Personal Battle Station

My current personal "battle station" (to quote the kids these days). Building gaming PCs back in the 90s really got me into computing, and lead me to working in IT. Building your own computer is the best way to learn.

I've made the jump from Windows 11 to Linux. I picked Pop! OS because they make a build specifically for Nvidia cards. You can find the download page here: https://pop.system76.com/ So far no issues with the games I play. Lutris took some trial and error to get games from GOG working properly, but if you read their documentation before diving head first in to it, it's very straight forward. Once set up, Lutris removes a lot of the guess work out of setting up games. Other productivity apps I use, like LibreOffice, Sea Monkey, Gimp, etc were present on Linux a long time ago, so I didn't have any issue there. Proton/Wine solves many issues with many apps that are windows only, or you can run windows in a VM if they don't work. Since my Tax application is windows/mac only I set it up in a win11 VM. If you're like me, you were only using Windows because of your game library. Check out ProtonDB, if your games get the all clear there, I highly recomend moving over to linux.

There is only 1 bug I ran into, Helldivers 2 has to run in Windowed Fullscreen. If you switch it to Fullscreen the game will not load. Not a deal breaker.

Linux Gaming Links

Specs



  

^decorated with stickers from Portland area street artists^

I have been building my own PCs for 3+ decades now. Kids these days have no idea how easy they have it. :) The old k6 and 486 systems have me working on jumper settings. A selection of machines:

- Pentium II 400 MHZ, 32 MB of RAM, S3 Savage 4, Sound Blaster Live! This was then updated to a GeForce 2 MX and a PIII 450mhz.
- AMD K6-233, Diamond Monster 3d, some random S3 2d graphics card, sound blaster 16. up to 16 MB of ram.
- AMD 5x86 133 (their branded 486 DX4), 2x CD-Rom, Sound Blaster 16, 4-16 MB of ram.
- Various Athlon t-bird/Athlon xp systems.
- Too many systems for friends.
<-- the old college rig.