Honestly, I haven’t tried backing up and restoring but it seems likely to work. I have however brought game files across and after copying them over I added them to Steam and the verified the files. It seemed to fix the permissions and ownership quite well, though that could have been luck.

Perhaps more modern ones, but the ones in my last and current laptops are both 18650s. 6 cells, 9 cells, you stack in series to increase voltage, parallel to get more capacity, so a 3s2p would have ~14V which is more than the required 12V for internal components, no boost converters needed. That said, now they do a lot of pouch batteries which are actually multiple internal pouches run in series to get the same sort of voltage but made with the chassis fitting them perfectly, no wasted space.

18650 is awesome, a good balance of weight to capacity. They are the standard cells used in laptops, vapes, small powerbanks, power tool batteries, and so on. They can also go into a fairly standard charger for AA and AAA batteries and give a lovely nominal 3.7V.

That said, pouches are better for inside a device like a controller. The weight of a battery is significantly influenced by the casing. A pouch is almost entirely capacity, a cell like an 18650 or AA is largely the metal of the casing. If you have the pouch inside the plastic of the device you can save that weight.

Choosing a distro is both very easy and very hard. The easy answer is go with the flow, look for what the most popular distros are and see what appeals from those. A common distro will have lots of other people with the possibility of having the same issues you have finding solutions. It makes troubleshooting way easier and is worth the distro not being perfect if you can get more support.

The hard answer is don’t choose a distro. Try distros. Maybe before killing your Windows install get VirtualBox and install various distros in VMs and try them out. Performance is fairly good in a VM so you can get a realistic idea if how it will work for you in terms of how intuitive it is to find things, how the workflow is, and whether it is too opinionated about how things are done.

For example, Ubuntu has a little less ability to control things at a deep level, but it is more supportable because everyone using it either does or does not have a given problem.

At the other end is something like Arch which is more of a base than a distro. You choose your desktop environment, what services you want, all the back ends, and you have to configure it yourself.

I would recommend EndeavourOS as a great Arch based distro.

I have found that with Arch I don’t run out of troubleshooting before the problem is solved like I did with Debian. That said, the learning curve is a little steep so not switching makes sense, but I find it better personally. Just like in Windows things are out of your control I felt that Debian had strong defaults and I had trouble changing them too far. I am sure ignorance played a role but I have found the documentation on the Arch wiki was more useful in actually solving my problems.

Yes, as the other responder said, tell steam through the properties dialogue to use Proton for compatibility.

It would also be a good idea to tell the devs that they have this issue. They can take down the Linux release and let it default to Proton, but they have to do it on their end.

Is this running with Vulkan? Have you tried using other graphics backends like DX or similar?

Have you tried windowed mode? That had fixed a similar issue for me before.

Have you tried running the graphics settings all down to as low as possible, like absolute potato mode, to see if it continues there? If it works as a potato then adding a few things until you replicate the issue will help you narrow it down. If it happens on potato mode then maybe try verifying the game files?

Lastly, maybe consider trying an earlier driver version? Same for kernel? Sometimes weird issues like this are regressions and it was actually solved a few versions back but someone recreated the problem because they thought they were being smart and regressed the issue.

Nice, good to hear it worked out mostly. As for the black menu issue, consider looking at using various different libraries. For example, some games need the actual Windows .DLL files depending in exactly how they use them. The substitutes in WINE are just that, substitutes, so they have very slightly different behaviour in some cases. For GUI libraries if you get something wrong it is easy to have problems like a black menu box from something loading out of order, returning too fast or slow, or just being formatted differently. The native libraries can be used and that can sometimes solve the issue.

Yes, this can be done through WINE.

Depending on your method of install for WINE you will use different specific buttons and so on, but the idea is the same. Take the patch .exe file and run it inside the same WINE prefix as the game is installed in. This can usually be done by opening Lutris and selecting the game, then clicking not in Run but on the WINE icon near it. That allows you to select the .exe file and run it in the same WINE prefix as your existing game install. From there the patch should be able to find the game at C:\Path\to\game and make the required changes.

Hope that works out for you

So broadly you will find categories in games like Smash Bros and so on. Some characters will be heavy, some light, some fast, some slow, some strong, some weak, but each trait creates an axis. The ideal distribution of characters is to have all areas of the multidimensional space filled or if not filled at least alternated.

For example, you should have one heavy, fast, weak character, one heavy, slow, strong, but maybe not a heavy, fast strong or a heavy slow weak. You can chart them on a two dimension axis at a time, then use the characters from Tuxcart etc to fill the space based on what makes sense, eg the Gnu should be heavy but also fast, but it is definitely a prey animal, while penguins are smaller and fast with a more moderate attack level, maybe even weak.

Once you have some of the extremes filled you can consider subversions of the paradigm. For example, a compiled language is slow at creation but fast at use, so maybe a mascot for one of those could have two modes, switching state and therefore characteristics.

Another thing to consider would be the dynamics of your interactions. Are you going for the jumping around of Smash Bros? If so, lots of the details about their camera work can guide your decisions. What about the overall pacing? Do you want frenetic play like Smash Bros? Combos? Strategy? Lots of things to look at there with a narrative approach to the characters as representing their projects, for example Wilbur is smaller and supposed to be super modular, so maybe having quite a few modes with different characteristics would work, while something like puffy is great for water levels alongside tux and any other aquatics.