This sort of thing is deeply distro dependent. Pop_OS and Linux Mint handle Nvidia drivers pretty seamlessly, for instance

Not sure what the situation is on the NVIDIA side

Nvidia’s proprietary Linux drivers are effectively equal to their Windows drivers

I use one as a Jellyfin server and to stream my main gaming PC to my home theater setup via Moonlight. Works great and since it’s all wired LAN the latency added is under 10ms end to end

Agreed. There are some tone deaf people from those instances who think their perspectives are the only true ones, but that’s true of any sufficiently large and unified group.

Ahh, okay. I know Cinnamon shows the song that’s playing if you click the little speaker in the toolbar to adjust the audio slider with the mouse. IDK if there’s a setting to make it show on the little pop-up thing in your photo, not sure if that one has options. Like the other commenter said, I’d check in the Mint forums or discord. Could be there’s a theme that has it already

Which Linux distro are you using? What’s your Desktop Environment?

On Linux Mint with Cinnamon there’s a very similar popup to what you described if you open the volume slider from the toolbar in the lower right.

I did say it varies and sometimes the Windows build runs better than the Linux build depending on optimization

Linux Native builds generally have better performance than Windows builds running on Windows. That’s what I was comparing between

These are solid sources to cite, but for the record I was talking about a Linux native build vs a Windows build running under Proton, not a Windows build running in Windows vs running in Proton. Linux is a more efficient OS and well-optimized builds made for it can really fly.

Yes. There are some games where the Linux-specific bugs don’t get fixed and it’s better to just run the Windows version thru Proton and take like a 10-20% performance hit so it runs with more stability.

Sometimes the Windows versions just run better than the Linux build because of bad optimization on the Linux build of a given game, as well (OpenGL vs Vulkan drivers, etc etc)

They don’t share dependencies with the base system, but they do share dependencies with each other, so long as those dependencies are at the same version, which most of them are because flatpaks generally stay quite up to date.

Poor guy. I mean he’s ridiculously lucky to be as famous as he is and to have been compensated fairly for the rest of his Sonic/SEGA music but it sucks that one of his most famous works has effectively been stolen by a corporation’s sense of entitlement.

One flatpak uses a lot of extra disk space, but for each additional flatpak you add to a system the disk space difference is much smaller because they share dependencies. When it’s system-wide for all user-installed packages, the difference is quite small.

A number of the best games of all time are quite cheap:

Tetris (pretty much any version)

Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 (use OpenRCT2 to run it well on a modern PC)

Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic 2 (use The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod to add back in the stuff the devs had to cut for time, otherwise the ending is disappointing)

Balatro ($9.99 on mobile or $19.99 when bundled with Slay The Spire on Steam)

Slay The Spire

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (free and open source)

DOOM (the original, not the 2016 game, very cheap and there are literally millions of mods and community made maps)

Baba Yetu is such a banger

entomology

You mean etymology.

Entomology is the study of bugs.

About time somebody tried it

Yes, it was very influential and massively popular.

It also had all these rip-offs come out 3-4 years after it because that’s just how long it takes to make that type of game at a reasonable scale

It truly is bizarre to me how smartphone aesthetics have somehow outweighed practical usage and ergonomic comfort.

It’s kind of like the main “screen rectangle” smartphone evolutionary tree has largely gone down the road of the “Red Delicious” apple, which is bitter, mealy, mushy, has a leathery skin and is a terrible snack overall, but keeps being bred and bought in large numbers simply because it’s the iconic “pretty” red apple.

I loved the Walking Dead series