The way I went about it was putting Linux on a separate disk and then getting the bios to boot from it, leaving Windows untouched (though I can access the files from the Windows drives inside Linux if I need to).

Unless your machine is really old, it should have EFI boot so the Linux installation just registers itself with the bios as a boot possibility but doesn’t actually force anything or change the Windows boot. Then on the bios you have a menu where you can chose were to boot from, and Linux will appear with the name of the distribution you used (because that’s how a distro normally registers itself with the EFI boot during installation) whilst probably your Windows 7 can be booted by choosing the drive were Windows is (because it’s still using the old style of boot process which is based on putting a boot partition at the start of the drive were it’s installed).

My Windows is still there, totally unaware of there being a Linux on the same machine.

The way I suggest you go about it is to check how to get into the bios (if you don’t know already) and the booting stuff in your bios to see if works as I said and you get it, and to see how Windows has its boot set-up there (as I said, for Windows 7 the bios should be booting a disk rather than an EFI entry). Download a Linux distro and put it on a USB flash disk or even an external HD and then try and boot from there (if you can get your bios to boot from the USB Flash disk or external HD then you understood the principle of the thing) - you can even just play around with that Linux distribution you booted from an external source and see if you’re ok with using it (i.e. if the UI is not confusing).

Then if you want to go ahead with it, get yourself a separate SSD (256GB is fine), install it and then you can install a Linux distribution from a USB Flash disk or external disk into it. Just install that Linux entirely in the new drive (since the drive is all for it you can let it just do the automated method of “install on drive”). Don’t tell it to do anything with the Windows drive (if the new drive is not empty - i.e. you got it second hand or were using it for something else - MAKE SURE YOU KNOW FOR SURE WHICH ONE HAS Windows so that you mistakenly install into that one, if the new drive is empty it will show as empty in the installation UI so you know it’s not the Windows one) and Windows will still be there and you can still boot from it if you need to (the point of checking out of how booting worked in the bios beforehand is exactly to make sure you know were is the boot menu on the bios, how to use it and which entry in the boot menu is the one that boots Windows).

In my case I actually had an old Linux in there which I overwrote with the new one that I now use and an old complicated boot mechanism were booting went via the Windows booting stuff which was the one showing me a boot menu, all of which going via a WIndows Boot partition in the same disk as the Linux installation so working around all so that Windows still booted was quite a headache and included some pretty nervous moments, but in your case if you just use a new empty drive for Linux and just chose in the Bios what to boot, it should be pretty straightforward.

Worst case you just have to go back to using that Windows 7.

I went with Pop! OS because it was recommended as being good for gaming and it has out of the box support for Nvidia Graphics cards, which is what I have.

It just worked, no fuss and a quick check on my personal Linux management and gaming on Linux notes folder shows no actual notes for my Pop! OS desktop system (for the games in it I do have a couple of notes, but no for the OS), which means I’ve had zero problems with the actual system so far (I write the notes down if I get a problem I need to figure out how to fix, just in case I get the same problem again and have to fix it again).

Mind you I haven’t mucked about with things like replacing my windows manager or using Wayland instead of X-windows since I don’t see the point in changing what’s not broken and works fine in a system which is supposed to be for relaxing, not experimentation.

I was doing the same thing (I too run my computers into the ground, though I also didn’t want to move to Windows 10 because of all the analytics at the OS level sending data to them MS added to that version, plus and frankly, it worked so I couldn’t be arsed).

I also switched some time ago, pushed by Steam’s impending end of support plus more and more stuff coming out without Windows 7 support.

However I took the dive and switched to Linux rather than Windows 11, to a great extent prompted by people here reporting good experiences gaming on it (since I already have quite a lot of expertise in it and I mainly just use my PC for gaming) plus it’s part of a broader set of changes to avoid enshittification (such as replacing my TV-Box with a Mini-PC with Linux) I’m doing at home and am very happy with the result.

It’s less heavy than Windows, even booting faster and seems to have extended how long I can keep going before that computer is totally run to the ground, though for that it also helps that once I started upgrading by changing the OS, I also went and did a few partial upgrades of the hardware, like replacing my old CPU with an equally old one but twice as powerfull - which used to cost 200 bucks but now was 17 bucks second hand - a more powerful graphics card and a more modern SSD disk for the games partition (it’s actually a modern M.2 SATA on a 2.5 inch housing adaptor, and that’s as fast as SATA ever got and to get better than that you need a PCIx M.2) - basically I did the upgrades I could do on the cheap without changing motherboard and everything else that depends on it (like memory and a newer generation CPU) and which would still be compatible with the Windows 7 boot partition I still have around (though I haven’t actually been booting it). Since I went from Windows 7 to Linux rather than Windows 11, none of the hardware upgrades was wasted in just making up for the extra bloat on Windows 11 and the machine definitelly feels a lot more performant.

