Linux operating system question...

yes. It is native to Linux.

My personal preferences are Ubuntu or Debian. I advise to stay away from some offshoots like Arch because they have compatibility problems. Mint I haven't used in a while because development was falling a bit behind and they had dependency issues, but it might be alright now. I haven't tested that one in a while.

Also, a side note, Wayland does not play very well with the client either. It doesn't play very well with much to be honest, but I see it more and more as an option for the desktop interface. It's supposed to be more secure, ect. However it doesn't work out very well for a lot of games, and is still not considered to be stable.

Something else to note is that in general you will have a 10-15% improvement in performance over like hardware running Windows 10/11. Though there are currently some growing pains with OpenGL and Vulkan.

Originally posted by BodyBagger: Well that's good news!

From what you wrote, it sounds like Ubuntu might be the best choice since you can confirm that it actually works. Do you think this is the way I should go?

I don't know if you can answer this or not, but do you know if I can run Cities Skylines 1 & Stranded Deep, as well?

Thanks for your help!

BB
ps Any suggestions for setting up Linux?

Ubuntu is my personal go-to Linux flavor for the desktop environment, and I use Debian for my headless servers. Though I have used many different branches since starting off with Suse a few decades ago when it first came out. (Still have the original manual and CD around here somewhere.) Even tried out Zorin for a bit recently because they advertised easier integration with Windows apps that require Wine, but it ended up being a headache to manage.

Stranded Deep has had a native Linux client for a while now. A quick Google search shows Cities Skylines does as well, but it is only available through the Steam client.

As for setting up Linux, the one thing I do take mind to do is to increase Swap during the installation. By default they want to set it to 2GB, but Unity tends to have issues with it being less than 8GB. If you have enough RAM I would also just set swappiness to something like 20 so that it only ever gets used if an application absolutely has to because you have no free RAM.
Lastly, I would follow this guide[community.7daystodie.com]. Used to be that you would only see this in the dedicated server, but I've been seeing it in a lot of regular client logs since v1.0 dropped. Better to be safe than have an issue with the client crashing.

Originally posted by BodyBagger:

Originally posted by Macdallan: The Steam store even has the OS requirements listed for Linux:

Steam OS + Linux

Minimum:
OS: Ubuntu 16.04 (64-bit)
Processor: 2.8 Ghz Quad Core CPU
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: 2 GB Dedicated Memory
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 15 GB available space
Additional Notes: Running the Dedicated Server and Client on the same computer will double ram requirements. Also future releases may require more hard drive space.

Recommended:
RECOMMENDED:
OS: Ubuntu 18.04 (64-bit)
Processor: 3.2 Ghz Quad Core CPU or faster
Memory: 12 GB RAM
Graphics: 4 GB Dedicated Memory
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 15 GB available space

Do you mean I have to use Steam OS + Linux + Steam Launcher? I thought that I may only need Linux + Steam Launcher for my PC. Can you (or anyone else) further explain?

No, SteamOS is just another custom Linux build. I believe it was originally loosely based off of the Google Chromebook OS, and currently is a sub-distro of Arch. They're just listing it because they were pushing SteamOS a lot as a "Gaming Linux" flavor several years ago. It isn't like most distro's though, so they list it separately.

Have had a lot of users having regular issues with Arch, so I would not suspect it will perform any better.

Originally posted by BodyBagger:

Originally posted by SylenThunder: Ubuntu is my personal go-to Linux flavor for the desktop environment, and I use Debian for my headless servers. Though I have used many different branches since starting off with Suse a few decades ago when it first came out. (Still have the original manual and CD around here somewhere.) Even tried out Zorin for a bit recently because they advertised easier integration with Windows apps that require Wine, but it ended up being a headache to manage.

Stranded Deep has had a native Linux client for a while now. A quick Google search shows Cities Skylines does as well, but it is only available through the Steam client.

As for setting up Linux, the one thing I do take mind to do is to increase Swap during the installation. By default they want to set it to 2GB, but Unity tends to have issues with it being less than 8GB. If you have enough RAM I would also just set swappiness to something like 20 so that it only ever gets used if an application absolutely has to because you have no free RAM.
Lastly, I would follow this guide[community.7daystodie.com]. Used to be that you would only see this in the dedicated server, but I've been seeing it in a lot of regular client logs since v1.0 dropped. Better to be safe than have an issue with the client crashing.

Q: When you refer to "swapping," do you mean swapping my ram for video ram, or swapping my ram with my SSD if my ram is running low? FYI, I have an older system with 16GB of ram & a SSD drive, 4 GHz processor (Intel), and a 4 GB video card (Nvidia GTX 970). I'm assuming I'm setting up the swapping during the Linux OS setup on a popup window, correct?

Yes, you can set up Swap during the installation of Linux.

As for swappiness, you can check it using "sysctl vm.swappiness". I believe the default is 60.
If you only have 16GB RAM, it's probably fine to leave it there, or maybe reduce it to 40 or 50. When I set up a dedicated server that has 32GB or more of RAM available, I set it to 20 using "sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=20".