Can’t upgrade because my 4 years old mobo is apparently too old (haven’t checked out the workarounds yet). Installed Linux Mint to give it a try and I am positively surprised so far.
It’s going to be purchase a new hard drive and then jump to Linux Mint this August.
It’s not an experience I am looking forward to (5080S, I do a lot of modding, and enjoy fangames/indie games which do not always play nice with linux) but needs must - the Linux community in general is very friendly, so we’ll get through it, even if the first 6 months are rough. I’ll keep the dual boot and push the windows partition to 11 if needed by work, that way I can put off rewriting my elderly access database for another few years.
Honestly, Microsoft are committing suicide when it comes to home users. It won’t be sudden, but the wheels are turning, all the IT savvy folks are switching people over (already did my aunt’s potato, mum’s demi-tato is next week). Eventually, a tipping point will be reached and offices will start switching - I hope that day comes before I die of old age!
It essentially (if I’ve understood things correctly) aims to replicate the behaviour of proton.
Works like a charm, I have a simple alias set up that will run almost any .exe - even installers and stuff. Only thing that hasn’t worked so far was my digital exam software (that is essentially a windows rootkit) because it couldn’t find the cursor images lol.
…all the IT savvy folks are switching people over…
Totally feels strange because my dad’s laptop doesn’t have the TPM requirement and he was telling me about how he was talking to the IT guy at his work about possibly switching to Linux just so he can keep his laptop. No clue if he’s gonna have me or ask if Mr. IT can do it, though, if he follows through. Absolutely insane because I might not be the only person in my house using it anymore (android not included because I view it as a completely separate entity).
I was telling him that day that I could flash Mint (have the most recent addition on my laptop) to a thumb drive if he was actually wanting to switch over. He’s definitely an average computer user, so nothing too special, but it still feels real weird.
Though this will also suck for a while because the tech savvy people helping them switch over will also be running IT for these people who have never used Linux before and most likely have never even used windows CMD either. Cannot wait for stories of people being fed up because their parent/aunt/uncle/friend/whoever looked up how to fix their device and entered the cursed rf command without thinking once about it.
good thing about the terminal is it scares most general users so much that they won’t touch it even with instructions. There will be many issues, but I don’t think people running random commands in the terminal will be common
So, in the case of my aunt, there were a few teething troubles. That said, a lot of it was just requests to add web page shortcuts to her desktop.
The really big thing is that she’s stopped complaining about how slow her laptop is, and openly says she finds it easier to use.
Most of the troubleshooting is going to be around office software and games. It’s also going to be about replacing windows tools (I am really going to miss my “.bat cave”), and learning new troubleshooting skills (wine is a bit rough to troubleshoot unless you’re willing to get your mining gear out and dig deep into logs).
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
So, oddly enough, I’m not a complete novice. My background is mostly just lubuntu, puppy, mint and a bit of debian. I’ve shifted away from Ubuntu after the pro service ads in terminal, and the absolute fucking nightmare that is snap.
I’ve done my time in “oh shit I fucked up Linux again” purgatory, and it’s my daily driver for work. Terminal is a place I’m generally ok with; I know enough to find my way around and fix things as needed.
My issue is I’ve never really run dedicated graphics from a Linux distro, and because of the continual updates and proprietary elements I worry about keeping up. I don’t mind breaking things, it comes with the territory.
That said, bazzite sounds interesting - especially the optimisation. The guides on the main page also alerted me to something I’d not considered - going to have to redo my filesystem on every drive. Thanks for the idea of an alt distro, will dig into this a bit more - if it’s built in fedora I might have a bit of a learning curve (never used it as a distro).
Again, infinite free troubleshooting if you run into any issues, feel free to message me! I’ve given a bunch of people bazzite at this point, and can run you through just about anything.
Make sure not to accidentally choose “steam gaming mode”, on the download since that’ll turn it into basically a steam-deck interface.
This is pretty obscure, but the Game Boy Advance remake of Mario Bros. (Not Super Mario Bros.) is more fun than the original.
You can run, for one thing, and the controls are more responsive in general.
It’s one of the games on Super Mario Advance, and one of the main reasons I originally wanted a GBA when it came out! I had the original Mario Bros. for the NES and thought it would be fun to have a portable version. I was right.
Yeah the controls in the OG Mario Bros (and even the OG Super Mario Bros, to a bit of a lesser extent) are very clunky compared to modern entries. I’d say SMB3 holds up well though.
Literally if you’re playing on the original NES controllers made in a time before Nintendo understood the importance of erganomics. The corners dug into hands and even the buttons wore at fingers and I say that as someone who has naturally thick callouses.
Iirc, they didn’t even have the satisfying button press mechanism most buttons have these days where the button resistance drops as you pass the threshold of a “press”. And many games involved mashing or holding buttons. Like it was painful to watch my daughter try playing SMB and not just hold the B button to constantly run.
They were iconic but I prefer to see them than use them.
This list is the way to go. My last Lan party was about 17 years back but there is one golden rule, which is still more important than anything else: pick a game no one has played or one that everybody is familiar with! The biggest fun killers are unbalanced teams and matches. Despite that, we liked the first flat out game which now should be wreckfest and strangely enough a soccer mod for CS:S back then.
I think being the “free” game that comes with the system hurt it’s reputation. We all got bored of it, but going back to it after playing some terrible platformers really shows you how great it really is.
