Baŝto

Just the simple fact that someone can’t plug in a hard drive and have it work every time, they have to go into a specific folder and write a specific arbitrary un-memorable UUID and tell it to always mount it on boot.

You can also mount partitions by label (LABEL=), but you have to name them yourself and make sure you don’t give two partitions the same name. The point of generating UUIDs is to have an extremely low risk of two partitions getting the same UUID generated.

But I think I get the issue, when I search for “linux automounting hard drive” I only see tutorials which explain how to use /etc/fstab.

It depends on what kind of automounting you are looking for, what they explain is the rare process of switching/adding internal drives that get mounted right after boot. First time that should be set up by the OS installer.

In case you were looking for automatically mounting USB drives/sticks, there are tools like udisks/udiskies who can do that and it’s possible they can handle internal drives too, but I never tried that since I want them to show up in specific places (~/Games, /var etc). Though I’d expect Gnome and KDE to have something like that included.

Steam Deck

That’s a machine that comes with a preinstalled and preconfigured distro with a very specific purpose. You can also buy preconfigured PCs/Laptops with support from System76, Tuxedo Computers etc.

people still had issues setting and forgetting their password For Windows, you are sacrificing security

If you encrypt your hard drives you are generally fucked if you completely lose your passwords, but that aside: On Linux you can basically just overwrite it withpasswd from grub shell or a live cd in combination with chroot and a physical intruder can do that as well. On windows you need to remember your security question or you need to have created a password reset disk to reset your local password. If you have/remember neither, sites recommend Reset this PC > Remove everything > Only the drive where Windows is installed > Just remove my files > Reset 🙃 I couldn’t find third party tools in reasonable time, but there might be some. You’d need a live cd as well, but secureboot can make that impossible.

I’d say for Linux you probably can reset your password in more situations than on Windows, but it’s less convenient and less secure (especially grub shell).

It’s a completely different story if you use a Microsoft account since Microsoft can basically change your password at will. If you don’t wanna get attacked from Microsoft it’s less secure, but since it allows two factor authentication and such it’s more secure in all other situations. You just can’t log in without internet.

I can’t remember many native games not working (any longer). Basically only the Anomaly series, Ticket to Ride and some other indie game. Anomaly has a serious bug that gets it trapped in an infinite loop on modern systems during loading screen, but there is a community patch for that. Ticket to Ride removed the Linux port on steam instead of fixing it. The indie game worked, but they forgot to make the executable actually executable.

Though there are certainly a bunch of games from humble bundle era who got a half-hearted Linux port basically as a fee to enter the bundle, with no updates or support since then.

If you are talking about running game through wine/proton, then yes that’s expected. It works surprisingly well, but any new proton/wine version can have indeed regressions and game updates break stuff. Games that don’t get any updates anymore should work a bit better. An exception are games that are officially supported by Valve since those are bound to specific proton version and they even support some DRM solutions (steam+proton only), but they can break on updates as well.

Best situation is if they have a somewhat fixed release and maybe a few updates. Having updates very month is a bit a problem. Online games that lock out older client versions are a huge problem. Online games should generally rather be viewed as a temporary service, they’ll never be as reliable as fully offline single player games are.

Games that use directshow/Media Foundation for cut scenes also don’t work great when playing them through steam for legal reasons. Valve won’t distribute decoders and doesn’t want to depend on them being installed in the system. They convert videos on their servers, but only the first time a player encounters that video and that player will see a placeholder. Wine supports those cut scenes.

You won’t even have an perfect experience on officially support platforms, but you can expect it to work better and the devs to test stuff.

You generally can’t expect Windows/Mac/Playstation/Xbox… games to run on Linux, though they might do.