I got sick about dystopian chaotic worlds that don’t work - where the hero’s journey is about saving the world from some impending ruin, or about preventing a starving dystopian city from being blown up.
In Trails, the conversations you have with NPCs remind you that while you’re on the trail of some bandits or suspicious people, other people are not evacuating, sheltering in fear, etc; they’re living their lives, keeping up to date on modern trends, making travel plans to other countries.
So, so many worlds just don’t have space for characters to have those thoughts. It’s always fear around impending disasters, or how to respond to a fight, or grim poetry about how much the world has fallen into darkness.
It especially hurts that some people live so much of their lives in these fictional worlds that they start to believe people would be like that when they go outside. Worlds like the one in Trails, even if they spend a lot of time being boringly polite, are a nice call back to reality.
Yup, I had this exact experience. Installed Bazzite because it was a “gaming OS”. Had trouble just installing any non-gaming apps, or looking up guides to do so. Even gaming wasn’t perfect.
Installed CachyOS, and yes, there are annoyances, but also a nice path to fix them. It’s both a good gaming OS, and a daily driver for casual use.
Certainly interesting to look at the fastest-growing distros: Ubuntu (the well-known, popular option), Bazzite (the gaming-marketed one), Freedesktop (someone else can answer this for me), and CachyOS (the side-gaming one? Not quite a gaming OS but very good at it)
I’m not so sure Valve is the right maintainer for the core desktop. The Deck works well, but mainly what Valve is maintaining is the Game Mode feature and Proton. Everything else is largely better handed off to a bigger group.
I’ve definitely run into some snobbish “Accept my incorrect solutions and be grateful, or go back to Windows, newb” types of people. I don’t have much love for them. I recognize it takes patience to acclimate new users, but it’s part of the job.
By and large I’m preferential to just stay with something that works; part of what pushed me off it has just been Microsoft themselves enshittifying the experience. I feel like I remember a day when Windows start search actually took you to what you wanted, and now “notepad” immediately queries the shopping network before your own program list, and when you get Notepad open it has a Copilot button.
You’re doing the right thing as long as you stay on an OS that keeps you going day in and day out. I tried Linux earlier in the year on two distros that did NOT work as well as the internet said they would, and went back to Windows. More recently, tried another one and there were stupid difficulties - but I got past them, at a time when Windows issues were just giving me “This is the way it is now, just put up with it”.
I’m dual booting with Windows because of a project I’m finishing that would be difficult to move OS, but Cachy is now my gaming OS. It’s nice to move away from the “forced” behavior from Windows.
Tangentially, a few UI decisions felt locked-in on Ubuntu and Mint too; or at least I couldn’t find an easy way to change them. I’m still a little annoyed my scroll wheel changes form options but it’s a minor thing.
How do people feel about this company using generative AI? That was a concern of mine around The Finals; they’ve defended the decision on voice acting and it made me wonder where else they’re using it.
EDIT: Learned some new things from the responses, certainly an interesting situation. I’ll consider them.
IGN: “Traditional gamer journalism is dying. Please support honest journalists.”
Also IGN: “Good work, 47. Now publish the article and locate an exit.”
Did anyone else know the reason Morpheus is “reborn” in an odd way in Resurrection is because he canonically dies in the MMORPG? I remember wanting to play that as a kid…probably didn’t miss much though.
There are definitely some ways I’d like to see media shifts, but I’m always very cautious about govt regulation around it.
For instance, I always hated how much we parodize authoritarian dystopias. The “parody” element is often lost on people, and they end up respecting it; like people who lose the irony in vouching for Helldivers’ “For Managed Democracy!” or feel like Warhammer40k’s Imperium of Man is awesome.
We probably need more Spec Ops: The Line’s, but also more hero fantasies about destroying those dystopias.
Just get a Steam Deck, and add a hub and wireless controller.
Oh, but it won’t run full-detail AAA releases at 4K? Nothing cheap will. That is exclusively the domain of consoles, earned through direct-contact optimization with developers. That’s still enough horsepower for the thousands of great indie games on Steam, many of which are simple enough to run fine on a midsize TV on the small Deck CPU.
Basically, if someone is adamant about running high-detail games on their TV using Steam, they’re already a niche enough market that it really doesn’t make sense to build up a single SKU for them and hope for bulk manufacturing savings the same way you could for consoles.
It’s probably better off for developers to keep targeting the Deck as a general metric point anyway. The especially good news there is, once devs do that, Linux desktop gamers benefit anyway.
The whole appeal, the whole marketing, in the game is about making this gigantic steampunk thing. But then, hidden in a corner is a Pollution metric - how much harm your factory is doing to this planet, thus angering the bugs.
By being so indirect about the messaging of your grand conquest, you’re made aware of how horrifically abusive corporate empires can dominate continents without really considering their goal state and its damage; and how their response can end up being violent and destructive without initially planning to “Wipe out all other life in this region so I can have it for myself”
I think Mint is the cleanest recommendation when you don’t want to be held liable for issues; but for gaming specifically, I ended up liking CachyOS a bit more.
It’s very bleeding-edge, which if you know tech is often a good and bad thing. But games work well. It is not quite so clean with things like installing popular apps - I’m using a package manager called “bauh”, which is relatively new, unrefined, but works. I still end up installing a few things from terminal, which I know shouldn’t be needed for casual users.
Last I tried Mint was early in the year and I think I installed from an old version. It could be what few gaming issues I saw are gone.