Lol a kid can google how to install games on linux, just need one to do it and teach the others, I used to bring games on a usb to play on macs through wine through the school lan, eventually I put them in some random folder on the school network, it didnt delete it til like the last day of school my senior year, wed copy the games to our computers and delete them at the end of class.

I see a price increase more likely in the future, maybe to boost sales by announcing it in advance

Not since 19 for dctl, reactor (which added hella of the festures free missed for free through an open source addon library) etc. got paywalled, 20 adds ai magicmask and subtitles also paywalled, like free is going to slowly lose features while not gaining new ones it seems

I also really like gparted, originally with the dual boot I had to manually partition the drive for the os and the boot paritition, took a couple minutes to figure our and its very convenient to be able to mess with your ssd easily just by plugging in a usb and booting into the live os from there. Idk if any other installers do that, if anyone knows please let me know, like the usb boots into kde plasma and you can kind of test out the ui while clicking through the gui installer.

Used cachyos for the last couple months, its a graphical installer, automatic everything, and when it loads you get a startup menu that you can click install gaming packages on to get anything youd download for gaming, its supposdely the only distro actually optimized for gaming and detects your hardware automatically to grab everything.

Off the install and one click installing those packages everything on my steam account (after checking proton compatibility cachyos setting) worked fine for me. Blender also works well, but in that case I needed to grab a driver for amd.

Bazzite made me nervous, I like being able to clixk through the install seeing what im doing. I reinstalled windows right before and did dualboot first, before removing windows and sticking with just cachyos. Cachyos was about 10x easier to install than windows and 1000000x faster, like it straight up took 2 minutes maybe while windows takes 2 hours, I was shocked that it was actually done.

It has plenty of nodes locked behind a paywall like magic mask, they also recentlly locked reactor, the community made plugins, behind a paywall (I still think its worth it, especially if you buy hardware for editing, the studio license comes with it)

(reactor used to be free and would extend it a lot only works on studio now) btw I pirated it, its very easy to do on linux just one reddit post where you copy and paste 3 commands into the terminal after downloading the official studio version from their site, eventually I might buy some hardware from them for around 300 since you get free studio with it.

Davinic is paid but its a one time fee and pretty solid on linux, no issues transitioning for the modst part, some reactor plugins are incompatible like shaderotoys