Maybe tangential but this reminded me of how much I hate setting up systemd timers/services. I refuse to accept that creating two files in two different directories and searching online for the default timer and service templates is an okay workflow over simply throwing a cron expression next to the command you want to run and being done with it. Is there really no way we can have a crontab-equivalent that virtually converts into a systemd backend when you don’t need the extra power? I feel like an old person that can’t accept change but it’s been a decade and I’m still angry.

You might be able to read Arches faster.

I’m not sure what a good written guide for manually running linux games is off the top of my head, but generally yeah you install Lutris, install the latest Proton-GE version through e.g. ProtonUp-QT, create a game entry in Lutris with a “Prefix” location dedicated to your wine prefix, pick Proton-GE as the runner, copy the game into the generated prefix, target the normal EXE, and launch it. Sometimes if a game isn’t launching you’ll need to use “winetricks” to install vcrun2022 and dotnet48 dependencies into the wine prefix, since each Wine prefix is sort of like a copy of windows, and windows has a handful of dependencies that games sometimes rely on. I’ve heard you can also just add the game as a “non-steam game” to steam, but I’ve not bothered as Lutris gives more control. Again I can’t vouch for any specific guides, but the keywords from this post should help target a general direction to move in.

In my experience, there is nearly no difference between windows and linux when it comes to piracy. There are a few games that linux can’t run (anticheat), but generally that shouldn’t be an issue for games that you would typically pirate. Linux does have a standard learning curve though, and you’ll need to get familiar with Lutris or some other Wine prefix manager to manage your games. If you’re dedicated to moving to linux, game piracy should not be a deciding factor.

Feigned enthusiasm/friendliness. “Thanks for catching that problem!”

Whenever I have something to say, someone has already said it. People are always on the ball here.

Wow you weren’t kidding lol. I watched the 2.0 demo and at this timestamp there’s a CSAM-related room title that Matthew was invited to (at the top of the right window). Granted it’s probably someone stream-sniping, but it goes to show that there’s apparently active bad actors trying to interfere.

I’m planning on at least doing Arches. I don’t know if The Smoke Room will ever be finished but I’m down to try that at some point also. I’m still on the fence about Adastra; I’ll probably get around to it at some point but it looks so different to what I really liked about Echo so I don’t know if it will really grab me the same way. I’m not a furry but I did grow up gay in Hicktown, USA, so Echo’s story sort of knew right where to hit me to cause maximum emotional damage.

The OP immediately made me think about Echo since I just played all the routes on your sorta-recommendation and I haven’t stopped thinking about it ever since. I’m in the process of attempting to force my non-gay non-furry friends to play it so we can all live in the new upside-down world that it’s created for me. I haven’t done Arches yet, planning on it soon.

Nice, I’ll have to watch this. A quick skim through the YT comments says that it’s AMD drivers which is the only thing I could think of. Linux Mint 21 actually has an “EDGE” iso which has a newer kernel version, and Linux Mint 22 is instead going to track the latest HWE kernels, so my understanding is this type of hardware problem should be a thing of the past at least in Linux Mint’s world. I don’t know if Ubuntu has their own plans or not.

Mint uses the same kernel version as Ubuntu, so that’s not really a point in favor of Ubuntu in any case. Do you remember what video it was?

“Escape hatch” specifically refers to the speculation that Valve is positioning themselves in a way that they can’t be forced into paying fees for existing on the Windows platform, and that if push comes to shove they can say they only support Linux now. This hasn’t happened yet, but it’s a strategic stance which will likely prevent it from even beginning to happen. This doesn’t have to do with the Steam Deck specifically; it was also part of their intentions with the Steam Machine and etc.

Maybe it needs to be more obvious that there are many ways to do things in Linux, and give new users a short “learning to learn” primer on how things operate differently in Linux-land, and where/how to look online for help. There are always first-boot popups but I imagine most people are conditioned to click out of them without even reading; forcing people to confirm a couple times that they want to skip “very helpful reading” may cut down on people that play the search engine lottery on what information they use for their first steps.

Also semi-related, I hope that mainstream Linux eventually “un-stupids” computers for regular people again. I get the distinct feeling that Microsoft and Apple have, at least somewhat intentionally, imposed ‘learned helplessness’ onto average computer users. “Oh computers are magic no one knows how they work. We are the only wizards that could possibly understand them and we will sell you the solution.” Windows/OSX/iOS/etc are so locked down that people have rightfully learned over time that if they run into a problem, there really is no solution. I suspect that’s permeating into the new user experience on Linux where people will encounter one problem and throw their hands up and say “fucking computers” instead of using basic problem solving to try another approach.

Their rough new user experience is concerning though. From what they described I suspect many of their “problems” are not actually “real”, but it doesn’t really matter because they still ended up in a scenario where they thought there were problems. How did they end up thinking that everything must be done with terminal while using Ubuntu? I know in the last ~10 years there’s been a big focus on the new user experience, so what more can be done to prevent this? My gut says there are too many online resources that are confusing new users when they try to onboard themselves - especially resources that are old, written for other distros, or written for people who just want to find the command they can copy-paste to do something.

Gaming has been the only pathway to mainstream desktop since forever. I’ve been around for a hot minute and I remember that consistently, the “real Linux users” for years repeated “we don’t need gaming this is an adult OS go back to Windows and play with your toys” and then turned around and whined that no one wanted to use desktop Linux. Valve stepped in and casually created the year of the Linux desktop as a side-effect of just wanting an escape hatch for their business model. Now the casuals and elitists alike will have a better experience via the magic of Marketshare, and all it really took is not listening to people that don’t know what’s good for them.

So doesn’t that still mean that they think gender-neutral pronouns are political, i.e. they don’t accept them? I’ve also noticed the dev in question is Swedish, so I’m not sure where German language quirks came from?

I don’t understand how a German grammar situation would elicit the response from the PR. Are gender neutral pronouns “political” in Germany? Why did the dev say “personal politics” specifically?

That’s why I didn’t say “transphobia” anywhere in my comment. Real weird vibes is what I’m personally sticking with until I see more. The ‘transphobic’ and ‘misogynist’ claims are a leap without further evidence, but there’s a very strong clue about the type of person someone is when they say pronouns are “political”.

From last time. TL;DR real weird vibes. This is a PR where you say “oops, that makes sense”, click merge, and go on living your life. Not whatever this ended up being.

On a related note, I’ve found Dockge to be powerful enough for my usecases. Worth a try if you don’t like the adversarial relationship of Portainer.