Any points and click adventure game, there are loads including old classics and modern good games.

Monkey Island remasters are fun and can be played with mouse. Broken Sword games are also good.

Rusty Lake games are great if you prefer more puzzle games than narrative ones. Still has a great somewhat surreal plot just not like a point and click narrative game.

Also If you havent played dwarf fortress now is the time to learn, the siege update came out this week. Mouse or keyboard, or both, but definitely can be done one handed.

Vampire Survivor that others have suggested is a good shout, one hand on the keyboard is enough and its very addictive.

100% CPU use doesnt make sense. RAM would be the main constraint not the CPU. Worth looking into - maybe a bug or broken piece of software.

Also the DE may he more the issue than the distro itself. You could install an even more lightweight desktop environment like Open box. Also worth checking whether youre using x11 or Wayland. Its easy to imagine Wayland has not been optimised or extensively tested on something like your device, and could. Easily be a random bug if the DE is pushing your CPU to 100%

There are super lightweight distros like Puppy linux.

Nah its basically stable. Green is monthly which fluctuates with seasons (more people in northern hemisphere and spend more time online in winter months). The blue line is yearly rolling average and the initial spike takes a long time to work though giving impression of gradual decline.

Emulators are entirely legal and legitimate, and eveb essential.

Equating piracy with emulators is just nonsense from the publishing industry. If you own a game and a console its perfectly legal to rip the ROM to play on your own device. The games industry don’t like that because they dont want you to own anything and just be paying serfs renting your console and games.

Emulators are used by people who pirate, but the illegal bit is the piracy not the emulator. And its worth remembering that piracy is a civil legal matter not criminal for individuals in most jurisdictions. The games industry (and lots of other IP holders) love to murky the water there too. There are certainly criminal organisations making money out of piracy but the end users are not criminals. And the “cost” is usually imagined and massively inflated - they talk about lost sales but there is no guarentee people who pirate would have spent a penny on the pirated content.

Also separate from my long response, thanks for sharing that link. Very interesting read and the GNOME window decoration issue is rediculous.

For me, I’m sorry to say, GNOME is the epitome of asshole design. This one of many examples of its rigid design philosophy having negative consequences for users and devs. And devs are protecting GNOME from its own users bad experiences because the user blames the game for not conforming, not the DE for being rediculous.

Worth saying the 3% market share is very new, and previously the share has been way way below this. At 3% that is millions of users but even that is hard to justify a linux release; many games dont even get MacOS versions even now and it has higher desktop share.

The other problem for linux is version control - libraries are different across distros of different ages, and also constantly update. If you build software on a dependency and it changes in a few years, your game may break. As bad as windows is, when games are distributed a lot of the dependencies are distributed with the game as DLLs and installers for Microsoft tools. But for linux you previously could not guarentee the same version of the same dependency will be available on two distros still actively supported.

It can be surprisingly hard to get old Linux software to run on new Linux distros. People are not generally aware of this as generally its old windows and dos games that people try to get working (so wine or dosbox are used), not old Linux software like Open Office from 2005 or an old version of Firefox. Most linux software continually evolves or its niche and just stops working (unless youre willing to go back and compile from source, and that can get nightmarish if it doesnt compile)

Proton is part of the solution but developing “for” proton is not efficient long term. It is great for enabling windows games to work on linux, but linux native games would be more optimal. We’re just lucky we’re now in a time where there is a lot of CPU and GPU resource available to support the overhead and windows is also so bloated making linux + proton comparatively better.

I suspect Flatpak may be another part of the solution - Flatpak can essentially be a way of ensuring a game can have a fixed set of dependencies which install on any Linux and should just work. Its not that far off the windows model of packaging DLLs, but is much cleaner and contained.

Nix is another potential approach to this.

But developing for Linux wouldn’t take off until the market share is substantially higher. The SteamDeck and tge rumours Steam console may help with that, but for now I think devs relying on Proton makes sense.

It had to happen eventually. Seems reasonable time to make the moce. It’ll be beneficial for all Linux users, and probably a huge relief for Gnome devs to be be able to focus purely on wayland.

It just will suck a bit for those on rolling release distros who still experience major issues with Wayland, particularly when its not Gnome or Wayland projects that need to make a fox - looking at you Nvidia.

I wouldn’t be surprised if other big DEs, such as KDE, start making firmer plans for dropping X11. I’m one of the 30% of KDE users still using X11 - for me it was Nvidia issues, and I do remain anxious about being reliant on drivers from a notoriously bad manufacturer. Having said the drivers have improved massively over the past 18-24 months for me at least, and maybe everyone moving over to Wayland is what’s needed to force Nvidia to act.

In terms of KDE dependencies, you’re talking basically about QT. The amount of packages you download shouldnt be too much and likely used for other QT programs which are common.

However there is also GSconnect which is a Gnome extension and uses the KDE connect protocol.