As for games, most just work, about 1/3 need extra tweaking to work well or work at all and only 1 or 2 so far I couldn’t get to work at all.

Curiously at least one game - Borderlands 2 from Steam - that didn’t work on Windows 7, works on Linux. Also I can now run games whose minimum Windows version is 10 which I couldn’t before.

Also since all non-Linux games are running on the Wine compatibility layer, Linux is actually better backwards compatible with older Windows and DOS than Windows itself, which is nice for Patient Gamer types like me.

I think that with Linux in it my PC is actually compatible with more games than it was with Windows 7.

I seriously think it’s one of my best decisions in years.

There’s a whole different angle to game fun which is exploring game mechanics and the complexity that emerges from their combinations and interaction with the game space and the behaviour of independent game entities.

For example (and highly simplified), in Terraria the player has to balance the location of resources, their search and extraction of them, the actual movement, location and needs of the game monsters and NPCs, and their own progression up the “research ladder” (only in Terraria the “research ladder” is implicit and based on which resources have you managed to get your hands on and what have you built with them).

Whilst some of the fun in that game is in exploring a procedurally generated world, the drive to do so and the main fun in the game is to solve the complex problems that emerge from the interaction of those things: you explore to find resources that let you make equipment that allows you to explore more dangerous or harder to reach places to find more complex resources to make more complex equipment and so on and meanwhile the more advanced equipment also lets you do no stuff (IMHO, just merelly “shovel +1 level” equipment improvements are nowhere as satisfying as getting access to new kinds of stuff that let you do new stuff).

Examine games like for example Factorio, Minecraft or Rimworld and you find the same kind of global game loop: do stuff to get stuff to be able do more difficult stuff to get more advanced stuff and so on and all the while the complexity of your choices increases because the combination of options you have goes up as, often, also does the complexity of the World you now have de facto access to.

The AAA world however went down the path of story-like games which have one core linear story (the main quest) and then a bunch of mini-stories (side quests) and were game progression comes from advancing the core story and gaining levels (which themselves are generally just the mathematical result of doing stuff and advancing the core store and doing side stories) that let you do the same things only better and maybe a few news things, ultimatelly to help story progression. Stories “officially” drive the player’s exploration (though some players also self driven to just explore just because of liking to explore) and it seems to be impossible to get good stories working well in procedurally generated worlds (as No Man’s Sky has proven, IMHO). There is often some amount of the same mechanics as I describe above for open world indie games, but they’re not the core of the game and what drives the player.

And yeah, if your game is story driven and you can’t procedurally generate the game space with good stories, you’re going to hit limits in the size of the thing, either on the size of the game space that has to be handcrafted to work well with the stories or in the amount of stories being insufficient for the game space leading to lots of boring game space that feels empty like it’s just filler.

There are quite a lot of ways of making an open world game with infinite replayability without requiring massive maps, but they’re not in the style AAA gaming has been going for in the past decade, they’re more things like Oxygen Not Included, Factorio, Minecraft or Battle Brothers were the game space is procedurally generated, the fun is in conquering the challenges of a map, and once you exhaust it you stop yet end up coming back months later and try a new game with a new map, from scratch, because it’s again fun and there’s no “I know this map” to spoil it.

The handmade game spaces with custom made “adventures” do manage to have better experiences than those games that rely on procedural generation and naturally emerging situations for providing gamers with experiences, but they’re mainly once of and rely on sheer size to remain entertaining for long.

Soon Twitter will complete its transition to Nazi Bar of Social Media.

Well, the US turning into a banana republic will at least solve the problem for bananas.

And for those on the other side of the Atlantic, there are several computer shops that will just put a computed together for you without an OS.

Here’s a random example “configure your own computer” from a computer shop in France. In this one the OS (Système d’exploitation) is not included and you have to pay extra for it.

In my experience with custom assemblies like this the OS is never included.

When I live in the UK at some point I’ve even used of these kind of stores there to get a custom notebook.

It’s basically an “assemble your own computer” for people who don’t know how to do it and aren’t confident enough to try (understandable given that the parts value of a whole desktop PC adds up to at least €1000 so there generally is some fear of fucking it up if you’ve never done it before).

Sometimes a point is well made even if I disagree with it, the conclusion in it or disagree with the path it suggests whilst agreeing with the objectives.

It’s like how in Politics in better times (or less adversarial countries) one might respect a political oponent whilst disagreeing with them.

