Look at https://retropie.org.uk/ It is made for a Pi but there is a Linux version. You can find instructions on how to install it in Linux from their website. It is an all in one program that includes emulators all the way up to PS2. It runs pretty well and it is easy to configure. ALl you really have to work on is finding the ROMS you want. My wife bought me a Pi setup a couple of years ago for my birthday that included a SD card with thousands of ROMS on it. I copied them to my Linux setup at work for the people in my office. It's overkill though, because we only play a few games and those can be found on the internet.
I have an older laptop with a pen and touch screen (Fujitsu Lifebook T725) , will the pen and touch function work in Linux?
I should probably have weighed in on this I just didn't see the thread. I am a fully fledged niche operating system user. And I started with Linux of course. Let me explain to you this about Linux. No matter what anybody tells you, linux is Linux. By that I mean: if it is a Linux distro, then it is 99% the same as every other Linux distro out there. Some people will tell you that Ubuntu is for newbs, etc. But that's just plain bullshit. Remember Linux is Linux. However there is a few minor things that do separate one distro from the other. The first is: is it a rolling release vs a stable release, or LTS. You'll probably encounter this if you do any kind of research. And you'll have fanboys especially on the side of rolling release. A rolling release basically means that the software is updated almost immediately from the time it was released. Some releases prefer stability to bleeding edge. The fanboys like bleeding edge. The biggest rolling release distro at the moment is probably Manjaro. However: many people prefer the original which is Arch Linux. Manjaro is basically an easier installation than arch is, but it has the Arch package manager and it is a rolling release. basically if you want an arch distribution without the headache of installing Arch you install Manjaro. One of the main reasons why people like Arch so much is because of the Arch wiki. if you ever need to find out how to do something it's most likely in the arch wiki. And there are many people who will help you in arch forums to learn the basics of things. The second major difference between distributions has to do with a program called system d. System d is both loved and hated at the same time. System d stands for System Damian, and that's one of the reasons why people hate it so much because it wants to control everything on your system. People that like Linux but prefer to have more control are looking for distributions that don't include system d. However in your particular case I wouldn't necessarily look at any distribution in terms of that because the alternatives to system d for somebody like yourself would be too mentally taxing to start out with. But just understand that when you're looking at distributions system d is one of the major things that people look at to see. Other than that the other thing that people look at in distributions is how the package manager is handled. One of the reasons why Arch Linux and Debian for example are so popular is because they have really great package managers. Going back to the idea that Linux is Linux, you might find out if you research it enough that Arch Linux and in fact Ubuntu are both based on Debian. The last but certainly not the least is some Linux distros prefer to have no commercially licensed software installed in the system. These are the quote-unquote free distros. The term free distributions is based on Richard stallman and the Gnu Linux license. Probably the biggest operating system that adheres to this standard is pure OS. PureOS is sort of a startup hardware company kind of like Dell that builds PCs that are privacy focused. They also recently came out with a Linux phone with their operating system running the Linux software on the phone itself. In your case unless you're really worried about privacy I wouldn't worry about this because it makes things more difficult. Because most video cards require you to have drivers that are commercial not standard or general ones. Although Linux does come with some good standard drivers most people who play game prefer the commercial versions. Anyway to your question, if you install either Ubuntu or Manjaro Linux, it won't be much different than what you have in Windows to be honest with you. The desktop will be quite familiar. In fact you could probably pick up everything you need to know in about a week. However, once you start looking into what's known as the terminal, which is the most fantastic and complicated part of Linux or any unix-based distribution, you will both be fascinated by it and also perplexed by some of the things that you can't do that you want to do. I will also say this that if you want the greatest support for peripherals such as your printer and such then you probably want to install a Debian based system such as Ubuntu or Debian itself. Arch Linux while it's great it's going to require you to install packages from the arch repo and that's going to be a headache because you don't know what is a good package and what's a bad one. Anyway I said all that to say this that I don't even use Linux: I use a system called openbsd. And openbsd is a fantastic system. If you really want to learn unix-based operating systems starting out with openbsd would be my recommendation. if you're not going to use it for media streaming and such you just would like to learn Unix or Linux, then install this system to your computer and run it without x Windows so it's just a terminal. Then see the things that you can do like Tmux, vi (vi is a keyboard based text editor). Openbsd has the advantage of just installing the base system and nothing else. Everything in the system is self-contained. It is also the most secure OS in the world.
I just bought a book on classic shell programming and also learning the korn shell. I can't wait to dive into these books. The O'Reilly animal books.
@Rocket River did you ever but the bullet and try a distro out? By the way I'm still waiting on my damn books. Amazon is slipping.
Speaking of old PCs: Please remember to erase all the files, and either format or remove the hard disks before giving your old PC or selling your old PC to another person. I bought an old PC today advertised online from someone in the jewelry business and has an Eastern European accent. When I turned on the computer, the web browser was open to a page what looks to be Russian text. It also has PDFs littered on the desktop and is logged into his email account. I went ahead and just reset the PC without snooping in the seller’s files.
It's that time again. What to do with Ancient Computers Has the Flavors of Linux gotten better? Better GUI and Drivers? Figure I would Make a Streaming Computer maybe . . . . Dunno what else they could possibly be good for at this point Rocket River
