I knew the internet had everything and anything you can think of has already been done, but it was proven true again this week. TL:DR - Someone scripted a Steam and Proton compatible installer for Sims2 and I don't need windows anymore for anything.

Story Time:

My dad upgraded his tower. If you've ever wondered how I got into tech, this is a large part of it. So my dad maxed out everything MicroCenter has to offer and got himself a ridiculously overkill monster so he can fly around in Microsoft Flight Simulator occassionally but mostly play cribbage while watching TV. That meant the previous tower got demoted to "upstairs computer" and previous previous tower was looking for a new home. Where is that home? Me of course!

Technically, it was so my kids could take it apart and learn about how computers are built. And we did open the case and talk through components and such. My oldest is also starting to get really into aviation and plays Flight Simulator on his SLS. We looked into upgrades for this ancient beast but didn't get much beyond the research phase. It's a Dell gaming tower, specifically the XPS 730 (s, I think?). It has a core i7 - 1st gen and triple channel RAM. Yes, triple, and it's a weird kind that wasn't made for long and is still expensive. Doesn't matter though, it's maxed out at 12GB.

Dell is not exactly known for their use of off the shelf components. The board is supposedly ATX compatible with proper standoffs in the case, but we'd have to rewire the power button. We did research board/ram/proc sets from MicroCenter, and my oldest has one picked out that he wants, but I'm hesitant to throw money at this truly giant tower. My husband suggested only keeping the graphics card, which has been upgraded at least twice, an nVidia RTX 2080 and building a whole new computer around it on the cheap. My brother suggested an external enclosure for the card to use it as an eGPU.

Determined to salvage this thing, and get it out of our entry where it was dropped as we really didn't have a good place for a tower, I cleared my desk and set it up anyway. The Windows 10 install is a hot mess, full of years of collected random utilities, system monitors, several DVD players, and of course, Flight Simulator with a bunch of add-ons. My dad also had a drive with an older Ubuntu on it, but abandoned it as it couldn't read some of the sensors he liked to watch. I'm keeping Windows because it's the only way to change the color of the lights, but with 4 drive bays, I can have lots of fun.

And so, this beast now runs Bazzite, quite well at that. Because it's an nVidia card, I don't get Steam big picture mode, but it's a desktop, so I don't care. It runs all my games well enough, but Sims2 remained a sticking point, as that's not available on Steam. One of the advantages to loving this old game is that it even predates this tower, so on the Windows side, with a few hacks to deal with the more-advanced-than-windows-xp operating system, it's the most beautiful my Sims have ever looked.

On a whim, I wondered if it would be possible to get it running on Linux. The Sims2 community is an amazing place, full of people who just don't care for the newer versions and have done everything they can to keep 2 running. And so, I found that someone had scripted a web installer that downloads the full Ultimate bundle (made free in 2015), the GraphicsRulesMaker, shadow fixes, and a few other goodies and runs them all via Steam and Proton. It's amazing. And it worked! Because of the emulation and my lovely 1st gen i7, it will lag sometimes when I get to eager and start trying to do too much stuff before the house has fully loaded. But I used to try to play Sims2 on netbooks, so I don't really have very high standards.

Web and Android OneNote are sufficient for my needs at the moment, so I think I'm in the clear to be done with windows. Unless I want to change the color of the LEDs I guess.