You are just a font of information, thank you so much! I’m starting to feel like I have a handle on the landscape. NixOS sounds like a cool idea, though I am not a programmer so maybe it’s not for me at this current time.
I probably know what to start looking at now when the time comes to make the change, this has been a great help. Pipewire sounds great and I’ll definitely look into that, I do remember tearing my hair a bit occasionally dealing with PulseAudio back in the day 😅
Thanks again for the rundown! Snapshotting like that is definitely cool, I can see why you enjoy it. I’m no stranger to having to nuke the system partition and reinstalling because I broke something so snapshots definitely sound like a convenient tool. Though I might be older and lazier now and less prone to do a bunch of weird things.
I know the memes of “Arch, btw” and have always been scared of it tbh. Maybe it isn’t so bad though? I’ve also heard people praise Bazzite, but I might lot end up doing much gaming on my laptop as I said.
Is the whole thing about real-time or low-latency kernel still a thing, or is that old news? Just in case I wanted to play around with JACK again.
Wow, thank you for the extensive reply! I did used to use xfce back in the day, yes. Never had a problem with it, but those were maybe simpler times. Might look into KDE this time, why not.
I was really thinking less of the DE and more along the lines of if you had any recommendations that weren’t Ubuntu- or Debian-based, as that’s pretty much all I’ve used I think. But maybe that’s too much experimenting…
Haven’t played much but it’s Deus Ex: Mankind Divided still. Only at the beginning so far, doing side quests and exploring Prague. Really enjoying what I’m seeing so far and already am feeling bad for how the series got cut off and cancelled.
I used to use UbuntuStudio back when I was playing around with music recording and production ages ago because it ran the real-time kernel which was important for JACK I think. Last time though was just Mint.
My gaming PC is on Win 11 because it’s recent and I’m lazy and it’s convenient. My laptop runs Win 10 so it’ll be Linux I guess. Not really looking forward to finding a distro and reinstalling and whatnot but what can you do. It’s been a good few years since I last had a Linux box so I’m pretty rusty and not up to date on the recent best distros.
You’ll like it I think, I played it earlier this year and absolutely loved it. Great vibe, good story, beautiful pixel art and a great retro feel without the clunk of actual retro games 😄 Cool world building too.
Latching on to your Lovecraftian recommendations I’d like to put forth Skald: Against the Black Priory, which should presumably also run excellently on the Steam Deck. Keep an eye out for it during the sale, it’s a great tribute to retro CRPGs and has a wonderfully gloomy lovecraftian vibe.
Okay this is a little off script since it’s not an open world game, but if you’re only looking for satisfying movement you should take a look at Neon White. Just be warned that the writing is… on the cringier side. But that doesn’t really matter in the end.
I mean, it’s not like that at all though? Even setting aside the popularisation of the free-to-play model and its monetisation - which has defined mobile games (an industry dwarfing all other types of games in revenue by the way), FarmVille was the first innovator in terms of really invasive big data analysis of customer behaviour to maximise profit and retention. The way Zynga did player data analysis (back in 2009 I might add) literally set the tone for all modern internet. There are plenty of articles about the influence of FarmVille, here’s one.. There is another one here.