There’s also a trait in some cultures were people tend to try and poke holes on other people’s ideas and point out the bits they find incorrect, not because they’re against it, in disagreement with it or to put down that other person, but to try and help improve that idea even further - in other words, genuine constructive criticism. A downvote isn’t constructive, and sometimes people deserve an upvote for trying or for how far they got, even if the end result could be better.

One Frankenstein can make many monsters but one Frankenstein Monster is just the one monster and being a monster wasn’t even his choice.

Logically, Frankenstein is the one who ethically and morally can be deemed Bad, not the monster.

Maybe they’re premium ads because the advertisers pay extra for access to a pool of self-selected suckers.

I don’t think the sensors really matter for a server but the rest makes some sense.

Still, 80 bucks will buy you quite literally a Mini-PC (a really crummy one, granted) which can run more server tasks because it has as much or more memory and storage and isn’t hindered by there being an Android OS layer there doing nothing useful, and which is absolutelly and 100% under your control because it boots into your OS of choice.

Half than that will buy you a crummy SBC which probably de facto has as much capability to run server tasks as that Oneplus (it’s weaker but doesn’t have Android there eating up resources) though in my experience those things tend to be a bit finicky.

I don’t think it’s actually worth it to spend $80 on an used phone to use as a server (unless you do need UPS-like features or built-in mobile nertwork access) since you quite literally have better options brand new for that money, but if you have one around it can make sense even if it’s a bit more work getting it going and is not fully under your control (unless we’re talking about something jailbroken where you can install Oxygen or Lineage on, so a Pixel would probably be a better choice).

That said, there is a certain technical elegance in the whole notion of repurposing an Android Phone to be a home server.

I think you’re seriously overestimating the technical prowess of the average law enforcement officer…

Except the price, which is much lower for the SBC, way much lower if one uses one of the lower end Orange Pi or Banana Pi SBCs.

Also you can put Linux on the SBCs (which always come unlocked) hence do way more with them as servers than if one has to use Android as the OS.

I mean, I can get it if people with the technical chops, love for technical challenges and an old and pretty much worthless Android phone, configure it as a server if only because “why not?!”, but it’s not exactly a great option considering that a 40 bucks SBC can do the same, only better, more easily and with far more possibilities (given that it will be running Linux rather than Android).

PS: Actually somebody below mention mobile network connection, which, thinking about it, would be a good reason to use an old Android phone as a server since it has built-in support for 3G (unless it’s quite old) whilst the SBC needs it add to it which might be a problem for the cheaper SBCs (just wondering about how I would get around to do it, I think you need to connect a USB dongle to it and it has to be something compatible with Armbian Linux)

I’m truly, totally, completely shocked … that Windows is still being used on the server side.

For sandboxing in Lutris you’ll want to have a look at the “Command Prefix” option under “Runner options” - whatever you put there prefixes the command that runs the game, which is exactly how sandboxing with things like firejail works (i.e. you start your stuff from the command line with firejail firejail-args your-stuff your-stuff-args so you literally prefix your command with firejail).

It’s possible to configure it game by game and also as a global default for all games which you can then override for only some games (this later is how I run it).

Lutris also integrates with Steam so you can run Steam games from it.

Same here and for me too it was gaming holding me back, though I mostly buy my games via GoG hence use Lutris and it’ve had a pretty low rate of games that won’t work at all (and, curiously, one of them which won’t work in Steam works fine if I use a pirated version with Lutris), though maybe 1/3 require some tweaking to work properly.

It’s also interesting that by gaming in Linux with Lutris I can make it safer and protect my privacy because Lutris let’s me do things like run the game inside a firejail sandbox which I have set up as default for all games including disabling network access for the game.

Still have the Windows partition around just in case, though the only time I booted it in the last several months was to clean up some of the stuff to free one of the disks to make it a dedicated Linux disk.

There are gamers and there are gamers.

Some gamers prefer not to have the level of noise of a jet engine taking off right next to them to get a couple percent more frames per second on a game.

I would say there are at least two quite different markets amongst PC gamers who have different preferred balances between performance and the downsides of it (noise, heat, power costs), a bit like not all people who enjoy driving want muscle cars.

Lying and misportraying themselves in social media is nothing for a country were most people are fine with murdering tens of thousands of children because of their ethnicity.

This is nothing given the depths of their depravity.

Ah, the good old fallacy of justifying one thing with something completely unrelated.

One can just as easily use the same argumentative structure to claim that a delayed train on the subway is the tip of the iceberg which is the Worldwide Illuminati Conspiracy or that the wood in one’s wardrobe having a darker spot indicates it used to be a gateway to Narnia.