Radical Red and Polished Crystal are peak, in my opinion. I can't go back to the lack of special/physical split, it's just awful.

Cool, you're lazy, gotcha.

No, I literally had to add one change to the game launch properties one time. It took me probably 3 minutes of googling and following instructions. I wouldn't call that "a bunch of fucking shit".

Cool, me too.

Helldivers 2 works almost perfectly on Linux. I had to nest it in a gamescope session to fix some weird mouse issues, but that was it. I dual-boot Windows and I've never even launched it there.

Since I upgraded my instance, I've been using Photon UI as a PWA and also testing Raccoon for Lemmy. I like Raccoon a lot, but it's still new and a bit rough around the edges.

Arch is great, but it can be a bit much for someone to jump straight into. It's definitely gotten easier in the past few years, but there can be quite a bit of optimization to do to bring gaming performance up to (or past) Windows levels.

My recommendation for a newcomer would be Nobara. It's a version of Fedora heavily customized specifically for gaming, and it's run by a developer who does a ton of work for the Linux gaming scene (all hail GloriousEggroll).

The issue is that I want to funnel people through my instance, if possible.

You can see in this image that the meme I'm currently looking at is hosted on lemmy.world even though I'm on my own Lemmy instance.

I wonder if these are coming to the Pixel Fold.

There are two big benefits in my opinion.

1. Speed and responsiveness. When the bigger instances were (or are) overloaded, my Lemmy experience was still fast and snappy. Content was slower to update for those big instances, but navigating Lemmy itself was still fine, and it gave me an opportunity to engage with some smaller communities.

2. Control of federation. I decide who to federate with, and as long as I follow other instance and community rules, I won't get defederated.

The biggest downside is that I can't discover new communities organically since I'm the only real active user of my instance. Nothing new gets federated unless I seek it out. But I solve that by using a fediverse indexer every week or so to search for popular or interesting communities.

Not vice-versa, oddly enough. I don't know if this is the norm for the fediverse, but on Lemmy, instance blocking goes one-way. So users on those instances can federate with Beehaw and see communities, posts, and comments, and even post their own stuff, but users on Beehaw won't see it.

Edit: Ah, correction, this only applies to things on instances that are still federated to the defederated instances. The two instances defederated from Beehaw will no longer get any updates directly from Beehaw, but will still see Beehaw users' comments on posts on other instances.