I would say that your concerns regarding the KDE Connect dependencies should be balanced against the good Android and iOS support, and the wide use of KDE connect means it is well maintained, supported and responsive to security updates. These considerations may outweigh the installation of packages that you otherwise won’t be using? It may be better to go mainstream and accept the dependencies than hunt down a lesser supported alternative and deal woth the associated shortcomings.

Interesting question, I’d imagine that one major limit would be the number of cores your CPU has available. Once you got to more VMs than cores, I’d guess things would quickly grind to a halt?

But I wonder if you could even anywhere near to that point as on searching only L2 VM is mentioned on various sites and that is with warnings of severe performance limitations and for development testing only. While L3 might work the problems may get too bad you can’t practically go beyond that level?

GG.

I never delete anything, although I did forward all my emails from Gmail to Proton and delete them off Gmail.

Everything is marked as read too although tbh I do that in large batches of a few thousand in one go. I’m very bad at checking my emails.

I’m not really a data hoarder - I just can’t be arsed to go through them and delete them, plus very occasionally it’s been very helpful to find an random email from years ago. I’m also pretty good at not subscribing to marketing emails etc and unsubscribing if I do (eventually…)

I think your auto-correct has gone wrong; patients rather than patents 3 times.

Totally agree with your point though. I’d extend it to include copyright reform as well as patents; intellectual property rights are being abused globally and used as a way to abuse citizens.

And Women wouldn’t trust a man has taken it because, ultimately, they’re the ones who become pregnant not men.

While companies have looked into male drug-based contraceptives, ultimately even if it were 100% effective, it would never beat female drug-based contraceptives. It’d have a market sure - but it wouldn’t stop women taking birth-control because it’d remain the only way for them to be sure.

The key is getting out at the right time, and that is weighed massively against small investors. The big investors and institions control the market and can move quickly while small investors cannot.

Tesla is not doing well - look at its falling sales. It’s a risky stock to hold. The AI companies are also highly risky stocks to hold.

That doesn’t mean don’t hold them - all anyone is saying really is that these are high risk investments, and at some point they are going to probably crash because it’s a bubble.

That doesn’t necessarily mean “don’t invest”. It does certainly mean be prepared to get out fast and also only use money you can afford to lose when investing with such high risk stocks.

Xwayland is an X11 server that runs under Wayland. It acts as a compatibility layer so that programs that are native X11 programs that don’t support Wayland can still be run. The system largely determines when to use Xwayland; it’s not generally something the user does.

Wine, and it’s derivative for gaming Proton are normally run as X11 applications. There is a Wayland driver for wine - it’s not perfect, and not widely used by default yet, but it does generally work. Still, at the moment usually wine and Proton are by default running with X11 (and so xwayland) even on Wayland.

When there are issues under Wayland it’s generally to do with Nvidia drivers rather than xwayland or x11. But the wine Wayland.drv can still give a performance boost. It can also causes its own issues so is best used on a case by case basis.

Some people do set wine or proton to use the Wayland drivers when using Wayland; for example with Steam and Proton-GE just add PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 into the games launch options and it’ll run directly under Wayland.

It may be a way for OP to switch to Wayland and see if they can get good gaming performance in wine/Proton. However it’s more likely the Nvidia drivers are the cause of the performance issues under Wayland.

So to be clear Wayland + Pantheon resolves the issue but with a performance hit in games? X11 + Pantheon has the issue but with otherwise good performance in games?

Presumably all the system packages and software is up to date. If not then do a update.

Starting with the basics, what kind of mouse and keyboard do you have? If they are wireless, how are they connecting to your device? Note some manufacturers don’t provide drivers for Linux so it’s worth seeing if your brand and device is supported (E.g. Logitech and it’s wireless dongle; you need Solaar to get basic support and switching to Bluetooth may be best if available).

If they are wired, have you tried plugging the keyboard and mouse into different ports on your PC? If they’re on the same USB Bus that could be contributing to the problem. Although that really shouldn’t be an issue at all with modern devicss, it might be enough to get round whatever the issue is if one of your devices is conflicting.

Presumably if there is a power profile in Pantheon, and if so you’ve set it to performance, not something like balanced? This ensures that everything is running at full capacity. There are rare polling issues with wine and some USB devices, and one solution is ensuring the CPU is in performance rather balanced power settings to prevent a bottleneck.

If the issue is still persisting then I would next install a different Desktop Environment to see if the issue persists. This may help check if it’s an issue with Pantheon itself. Install a lightweight desktop environment such as XFCE. Try out XFCE in both X11 and Wayland, and see if the problem persists. If it doesn’t then submit a bug report to the Pantheon makers and consider switching to another DE (such as KDE or Gnome). If not then it at least helps seemingly exclude pantheon as the cause. It can be messy installing another DE and difficult to remove cleanly so one method is create a backup of your system using Timeshift, and then restore it after trying XFCE to bring your system back to its original state.

If the issue persists you could also try switching to an older version of the Nvidia drivers or the open Noevaeu drivers. If it resolves it that helps narrow the problem although if it doesn’t resolve it you still can’t entirely exclude the graphics drivers as the cause.

