So, I’ve been getting back into gaming in a big way these last few months, after a low back injury left me sidelined from my other, more physically active hobbies.
The silver lining (or I suppose cat nip) for my ASD brain is modding. In the past 6 weeks, I’ve modded a ds, a dsi, a wii u, a wii (which underrated as a “turn it on and play the classics” machine), several Android TVs… yeah…
While I’ve loved all of them (the Wii especially brought me great joy), I wished there was a way to play everything in one spot. A curated console, as it were.
Of course, you know where this is going - emulation.
Through the wonders of Ebay, I was able go score a Lenovo M93p tiny for around $80USD (a SFF pc from around 2014, about same dimensions as wii).
Throw in a faster processor, lobotomise windows, throw on Playnite, Dolphin Emulator and a bunch of personal classic and… well…let me introduce you to my SuperPretendo 5 :)
PS: ChatGPT gen art (and typos aside), I kinda love what it came up with for this.
You should be able to do all that in Bazzite. I know nothing about batocera but it doesn’t sound like it even compares.
Bazzite is just for steam, right? Would that mean it plays Windows based games via Proton layer? Proton blows on Batocera. Shame, because Bato was pretty nice.
I strongly dislike Windows, but it was the only way I could cobble together something for this use case that just works
Bazzite is an OS that is similar to SteamOS, but no it’s not “just for Steam.”
It’s a full Linux distro that is built for gaming, but not only gaming. It is very well integrated with Proton. You don’t need to use Steam to launch games, but it makes it easier.
I haven’t run into a game that I couldn’t run (with about 99% of them just running out of the box with no tinkering).
Proton must have come along in leaps and bounds since I last used it in that case.
What front end does Bazzite use? I understood it to have Steam baked in; most of my games are from other sources, like GoG.
I think once Steam kills support for Win 10 (probs in a year or two, based on history) the smart move is going to be something like Bazzite.
Proton is amazing these days.
I don’t know what you mean by “front end.” It replaces Windows entirely.
Or do you mean the desktop environment? I use KDE but I think you can use Gnome if you want.
The OS itself is based on an immutable/atomic version of Fedora and then optimized for gaming.
There are other launchers for non-Steam games, or you can just add the game to Steam as a non-Steam game and launch it from there with Proton.
It’s like shockingly easy to do.