Appearance stuff for Mate, yeah they got some canned desktops and wall papers and the like, but for the fancy stuff you have to ask the internet for it and they will point you to the correct repositories for all the Gnome Tools stuff.

You can dolly it up as pretty as you want, right up to the rotating cube Comprise interface stuff that I never had any real use for either.

Fancy you can do, it just doesn't come stock that way.  

It comes stock looking like home sweet home to an old XP user .....

Well, I put $4.99 at risk and bought Painkiller Windows on $4.99 sale, then I participated in the Linux Beta program and my Linux stuff is downloading as we speak.

Why?   Because i want to encourage the rolling of good gaming titles over to Linux.   Of all the money I can donate, this $4.99 has the most potential to do some real good.

Simply rolling old titles over to Linux is a cheap easy way for the game companies (Epic in this case) to make a buck, expand their audience and DO AWAY WITH ONE OF THE LAST MAJOR NAGGING REASONS PEOPLE STAY ON WINDOWS.  

If I could find more first rate titles on Linux (running Steam and Ubuntu/Mint) I would save an eventual Windows 9 license cost as that is the ONLY reason I would ever need Windows again.

Plus, Painkiller is a fairly good shoot'em up game.    

I missed buying Serious Sam on $9.99 sale last month because I didn't have near enough video card to play it.  Since then I caught a open box low profile Asus video card for $22 that will play it at ~ 25-30 frames per second at medium detail levels which is fast/good  enough for government work (or for me anyway).    

Low profile (half height) graphics cards tend not to be uber-powerful on the gaming side of things, but they are quite a bit better than older on-the-motherboard GMA graphics from Intel -- by a whole bunch.



Like I said, for $4.99 I will try to encourage Epic to keep on rolling those old game titles over.



And yes, using Linux and the new graphics card I now have a $102 "in total cost to me" gaming rig that can play recent PC type full bore level games using Steam & Linux Mint Mate 64 bit OS at $5-6 per major game (when the games are bought on weekend specials).

Cheap ofd farts RULE  !!!

Gaming on Linux through Steam is a work in progress.  

I have bought 2 "full ready" Linux/Steam major game items recently, both required significant tweeking of the in-game parameters to get it to run using the Linux Mint Mate 13 LTS  that I have on my box now.

Fair disclosure, some of these games claim up front that they need more modern Mint versions than I have.   It would be nice if the game developers doing the porting would stick with LTS versions instead of just downloading whatever is current and developing everything for that.    

It is plumb stupid to fully develop a game for a Ubuntu non-LTS version that has only a six month shelf life ......

So, Gaming on Linux still seems to suffer from distro fragmentation even within the very short Mint/Ubuntu kissing cousins range.    It suffers from growing pains as time (as short as a year) moves the environment along far enough that discontinuity comes about between older games and distros and Steam versions.

Steam had a dream, but the dream is flawed because of lack of hard, stable standards between what was written then (6 months ago) and what is here now.

To make this work, Steam needs to sit firmly on their Steambox Standards and not let every fool in the world at whatever distro/version age/performance level download their software.    

It ain't going to work right without a more stable consistent environment.

Or else, like Painkiller, all the Steam Linux games need to be listed as BETA until they get worked out 100% for a closely controlled range of LTS distro versions.


=================


Gaming is still better on Windows right now.  



Sorry



Status update:  

Painkiller Hell and Dam-it-ation is now running in Super VGA mode (monitor's natural mode) at low spec levels (monitor's natural pixel density) at really fast fight'n speeds.   Game looks good, looks like it fits the screen properly and everything is working like it is supposed to.  

The game is still kicking my butt mercilessly, but I am old and my reflexes are slow ....  

(still learning how to bunny hop sideways and strafe)

Metro Last Light isn't running at all -- wrong Ubuntu base is being used by me (my fault) awaiting next month's upgrade to Mint Mate 14.04 to get "even" spec wise with itself.