I think assuming all the basics make no difference, the most telling test will be if switching from Pantheon to another DE helps - in X11 and Wayland. Pantheon is relatively niche and DEs are also important factors in themselves when it comes to performance and also bugs. If it persists beyond a DE test, then I’d be most suspicious it’s a driver issue either with the devices themselves or the graphics drivers.

Not much more I can think of beyond that at the moment sorry.

Install Qemu and have a play with Kernal Virtual Machines to try other distros. You can get a feel for them in a near native speed and find something you like.

Even if you stay with your current distro, VMs are useful. I have a Win11 VM (fully licensed), as well as some dedicated linux VMs sandboxed for testing software, and a VM set up with a VPN for torrenting, plus a variable number that I play with to learn linux. I’ve set up Arch from scratch in a VM just for fun/interest for example.

You’re probably not missing much — if your computer’s from 2018, newer graphics drivers won’t bring major benefits, and stability is likely your main goal.

That said, you’re not representative of all gamers, and older systems can still run into issues. For those with newer GPUs or who want to use the latest Proton or Wine, a bleeding-edge distro will usually work better. Linux relies on thousands of interdependent packages, and while Debian backports security fixes, it rarely updates package versions. This ensures stability but causes compatibility gaps as newer software depends on newer libraries.

Bleeding-edge tools like Proton and Wine evolve alongside their dependencies, so older, stable bases gradually fall behind. Backports help, but only to a point.

If gaming, especially new titles, is your focus, a more up-to-date distro will give you fewer issues. You don’t need a fully rolling release, but Debian-based distros with faster release cycles (every 6–12 months) offer a good balance between stability and modern software.

It’s about short term vs long term costs, and AWS has priced itself to make it cheaper short term but a bit more expensive long term.

Companies are more focused on the short term - even if something like AWS is more expensive long term, if it saves money in the short term that money can be used for something else.

Also many companies don’t have the money upfront to build out their own infrastructure quickly in the short term, but can afford longer term gradual costs. The hope would be even though it’s more expensive, they reach a scale faster where they make bigger profits and it was worth the extra expense to AWS.

This is how a lot of outsourcing works. And it’s exacerbated by many companies being very short term and stock price focused. Companies could invest in their own infrastructure for long term gain, but they often favour short term profit boosts and cost reduction to boost their share price or pay out to share holders.

Companies frequently so things not in their long term interests for this reason. For example, companies that own their own land and buildings sell them off and rent them back. Short term it gives them a financial boost, long term it’s a permanent cost and loss of assets.

In Signals case it’s less of a choice; it’s funded by donations and just doesn’t have the money to build out it’s own data centre network. Donations will support ongoing gradual and scaling costs, but it’s unlikely they’d ever get a huge tranch of cash to be able to build data centres world wide. They should still be using multiple providers and they should also look to buildup some Infrastructure of their own for resilience and lower long term costs.

It does make sense for Signal as this is a free app that does not make money from advertising. It makes money from donations.

So every single message, every single user, is a cost without any ongoing revenue to pay for it. You’re right about the long run but you’d need the cash up front to build out that infrastructure in the short term.

AWS is cheap in the sense that instead of an initial outlay for hardware, you largely only pay for actual use and can scale up and down easily as a result. The cost per user is probably going to be higher than if you were to completely self host long term, but that does then mean finding many millions to build and maintain data centres all around the world. Not attractive for an organisation living hand to mouth.

However what does not make sense is being so reliant on AWS. Using other providers to add more resilience to the network would make sense.

Unfortunately this comes back to the real issue - AWS is an example of a big tech company trying to dominate a market with cheap services now for a potential benefits of a long term monopoly and raised prices in the future. They have 30% market share and already an outage by Amazon is highly disruptive. Even at 30% we’re at the point of end users feeling locked in.

AI shopping tools are emerging as the next big shift in online retail, as they can autonomously research, compare and purchase products for consumers.

Are they? So far no one is making money out of AI, beyond rising prices and bundling in AI to justify the cost (looking at you Microsoft).

We are so far into bubble territory it’s rediculous. PayPal signs a deal to be a payment provider for Chatgpt, a place where no one is spending money. And their shares go up 13%!

This deal hasn’t brought in even a penny of revenue, and no one is using chatgpt to buy stuff. Yet based purely on AI hype, the idea it might be used to “compare products” now means a company already worth $67bn is boosted 13% in share price.

So far the AI companies are not making a profit. They’re scaling up and, because it’s so damn expensive, they’re just scaling up massive losses. Even with revenues materialising from no where profit is non existent. And companies - the actual end users - spending all this money on AI are eventually going to measure the benefits. So far there is little to no evidence that it’s good value for money.

Yet we’re so far into the bubble that companies are laying off staff to save money, which then “justifies” the AI spend. Look at Amazon today sacking 14,000 from its corporate offices to make use of AI.

Meanwhile the real economy is flat, with inflation above central banks targets. When the bubble bursts it’s going to cause a lot of pain. No doubt some people will walk away very rich, and in 10 years there will of course be some form of AI. But a lot of people are going to get burnt on the way.