KarthNemesis

literally neither was. they both looked and felt very alien.

i've pinned my suddenly having weird, "grammar is starkly bizarre" issues down to being a side effect of adjusting my meds. hoping that fades later.

edit: and also i do think your statement is a very practical answer in a general sense :)

for someone totally new?
i guess it depends on what you mean by "addicting," so i'll try to put in "potential hours" as a reference. regardless i think all of these are quite fun and consuming for me for a while.

The Binding of Isaac Rebirth.
its difficulty sort of "scales" with how well you do in your runs: if you never beat mom, the next boss, the next boss etc, it'll stay "easier" for as long as that takes. (and if it gets too hard when you start beating stuff, you can always wipe your save and start over, or start a new save, hah!)
the control scheme is extremely simple and it's fine to not be completely perfect at it if you're just going for basic runs and okay with relying more on "lucking" into victory. you really don't have to take on mega-satan or whatever.
up to you if the horror-to-horror-adjacent visuals appeal or not. you do also have to be okay with the idea of dying, it's a roguelike.
you can play this for literally thousands of hours.

Slime Rancher 1.
just a fun time shlorping up slimes. very low stakes and silly and cute. meant to be pretty accessible. if you're brand new i could see it taking up some time, and it's a good way to learn "video game logic." i've spent 80 hours in SR1, playtimes can be a bit varied.

Plants vs Zombies (the original GOTY edition, and definitely not the ad-ridden mobile port)
old 2000's popcap games in general were onboarding for many a gamer back in the day. i've spent 60 hours of it on steam, no idea how much back in the 2000's. playtimes overall can be a bit all over the map on this one.

Garden Paws,
if you like cutesy and the idea of gathering stuff for villagers, with farming / animal raising mechanics. it's slightly jank but it's very endearing. no fail condition. (it's somewhat similar to stardew valley with some differences!) this can be played almost infinitely, if you really like the loop, decorating, or have a few people to play with. playtimes tend to be 40-200 hours roughly.

Wobbledogs,
if you like the idea of raising cute pets with a genome and don't mind the very subtle horror/bizarre aspects (they can die, eat each other's bodies, and they pupate like caterpillars lol.) pretty sandbox game, and you can turn death off if you want. (or "clone" dogs you want to keep with the export/import tool in the menu.) this is a newer one for me so i've only put in 35 hours, but i fully intend to go back and try for some Huge Dogs TM. average seems about 20 hours but you can spend a lot if you like raising weirdo pets.

I had far more issues on windows than I ever have on mint.

When I had issues on windows, which i would run into multiple times a week, the "fixes" would be hacky, slapped-together nonsense that don't even make sense on paper. I had to change almost every program manually to run as administrator. Installing old games was a nightmare and didn't always work properly, even with compatibility modes. New drivers would break stuff. Trying to learn anything new was a rabbit hole that took countless hours and then I only learned the fix for that one specific use-case, and not anything... overarching. System updates were so intrusive, installing crap I didn't want or removed manually, I disabled them completely. It was slow and boot took forever. Ending system processes via task manager didn't always work and the system would freeze often when something went wrong. Often uninstalling programs was messy and left shit all over in the system registry and files and you would have to defrag and system clean once it started getting bloated.

When my windows install finally broke completely just trying to get shit to work the way I wanted, I bailed.

Transitioning to mint was certainly a learning experience.

Reorganizing your workflow will always be more upfront work, but I found I took to the changes fairly quickly. I found the file structure the most odd, but I became very used to it and very much prefer it over how hard it is to find stuff spread scattershot in windows files. It had a lot of little quality of life things that I really appreciate, mounting and unmounting external drives felt better, way more stuff worked out of the box, old games were not a nightmare to get working because they're had longstanding fixes for years that actually make sense. Solutions, in general, make way more sense to me, and I actually get a sense that I understand why they function. My boot time is very fast and I've never broken my system (I came close once doing something incredibly stupid and very niche, but I just timeshifted back and voila, fixed.)

Fixes or changes for preference tend to "stick" for me, like when I swapped to pipewire myself it's been very smooth sailing. I can pick and choose updates or ignore packages that don't work. There was an issue with kernels for a while that significantly increased my boot times; I just postponed that update for a few versions until one of the newer ones worked. I find I can get down similar rabbit holes to learn some stuff, but it both feels more like "lasting" solutions (and I learn more about how to do other stuff) as well as just more fun. Documentation is a lot better with users who know what they're doing instead of the guesswork "well I dunno but this might have worked for me, I tried 20 fixes so it's probably one of these!" I would run into on windows troubleshooting...

