Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

For the most part, yes. I’ve modded Skyrim, with SKSE and haven’t run into any mods I couldn’t add. Satisfactory has linux support for mods through the community-built mod launcher, so I haven’t had any problems there. If you are comfortable copying files around, sometimes editing text files, uncompressing files, and other like tasks then you’ll be fine. The only troubles I have had are running trainers that run alongside the game and connect to the running executable. There is one of the Resident Evil 2 remake I wasn’t able to get going. I think there are methods to do this, I just haven’t looked into them in detail yet.

For most things involving games in Linux, you need to have a small amount of tweaking skills, and that’s it. You might have to copy a launch string into the Steam launch setup, or you might need to download a tweaked copy of Proton to get something running well (Glorious Eggroll builds). If you have those skills or can learn them, you’ll be fine. It’s kind of fun, too. If you don’t have those skills or want to learn them, you’ll be restricted to not being able to get the best experience when running some games and there will be the occasional game in your backlog that won’t run at all without it.

Not trying to scare anyone off, but that’s been my experience with Linux gaming. I’m comfortable enough on Linux that it hasn’t been a problem, but some people might find it more of a hurdle to get over.

It’s also early access, so it will presumably help with it being a bit shallow. There are a surprising amount of things locked behind various mechanics that I’m starting to stumble across. For example, if you’re a jerk to people enough your karma score will fall and now you have access to rifle through vending machines looking for loose change or robbing an ATM. I have a feeling there are a lot more of these kinds of things to discover.

Just getting out of the Sims price hell is worth it for me. I’ve had some good experiences with early access games in the past so I’m reasonably upbeat about what may come down the line.

Preparation for real life, I guess. There’s no win condition that I know of :)

I am of the opinion that no one should be vandalizing property that they don’t own themselves. Protest, sure (following whatever laws Canada has in place for that), don’t buy a Tesla, sure, encourage everyone you’ve ever met not to buy one, fine, but please respect the right of people who don’t want their stuff vandalized.

Also, while dealerships have insurance, doing this just makes the insurance go up for everyone. But that’s not my point. People shouldn’t vandalize the property of others because they really, really, really x5, don’t like Elon.

I’m not an Elon or Trump apologist, I’m just someone fighting on the side of civilized behavior.

I put a lot of quarters into Xevious in high school. Way too many.

Also, if you’re okay downloading and installing mods manually, many of them “just work”, even some of the more tricky ones if you’re willing to tinker a bit. Some games have mod installers that are cross platform (for example, Satisfactory Mod Manager has a linux version and it works great).

If they don’t like their “tax evasions”, then they should change the laws and remove the loopholes that allow it. I’m not a supporter of a wealth tax (i.e. being taxed on something repeatedly because you still happen to own it) no matter who it is that would suffer from it that we all collectively dislike.

I’m feeling old. I have a folder called Notes with a directory hierarchy with text files in them. If I want to edit something, I navigate to the appropriate directory and type “vim -S”. If I want to get to them remotely (which I haven’t really needed) I would SSH in to my system with whatever terminal emulator I had available.

The visibility of fonts to websites has been restricted to system fonts and language pack fonts in Enhanced Tracking Protection strict mode to mitigate font fingerprinting.

I’m happy to see this. It’s crazy how hard advertisers try to determine who I am when I’m actively attempting not to be shown their garbage and won’t buy it from their links. Browsers should be sending far fewer html headers, and restricting the listed fonts to a common list is a good step forward.

Bodhi Linux. I have an old System76 Starling netbook that stopped working after some updates left it in the dust. I think it had a netbook version of Ubuntu on it originally. Years later I installed Bodhi Linux on it (since it was supposed to be good for low spec machines) and I currently use it as an Angband terminal, a photo slideshow device, and occasionally surf the web with it just because I can :)

I’m amazed at how well it works with an Intel Atom processor, 2GB of ram, and a 250GB disk drive. Kudos to the Bodhi Linux team.

I must be lucky. I’ve been using Linux (Debian then Ubuntu then PC Linux OS then back to Kubuntu) since approx 2002. I don’t remember ever having to reinstall my OS because an application borked on install or otherwise. Reboot, maybe, but it was normally fixable. I have been annoyed at my favorite apps disappearing in a new release and having to change my workflow, but that’s about it.

Even all the pain I had to go through to get X11 working correctly in the early days didn’t require reinstalls.

I rather liked The Immortality Thief by Taran Hunt.

Are these built to handle pipes? If I bat a file and redirect it to a file, does it work as expected or does it add in the escape sequences for the colors, for example?

Yeah, I know it’s strange, but I have a hard time, say, cleaning the dishes and listening to something I want to concentrate on (i.e. I don’t want to miss story beats because I got caught up in what I was doing). I usually lose the thread if I don’t listen to it, or I bounce off of listening to it because it goes so slow. Even chores that require no language processing. I would end up cleaning the same dish again or something.

I think it might be related to my having aphantasia. I can’t visualize anything, and I don’t have an audible internal monologue so I’m not really used to multitasking what I’m seeing internally with what’s going on in the outside world. If I’m watching an youtube video, I’m just sitting there watching it and not doing something else on the computer at the same time. I’ve watched podcast videos where there’s just a static picture, and I’m still just sitting there staring at the screen listening to it.

I’m weird, I guess.

I just finished the Three Body Problem trilogy, which I loved. Now I’m trying to figure out what I want to read next.

I originally thought I would like them, but I apparently don’t multitask very well. I lose the thread if I’m doing something else and I also apparently read much faster than people speak and I can’t as easily skip passages like I can when I’m reading. Because of this, it just seems strange to sit still and listen to a book for hours straight. It should probably also feel weird to just sit still and read a book for hours at a time, but I guess I’ve normalized that.

I’ve mostly been playing Hogwarts Legacy, a not very well known game called Reshaping Mars that I really enjoy, and I am aching to go back to Satisfactory but haven’t had the time.

I game on Linux using Steam. If those three other people who do this and are trying to play Hogwarts Legacy: go back to proton 7, something broke with HL’s latest update and proton 8.

Yeah, Ubuntu has been consistently pissing me off. Just not enough to go distro hopping yet. The worst part for me is that apt now tells you that you are missing some security updates to temp you into buying whatever their service is. Great, thanks. Maybe I’ll try KDE Neon or Pop! OS soon.

+1 for the package manager. No need to find some website to download what you want while having to worry about whether you’re at the right one and if you’re going to download a virus or ransomware or something. I can’t believe that’s the normal way to install software on windows, download something from a website and hope it’s the right thing. Much better to browse a bunch of software that is designed to work well on your system and is free besides.

One big thing for me is that linux doesn’t try to push you to do anything. I run simulations and they are a pain to set up again sometimes so having the computer decide to update itself out of the blue is completely unwanted. Linux will wait until you are ready. This can have a downside if you don’t keep up on updates, but it’s far less a concern than it is in the Windows ecosystem.

I bought myself a copy of NT 4.0 back in the day.