This is another thing I can never decide on. If I'm going to have half of my games on a different user account then I may as well just install them on my old W7 laptop and save the trouble!

The easiest way to prevent Wine from linking certain directories to your Linux home directory or assigning the Linux filesystem to a drive letter probably is to run "winetricks sandbox" in every new Wine prefix before using it.

With that said, if you're *really* paranoid (for example, if you are investigating a file with a known virus or major security issue), and you don't need 3d stuff, you probably want to be using a virtual machine instead of relying on WINE to keep your system safe. (Also, in the known virus situation, you probably want to take other precautions, like removing all network access from the VM.)

Could someone explain to me how this page work??? When i buy a game, where does it goes?

Is this related to Linux?

It goes to your account from which you can download it either using the Galaxy client, NOT available on Linux, or from your library in your account from your web browser. Direct link: https://www.gog.com/account also accessible by hovering over your user name then clicking on 'games'. How to access them inside Galaxy I do not know but then you are not using Linux if you need to know that.

Remember that you do not get Steam keys when buying games here. You get GOG keys :-)

Welcome to GOG!

I just ran sudo apt update & upgrade to my Linux Mint 19.3 XFCE system, and now the display is locked to 1024x768@76Hz. It doesn't let me change the resolution nor the refresh rate.

Checking the Driver Manager, it offers the closed-source NVidia-driver-390 and the open source noveau driver, but using either does not fix the problem. Before the update, I was using the closed source driver.

I tried to google but mainly saw discussions of someone having so new GPU that Mint didn't support it yet, but my GPU is an old NVidia Geforce 670M.

Any ideas what to try next?

Try other kernels, either newer (what I would try first) or older.

Also, a cold boot may help after an upgrade. Maybe that is only that a second reboot is what is helping, not sure.

This is the newest (it came after I had upgraded and rebooted), and oddly the problem remained even if I booted into an earlier version. Then again, I don't consider booting to an earlier kernel really a solution because doesn't that mean I can never update the installation anymore?

Someone else had a similar problem but in his case his NVidia GPU was so new that it didn't have drivers yet, and fixed it by adding them manually or something. Anyways, when I run Driver Manager, it does have the NVidia drivers already installed, and also offers the open source drivers. Switching to them doesn't help either.

Could it be that it is my monitor (the laptop screen) that is now somehow fails to recognize? So I do have accelerated graphics drivers, but it doesn't let me set higher resolutions because it doesn't know what "monitor" it is? It only says "Default" in the Display properties, not sure what it said before.

I have had to skip some kernels every now and then and reverted to or installed a slightly older one when something broke after an update. IF you find out a kernel is bad for your computer, you can then block that exact version from being offered to you but the very next version will be offered again.

Yes, drivers... do you have the central graphics files added as PPAs so not to have to wait for Mint team to offer them a few years later.

Seems to be fixed for now.

It seems some packages or dependencies or whatever were broken. I don't know why it didn't report errors before, but at some point I started getting some errors and also Synaptic package manager reported of 3 broken installations (somehow related to nvidia).

I tried to clean the cache and sudo apt-get install -f but it didn't work and Synaptic couldn't fix it either but after one or two reboots and changing drivers to the open source nouveua drivers, "sudo apt autoremove" removed some nvidia stuff, and after a reboot, now I finally got the hires desktop back, and screen brightness controls work too (I had some issues with them before, the brightness would always be at full when I booted to Linux and had to manually lower the brightness; now it finally works fully ie. remembers the brightness setting after a reboot).

The Driver Manager still recommends me to switch to Nvidia 390 closed-source drivers, not sure if I dare to try them anymore or just stay with nouveau drivers. Yeah I know people say NVidia's own drivers are "much better" but for some reason I never saw any real difference, even with games (= playing Team Fortress 2 on Linux). They seemed to work the same to me.

Anyways...

:-) All good then :-)

Well, yes and no.

I take it back that the open source drivers are just as good as NVidia's. The latter do give considerably better performance for games (I tested again Team Fortress 2, and Two Worlds running in Wine). Other than the performance (gaming), the open source drivers work nicely though, even having fixed the brightness issue I had.

If I switch to NVidia's drivers in the Driver Manager, the same problem happens and I start getting package errors etc., even though I've run e.g.
sudo apt purge nvidia*
sudo apt autoclean
sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install -f (this never seems to work...)
probably something else too...

Something is rotten in the state of NVidia...

I had horrible problems with Nvidia before, to the point that it was almost impossible to clean out all the junk the blob left in the system and it just refused to start X for me.

You might try manual Nvidia driver uninstaller, but results are not guaranteed. All of this is the result of Nvidia totally disregarding proper upstream driver development.

I really appreciated switching to AMD, and leaving all these blobs horrors behind.

The proprietary nVidia drivers is a must if you have recent GPU (post-Kepler, AFAIR) and want to play something more demanding than "The Battle for Wesnoth". :) This is so (partially) because on the newer cards nouveau can not reclock GPU. Needless to say, all fresh Vulkan and OpenGL versions are available only on proprietary drivers.

Using 390 drivers with fresh cards ("GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER"???) is pointless as old drivers do not recognize "device ID" of your card and just assume the worst (hence 1024x768 as from their perspective this resolution should be supported on anything) as the alternative is no graphics at all.

Use the most fresh 440.44 version. If it is not available from the get-go, add additional unofficial repositories, download rpm or deb files manually from some site like "pkgs.org", do any other magic necessary… Install the drivers manually from the nVidia site directly, if you must (don't listen to any "Gurus" out there telling you it is not right -- your PC, your rules)! But make the card work. Otherwise, it will be wasteful usage of (the most expensive) part of the system; you'd better get some Intel or AMD APU and use integrated solution. At least, the electricity bills would be smaller. :)

This might be a great option for Windows 7 users that want to try out Linux?

"How to Make Linux Mint Look Like Windows 7":

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/01/make-linux-mint-look-like-windows-7 :)