I think my favourite part of linux is a lot of things I wanted solutions to, for years, usually have at least one person out there with a similar issue that wrote a small program that just does it. Does it well. For free. I spent so much time digging for really basic stuff like a sound equalizer that wasn't garbage, bloatware, full of trackers, or ransomware! I don't have to spend hours trying to find a stinkin' RGB controller that isn't awful because the choices available are just better! I don't have to spend weeks comparing and contrasting antivirus-es and hate all of them in the end!

I find mint extremely stable and have no urge to swap nor return to windows. I find it much more stable for my use-case. I really like it, actually, and I appreciate how a lot of it is set up. Been using it daily for 4 years.

I loathed windows the entire time I used it, and had been side-eyeing linux for quite a while before committing. I don't know if I'm a "normal" use-case, probably not. Possibly it is best to take my experience as, "if you keep hitting walls often in windows that frustrate the hell out of you, linux might be a decent choice for you, and might "feel easier."" Both have their own quirks and own troubleshooting, I just prefer the ones on mint and they make more sense to me. (And take me far less time.)

I've been trying to find the words to express how disappointed I am in riot's decisions to become a "big company" including all of the shitty decisions completely at odds to their playerbase, and I'm just struggling.

I had hoped they had decided skins were lucrative enough, for how long they had just sold skins and left it at that. Now they're chasing "whales" for the sake of money, adding more and more ads, bloat, categories of fake money, and intrusive gacha crap, all the while their decisions progressively guts the core of people who actually care about their game. The people that drive the community and "engagement," as it were.

The people who make content for league (like SkinSpotlights, who is affected by this,) the custom skin makers, people who go out of their way to make it work on linux, these are passionate communities that they are actively shafting just to have a band-aid solution (and let's be real; it is a band-aid,) for high-elo scripters and low-level bots that affect (generously) 5% of the playerbase meaningfully. I acknowledge that scripters are extremely shitty to deal with but doing this isn't going to stop them, and it has serious downsides.

That it makes the barrier to entry for "even windows" users higher isn't good either-- a game that was well known for working on potatoes now has an always-on anticheat that makes many people have issues playing other games without freezing and stutters, fucking up their BIOS and bricking their pc, bluescreening at random, being nearly impossible for the average user to remove properly, and getting false positives for people who are programmers just running their work programs. How prevalent an issue these are isn't THAT important, that it happens at all regularly enough to get people clamoring about how it bricked their pc will make any average user pause. Realistically, if an issue happens to one person in a friend group, then you've most likely lost the whole group.

This is ignoring that it's a security nightmare being an always-on rootkit that millions of players use. It is the prime backdoor for legitimate hackers to target now.

I have a lil barebones potato laptop that runs windows that I could theoretically keep league on. I am seriously debating on whether I will, even though I unironically love this game, and was just finally able to get a foot into the competitive scene like I've wanted to for years. Hell, I don't even know for sure if it'll work on my potato laptop. It already barely runs league. 8/

it's just gambling. the thrill of getting something "good" or FOMO with limited editions is what they operate on.

The newest runner should have fixed League for most users now!

Here it is, https://kbin.social/m/leagueoflinux/t/728889/How-to-Update-Your-Wine-Runner-to-8-27-Fix-Through

I'm hoping that is understandable or helpful for people ^^;

I don't know whether a clean install changed anything but the runner, only changing the runner worked well for me. I also use League through Lutris, but I didn't figure out how to find and add new runners easily until I figured it out for this, and I absolutely wished I had known how that worked earlier (because it would have saved me a lot of time in many scenarios. 8i )

I'll try to post something coherent and get back to you. (Making words hard.)

I am also unsure why they "moved to kbin" if they had no intention of keeping the community updated via here. It's not really "moving" at all, then.

They only deigned to post the megathread, period, on Reddit, and I feel that says it all about their attitude about moving here: They never took it that seriously.

I would personally rather the community be here; but if this choice is choosing no moderation, and no official updates, then it's not really a true choice. I vastly prefer the fediverse and I'm not going back, but if they have no real intention of moving here, they should figure out what they are going to do. It's been 6 months since Reddit showed its true face.

I think, in the end, the community will split off, yeah. Both here and on Reddit.

Thanks for updating the people here, I totally forgot to share the solution myself, whoops. Maybe I should post the way to update the runners that doesn't require a reinstall, hahah. //sweats

I had just joined a LoL group to try to play with people, sadness. :/ Hopefully this is fixable soon. Same issue with unable to launch loading screen, constant "Reconnect" and error popup
"A critical error has occurred and the process must be terminated. Would you like to create a crash dump to aid the developers in troubleshooting this issue? This may take up to 5 minutes
NOTE: The process may appear unresponsive during this time."