There is, yes, but it’s pointless. I think some people are missing the point of Alyx being a VR game, the game would suck pretty bad in pancake mode. It’s the intricate interactions with the world you simply can’t get with a mouse and keyboard that make it special compared to other Half Life games. They didn’t just make a regular Half Life game and said “well we’re just gonna force this to be in VR now”, they made a VR game and set it in the Half Life universe.

Somewhat hot take… I’d argue Boneworks (not Bonelab) was “better”, at least if you’re used to VR and if you judge by freedom and replay value. Don’t get me wrong, playing through Half Life Alyx was fun and engaging, but to me it had little to no replay value, since for all it did great in visuals, audio, accessibility, and especially story, it failed dramatically in physics. Since I played Alyx right after Boneworks, I kept trying to pick stuff up which I ended up not being able to for larger objects, and the first time I tried to knock a Combine over the head with a pipe I was so sorely disappointed. Alyx has absolutely everything Boneworks is missing, yet that physics core is what kept me coming back to the latter. It really clicked for me when I noticed how many things in Boneworks one can solve in alternate ways by “abusing” physics. Climbing is a learned skill and combat can be as much shooting as it can be using knives, fists, shoving someone off a ledge, or grabbing an enemy and throwing it at others. It’s what truly made me realize how much potential VR had, being able to interact with a full physics simulation, where even your own body is a physics object, with your physical hands is amazing.

Proton is based on Wine, when people say Wine in a gaming context, there’s a decent chance they just mean Proton. Also there’s absolutely no need for gaming distros in this situation, gaming works out of the box on any (semi-normal) distro, the most you’ll have to do is flick a switch in Steam.

Edit: Or in this case with the Sims install Lutris I guess, since it’s an EA game, but that also isn’t much more difficult

She’s what one would generally refer to as a tankie and even refers to herself as extremist, so I do believe that is the appropriate term.

Apparently to some that’s the goal. I had a chat with a leftist a while back while the US election was in full swing and she was absolutely against the concept of voting for a lesser evil, since the worse things get, the more people will turn to leftist extremism, which is a win in her book. Suffice it to say, that talk made me anything but sympathetic of her view…

In my experience not just sometimes, but rather commonly. It often feels like the native Linux version, if it is even available, gets far fewer bug fixes - not like I can blame them, considering the far lower amount of Linux players, but sometimes I wonder why they even bother with it in the first place if they don’t want to bother with focusing on it, with how good Proton is.

No no, you don’t get it. Windows has problems, but switching to Linux would be like leaving your home country because you don’t like its political trends. Where’s your OS patriotism? There’s no need for Linux, because you can just keep using Windows and hope Microsoft ends up doing what’s best for their customers products :)

I’m paraphrasing here, but that’s an actual thing the CEO and founder of Epic Games posted on Twitter: https://nitter.net/timsweeneyepic/status/964284402741149698

I get that, but any extensive cheat sheet would just wrap around to being an inefficient man page

-help is the quick sheet, man is the extensive guide

Cheat sheets are man pages and the -help option on most commands

Those exist already

As much as I theoretically agree, I can immediately think of two problems:

1. The storefronts would have to communicate

It’s against their own interest to do this. Imagine you buy all your games on Steam because of the sales (although the creators of the game of course decide the prices, but still) and then play them on your Xbox. No profit at all for Microsoft, yet they’re the ones providing all the additional services like the actual game hosting, friends system, etc. It’s not much by any means, but it does add up. The money all goes to Valve. You could even buy the games via the Steam mobile app if you don’t even own a PC. Also, even if they were theoretically fine with this, even coordinating it would be a pain. Since you could put a game on the Google Play Store, the App Store, hell maybe even F-Droid, Epic Games, GoG, Steam, the Xbox Store, and the Play Station store, and I am absolutely certain I forgot multiple other options, all of them would need to be able to communicate and decide on if you actually own the game. This would be a logistical and technical nightmare.

