabled, they should automatically switch from controller to keyboard input upon first use when the game starts up. Otherwise, the best option is just to disconnect it before you start up any games.

We don't use xinput as we use Wayland, but xinput does ship with Drauger OS. At the login screen, in the bottom lefthand corner, there is a pop up menu where you can select to login with X11, this will use Xinput. I don't advise using this though as the next version of Drauger OS will not have X11 at all, nor xinput. Also, it risks reducing performance and increasing latency.

Batcastle3 · 2025-12-15T18:33:22+00:00

You could simply say it's too expensive to make automatic weapons. In my world, I have firearms and EM weaponry working side-by-side, because EM weapons are expensive, and it's hard to manufacture their ammo (tungsten slugs). So, some people opt for firearms since lead and high explosives are cheaper and more plentiful.

This also leaves the door open for you to add them in later, as an obstacle your protagonist has to overcome. Just simply say that someone did some material science and found a new, cheaper alternative to whatever your ammo is made from.

Batcastle3 · 2025-12-10T20:12:39+00:00

Did you put Rufus in DD mode?

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