Nostalgia and all-time enjoyment, probably Pokémon Gen 2 / Remakes (Silver / Gold / Crystal / SoulSilver / HeartGold). I consider them all one game of different “flavours”. If I had to choose one I’d probably go with SoulSilver. The remakes added some much needed modern conveniences, and having your Pokémon follow you around in the overworld was awesome.
Pure “this game is so good”, probably Elden Ring. Before the DLC I’d probably go with Dark Souls III because of Gael and Friede, but Shadow of the Erdtree blew me away.
Most hours played, Skyrim at over 5,000. HITMAN is in second place at a bit over 1,300.
I don’t think any amount of achievable retirement savings is enough to give me confidence that I could cover escalating health care costs enough that I could retire. Even if I had $10M in the bank, I would worry that the cost of health care will rise fast enough to impoverish me.
If you make it to Medicare age, it gets a lot less stressful. eg: my folks have had 4 knees replaced with very little out-of-pocket cost. There’s still supplemental insurance, but Medicare, not the profit-driven insurance company, determines what gets covered, and they mostly listen to doctors. There’s always edge cases, where some treatment might not be covered, but I feel like those are uncommon.
One way or the other, my ultimate health care plan is 9mm.
Maybe in our lifetime we will see an expansion of Medicare to be a single payer system for all Americans as a publicly available option (ie: the minimum standards other insurance would need to meet to be competitive).
That would be nice. Idk I’m just hopeful in like 25 years we may see some real change ushered in when it comes to that. Probably very naively hopeful but I have to at least occasionally believe in a better future.
I get more pessimistic every year and I started out extremely pessimistic. I think humanity going extinct in my lifetime is more likely than the US getting single payer in my lifetime.
I’m surprised that Trump doesn’t use Obama care to prescribe 9mm medication to people. It’s a lot cheaper to pay a one time cost of a 9mm that reoccurring costs of medication. Think about it, health care costs plumit and firearms sales skyrocket. It’s a republican wet dream.
Enderal, a whole new game built ontop of Skyrim. Offers an entirely different setting, map, class system, enemies, spells, and has an actual story that you will not soon forget.
Enderal and also its predecessor Nehrim are absolutely amazing! They’re so fantastic, I don’t even consider them mods, I see them as full games.
PS: Yes, I know Arkwend exists. But I’ve never played it because I personally dislike Morrowind and its gameplay systems. Especially the god aweful random hit chance system Oblivion got me into RPGs so that will forever be my gold standard for RPG games.
To me, this is different choices in player autonomy/agency. No player is truly autonomous in a game world, but giving the player choices and having the choices have outcomes that actually impact the gameworld makes it feel like it’s your own agency making the choice.
For example, why would I eat the fish in Nier Automata? Doing so kills me. Why would they give me the option to have a game-ending early on in the game based on eating a fish? Because in giving you the choice to do so, they’ve given you a level of autonomy. They let you find out for yourself what the consequences are, and the consequences make sense in the context of the game world.
Rockstar is bad at respecting player agency, but you know what the worst was in my experience?
Hogwarts Legacy. (Note: I pirated this trash to not give Rowling any money)
Right off the bat, at the beginning of the game, you’re meant to follow your Professor through a dark seemingly endless empty space. If you leave the side of your Professor, nothing terrible happens, just big red scary words cover the screen saying you’ve failed because you lost track of the Professor.
In a game that actually respects player agency, you wouldn’t just be like “Hey, you’re doing THIS MISSION WRONG” (which is basically what the message said in nicer terms), you would give the player an actual event showing why it was dangerous.
What would be so hard about animating a shadowy horror coming out of the shadows and snatching you, instantly killing you? At least then you have learned why you shouldn’t venture alone. Because there are scary monsters in the dark and they could kill you! This respects the players agency by allowing them to explore but also giving them clear limits that fit the theme of the world in which they exist. There’s definitely scary horrors in Harry Potter, and a myriad of things that could kill a new student. We don’t see any of them, just big all caps “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!”
The game would pose further issues, like not being able to jump over obstacles that your character is clearly jumping higher than. Invisible walls is another thing which disrespects player agency and breaks world immersion.
It’s been a while since I played it, but the whole game was crammed to the gills with these kind of wag of the finger “we didn’t tell you to play that way so don’t” instead of using compelling story-based reasons to keep people from doing those things.
Yeah. Use it at the Bunker and it blows up the Bunker. I love all the endings that are like, “I don’t know why she did that.”
Also apparently it’s a real last ditch move that doesn’t actually kill you. I didn’t know that until just now when I looked it up. I thought it was just an interesting thing where the game let you blow yourself up. Also, it apparently leaves you with tattered clothes.
I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.
Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.
But…
spoilerYou can also parry their attack, and then just kill them. Or just fucking book it and run past them, but that’s way harder.
The last page of this survey is heavy handed and full of leading questions. It feels like you’re less trying to gather research data and more trying to push an agenda; it would not pass scientific review. The fact that I agree with the agenda being pushed doesn’t change my feelings on that.
A better method would have been to ask the question in a neutral way (e.g. ‘Do you believe that storing game cartridges qualifies as preservation?’ or even better, ‘Storing game cartridges qualifies as preservation’ as a statement, with a Strongly Disagree - Strongly Agree scale), then at the end of the survey provide the information you’re providing in the links below each question.
bin.pol.social
Ważne