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.
Not really, though I can understand your point of view. I went into STALKER 2 fully aware that it wasn’t Anomaly, and I was able to enjoy it for what it is (despite needing to use console commands on three separate occasions to progress past hard-locking bugs). I finished it probably a month after release so don’t know its current state.
I was sufficiently engaged in the story and the presentation to definitely want to finish the game, and I enjoyed the new map and the blend of new and familiar locations. After spending so much time with the originals and the Anomaly map it was great to get a fix of more new content with the same vibe - some of the underground lab locations managed to hit classic STALKER vibes for me and kept me going to the end.
If I were to boot up some STALKER right now I might go for Anomaly over another run of S2 though, and that will probably continue to be the case until the DLC drops.
Oh, you know what happened? I just realized, I hadn’t even read the introductory material and realized it was from a public survey. It’s a “first past the post” problem.
First past the post is remarkably shit isn’t it. I think your analysis is completely right.