2. Companies would just sell mildly different versions and claim it’s a new game

You know how for example Undertale has a slightly special Nintendo Switch version where there’s… I can’t even remember, but I think it’s an additional boss. That’s just something small and cute, but let’s go with the GTA example. I have played about five hours of 5 and dropped it, so excuse me if this isn’t the best theoretical example, but let’s say the PS5 and Series X/S get the base game. Then the PS6 and new Xbox get maybe five additional cars and the game they’re selling is GTA 6 Expanded. Afterwards on switch (although by that time Nintendo’s new console would’ve released) you get blue and red weapon skins or whatever and it’s GTA 6 Switched Up. And then finally on PC you get the GTA 6 Ultimate Edition with expanded settings, better graphics, and maybe five more cars on top of those from GTA 6 Expanded. These are all technically not the same game, so you would not be able to claim them. Sure, you could argue they’re similar, but where is the exact line? That’s quite impossible to figure out - is it a cheated rehash or a mediocre remaster? Who knows

I’ve already considered Debian, but… I dunno, this isn’t what I’d call the most logical reason, but I just kinda don’t like it as my desktop OS. I’d use Debian over basically anything else for a server, but as a desktop OS I don’t like the vibe.

Keep in mind, I started using Linux this summer and in a few years I’ll probably look back at this wondering why I was such an idiot, but I gotta fall and get a bloody nose first to notice ;3

Huh, I never expected anyone to recommend Arch to me because you have to tinker too much with an alternative distro. I thought simplicity was the reason why people liked NixOS, no?

Because of course the arch wiki has the info needed. I should’ve just checked there from the start, thanks!

Huh, neat. On my current EOS Desktop PC it’s a bit too late to uninstall everything and reinstall it as a Flatpak, but I’ll keep that in mind for new Linux installs. Thank you :3

Excuse me if this is a bit of a dumb question, as I have never particularly worried about packaging methods and simply installed what I needed from the official Arch packages or AUR, but how does Flatpak lead to fewer updates? I know it sandboxes things, that’s why I’ve been interested in it for applications I don’t quite trust like Discord, but I never got around to actually switching applications of that sort over and trying the format out.

Speaking of Discord, hooking that out of the “normal packages”, aka everything I update via yay, would be beneficial anyways, since it’s the only thing that forces me to update my system by saying how I’m oh so lucky about a new update coming out and I don’t wanna mess with partial system updates. That’s kinda besides the point though, I just wanted to complain.

Personally, instead of Tmux, I’d recommend trying Zellij. I started with Zellij right out of the gate, but a friend of mine who dislikes Tmux a lot quite enjoyed Zellij, so I assume it’s somewhat better.

Any reason not to just use yay? That’s an alias for yay -Syu, which in and of itself, at least if I understood it correctly, is basically just pacman -Syu and from what I’ve read on the arch wiki -Sy is heavily discouraged.

I think that would just be illegal, although I am not certain… maybe it’s not

What I’d be more worried about personally is metadata. Sure, they might not know what you sent, but they know who you sent it to and when. The data is generally just gonna be “Oh, this person texts their mum every morning”, but Meta already provided message contents in an abortion case, so what if someone is accused of having an abortion (the fact that you can be “accused” of that now in the US is still fucked up imo, but that’s besides the point) and then Meta provides info that this teenager sent WhatsApp messages to a medical professional who can perform abortions. That would obviously not work as well as the contents themselves, but it does have value to the legal case.

In the end none of us have anything to hide… until we suddenly do

I know this wasn’t argued here, but I’d like to make it clear anyways: You don’t have to deal drugs or be a hired killer to want privacy. There are a bunch of reasons you could get in trouble with the government which fall into morally ambiguous areas. And sometimes we just don’t want our entire life being analyzed to have an algorithm decide what advertisement is the most effective in getting us to click on it.