Holytimes

Cachy is a better starting point then Manjaro. Manjaro gets funky.

Bazzite is much worse for a new user then cachy. Worse documentation and a load of quirks from being immutable.

Frankly they would be better off with mint unless they need very up to date hardware support for like a laptop.

At most they have a PC and a work laptop!

At the moment the only noticeable problem in PC gaming is the existence of spinning drives. Least for multiplayer games.

In a lot of newer games it's become absurdly noticeable. You have a 5 min queue then your stuck waiting 10 mins on top of that cause some dipshit is loading off a spinning drive.

It's gotten to the point iv actually seen some Chinese games literally prevent you from installing the game at all. If you have ANY spinning drive in your system. And prevents if from booting the game if you have one in your system. Because it causes that much of a problem. Endless customer complaints of horrid queue and loading times cause your waiting on people with slow drives.

Hard drives no longer are in the just good enough group for new games. It's been a slow transfer but we are finally starting to see a hard line being draw in the sand. And I don't expect it to slow down at this point.

While people are a bit over the top. A 960 is a decade old and 3gigs literally wouldn't be able to turn on with a large number of games released this year even on the lowest settings.

It's objectively out of date. Hell lanythjng ess then 6 gigs frequently crashes or flat out refuses for the most part.

Your literal hard cut off is basically this year with unreal 5. Ue4 games, most proprietary engines like decima, frostbyte or dandelion all will do fine at 3gigs of vram. But they are last targeting last gen consoles as their low end. So your low end is looking back around 6-8 years.

2025 has been almost exclusively full of games that are finally dropping support entirely for that standard and the new standard is 6-8 gigs of vram minimums and 16-24 gigs of available ram not counting system utilization.

Going forward if you don't have a 6gig card and 16 gigs of ram. You functionally don't have a computer that can do new high end games. And fuck that's not even a hard ask. We NEED to move the fuck on from 3gig cards and 8gigs of ram.

Hell a few games are even pushing for 8gig vram/20gig ram as the minimum. But I doubt that's going to catch on.

Iv also come across a few Chinese games that flat out won't install if you have a spinning hard drive in your system at all full stop. Not that you can't install to one, it flat out won't let you install it to any drive.

At some point we do need to just move the fuck on and accept hardware is out of date. And a full ten fucking years. Is a pretty damn good arbitrary line. Gaming is a very specific work load and it's getting noticeable how problematic it is in multiplayer games between having allies with shit computers and good ones.

Having 10+ min wait times after your queue cause a random is working off a low end PC and a spinning drive to start a dungeon in an mmo. Is fucked.

Black and white used machine learning If I recall absolutely a classic of a game highly recommend a play if you never have. Dota 2 has a machine learning based ai agent for its bots. Tho I'm unsure if those are actually in the standard game or not.

Forza and a few other racing games though out the years have used ML to various degrees.

And hello neighbor was a rather infamously bad indie game that used it.

For a topical example arc raiders used machine learning to train its AI during development. Tho it doesn't run on the live servers to keep updating it.

For LLM examples where the wind meets is using small LLMs for its AI dialogue interactions. Which makes for very fun RP mini games.

I'm sure there's more examples but these are what I can think of and find off Google.

LLMs are great for interactive NPCs in video games. They are bad at basically everything else.

Finally some good plot

System76 laptops are in my experience worse than frameworks.

But they are also less effort. So pick your poison.

As long as it's a 3xxx or 4xxx Nvidia card honestly its just as good as Nvidia now as long as you arnt being dumb and trying to use Debian or mint or something that has a massively out of date kernel on a new laptop.

Your option is basically only framework if you want good hardware.

If you don't mind low end stuff then you have plenty of options.

Literally every higher end laptop gets called a gaming laptop... It's a nothing term. Even the absolute least flashy laptop with no RGB and is basically just a glorified Thinkpad with a 4080 mobile in it gets called a gaming laptop just cause of the 4080.

Saying don't buy a gaming laptop basically means you can't buy literally any good high end hardware full stop.

It's a short sighted and frankly stupid piece of advice that just hurts people.

The Alienware bit tho, that's spot on. 100% fuck em.