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Okay any engineers up for a hypothetical? As others have pointed out, things like wind, nuclear, and other things are sensible answers. BUT WHAT ABOUT AN INSANE ANSWER?
It obviously would be prohibitive to have a colossal “city battery” that stored excess from the day to be used at night, and environmentally would present issues making a city sized battery. But what about a non-traditional kinetic battery (think F1’s KERS). What if there was say a building in the middle of the city, and inside is a metal disk made of solid steel that’s a foot thick, and 500 feet across, on an electromagnetic cushion, housed in a room with negative pressure or a vacuum. During the day, the excess solar energy from the city powers this to gradually spin faster and faster, and during the night this process is reversed with the enormous amount of kinetic energy feeding a powerstation generator that would provide power at night. Okay, I told you it was an insane hypothetical, but as thought experiment humour me. It would by definition be a battery, but one that wouldn’t deteroriate in the same was as a chemical battery, without the same environmental impact of involving all the cobalt, lithium, etc., although it admittedly would be pretty wildly expensive just from a space, and material cost of the disk perspective. How big would this need to be? Is this remotely possible? I mean WAY less power is used at night after all. Thoughts?
I made the switch to daily driving Linux on my laptop for work and play a few months back with a dual boot setup with Windows, and changed over mine and my partner’s gaming desktops to do the same, and they recently got a Steam Deck OLED as well. Honestly I can’t say this is true. It depends on the distro, but I went with Pop OS, and it has been ridiculously pain free to game on. I play a large variety of weird, old, indie games, and I’ve encountered a single game that didn’t work on Pop OS that I needed to play on Windows (WRC 4) and that particular game BARELY worked on Windows as well and took lots of setting up and fixing. More often than not I’m finding things work better on Pop OS (GTA IV doesn’t crash when changing multiple graphics options like on Windows, and GTA IV and 2013’s Tomb Raider both get better frame rates) than Windows.
This is all particularly notable because I didn’t go in as some Linux expert touting the superiority of it (I chose Pop OS because I’m a noob, and it’s easy to use), and fully expected to have all sorts of issues. My biggest complaint is that I should have set my dual boot partition for Pop OS way bigger because I barely need to use Windows anymore! My absolute #1 annoying niche issue that I can’t figure out is that the VPN I need to use to remote into my work 1) will work on Windows, 2) DID work on Pop OS when connected to my phone’s data but not my home wifi (???), 3) no longer works on either my phones data or wifi. Gaming though, has been a cakewalk, you should give it a go. Install proton, maybe grab a glorious eggroll, and you’re set, they’re support for NVIDIA cards make it equally pain free (across the 3 systems I mentioned we’re gaming on Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA gpus, and all are equally pain free).
Even controllers are no problem, but I haven’t messed around much with my wheel, or VR headset though, so we’ll so how that goes.