You’ll need an original iPod, iPod Mini, or iPod Video or Classic for Rockbox compatibility. iPod Touch is just an iPhone without the phone, so it’s locked into iOS, but the original iPod, and iPod Mini, Video, and Classic all support Rockbox.
I presume any generation of iPod Shuffle or Nano is also locked into Apple firmware.
As I pointed out, if you have an older iPod, eg. like an iPod Video or Classic, or any other player that supports it, Rockbox is a thing you can flash onto it.
I’d recommend Lutris over Heroic both because it runs locally where Heroic is Electron, and because Lutris allows community-based native Linux ports for games where applicable, eg. for Ultima VII: The Black Gate + The Forge of Virtue, Lutris gives you the option of installing that game with Exult instead of DOSbox, for Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider II, you have the option to install those with OpenLara, for Doom 1 and 2, you have the option to install those with ZDoom, for Little Big Adventure, you can install that with the ScummVM runner, etc.
Also, at least for DOS games where you don’t have the option to install a community-based modern port, you can use native DOSbox as a runner instead of Windows DOSbox as well through Lutris.
Oh, and one more bonus particularly for GOG games in Lutris’ favor over Heroic, is Lutris uses the offline installers so that if anything ever goes wrong with any given GOG game, you can just reinstall from the offline installer where Heroic operates more like GOG Galaxy or Steam in that it’s always downloaded from scratch.
Fooyin’s a really good alternative and if you can flash Rockbox onto an older iPod that supports that custom firmware, then it’ll just function as a normal external drive, no iTunes sync needed unlike with stock Apple firmware.
If you have nothing to lose, ie. if you don’t play anything with anticheat or you don’t use any productivity software with crazy DRM platform-locking you into Windows, do it, switch over.
The bulk of all games will run in Proton or even vanilla WINE now and the minority that’s platform-locked into Windows is anything that uses kernel-level anticheat, if you only play single-player games or even virtual board games like Civilization, those will broadly work fine in WINE/Proton and even in the case of the aforementioned Civilization, those games starting from Civ5 onward even have native Linux ports, but the Windows versions tend to perform better in Proton, and as for productivity software, there’s plenty of alternatives to things like Maya, Photoshop, Lightroom, or Premiere/AfterEffects to choose from that isn’t platform-locked anywhere, eg. Blender as a Maya alternative, Krita or GIMP as a Photoshop alternative, RawTherapee or Darktable as a Lightroom alternative, and KdenLive or Davinci Resolve as a Premiere/AfterEffects alternative.
Oh, and as for Illustrator, you have Inkscape as an alternative, and for Paint Tool SAI, you got MyPaint as an alternative.
As for a good distro to get you started, Debian or OpenSUSE seem pretty solid for beginners, and Debian Stable at least has a backports repo for newer software, and there’s also ChimeraOS if you’re building your PC into a games console.
Also, if you’re looking for a good Foobar2k or iTunes alternative, Fooyin is great for that, and Whipper’s a good CD ripper and basically an open Exact Audio Copy clone, although it’s text-based. You could also use CUERipper in WINE as another good open alternative to Exact Audio Copy, which is proprietary. CUETools will work fine in Mono as well.
Alright then MS, (this is hypothetical as I haven’t ran Windows as my main OS in years and don’t plan on going back) since you want me to trade in my hardware, how 'bout I trade in your OS instead? :p
There’s plenty of single-player games that don’t use any sort of anticheat you can play and that work fine on WINE and Proton.
X is one to talk given how bad they are about censorship themselves.
Debian’s pretty good, or if you need something a bit newer, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed seems pretty good as well in terms of a beginner’s distro.
Super-slim distros like Tiny Core or Puppy will be a rocket on a P4.
Stuff like this is why if you develop an emulator, that you’re better off self-hosting your own git repos, and optionally hosting on Tor/I2P to completely cover your tracks for good measure.
Good thing the end of Windows support isn’t the end of the story for PC at least.
Good luck when SSDs are less reliable when powered off than HDDs, and still pricier for huge capacities.
At least you can still use your older hardware, and at least Radeon cards as old as GCN1 are still actively supported outside of Windows.
Also, old games still exist and will continue to exist in some form into the foreseeable future, legitimately or not.
Like, if you’re not into multiplayer games, the Mesa drivers last time I thought still work well, great even, on Polaris and Vega cards as well as even legacy GCN on the Linux side of things, you can still use your RX 580 or 590 with full support going that route, for example.
You can always build a PC and not have to deal with that UEFI signing stuff as you’re expected to provide your own OS still, that option hasn’t been eliminated yet.
Also, AMD cards are more friendly to Linux users than Nvidia cards are, even with the existence of NVK for the latter; NVK only supports Turing and newer cards and Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta are too old for it, and since Nouveau is broken on Maxwell and newer by firmware signing, once those cards lose support in the proprietary drivers, unless NVK gets backported to them somehow, you’ll be SOL in the near future for 900-series, 10-series, and the Titan V, while Kepler and older is still supported by Nouveau, meanwhile over at AMD, Mesa actively supports Radeon cards going back to GCN1.
Basically, if you still have an R9 Fury or an RX 580 sitting around, for example, those cards will still be actively supported by Mesa open drivers for the foreseeable future, meanwhile your GTX 980Ti or 1080Ti, at least currently, are fully at the mercy of Nvidia’s closed drivers.
And so far LibreWolf and Icecat have both worked fine for me.
Wouldn’t that also block Firefox by proxy?
It’s going to get to the point where you might be better off going back to dot matrix if tank-based inkjet printers are somehow locked down via chemical DRM too.
In the US at least, the courts are seemingly bought out.
There might be some cases even for single-player games where DRM platform-locks you into Windows but that’s rare from my understanding.