Yeah, that was an unexpected nice thing about switching to Linux, though also the whole point. Like I knew that I wanted to take control back over my computer and OS, but I was surprised at just how much nicer it is when defaults are set without any profit incentive. There just wasn’t “spend time disabling MS attempts to get me to use their other software” or “dig deep for how to change a setting MS would really rather you don’t change” periods and it made me realize that that was where I’d spend a majority of the “computer maintenance” time on windows.

Don’t ban aftermarket exhausts completely, just the ones that optimize for loudness or dirtier air.

I’d like to see devices that detect when a car is running too rich or lean (bad cases I can smell right away, so it should be detectable at a range), along with enforcement and seizing vehicles where they deliberately mess with those, especially if there’s a switch or function present that can switch between legal and illegal modes to pass emissions tests and then go back to spewing out unburnt fuel or a much higher number of nitrous oxide compounds.

Windows comes with its own set of challenges in the form of wanting things set up differently from how MS wants them set up and not wanting to be nagged about using their shitty programs and services. I got to the point where any time the OS or software initiated some kind of contact with me, it would annoy me even if it might have been helpfull because I’m so used to those being from the marketing department.

Like I’ve noticed that Linux can do things without annoying me even if that thing used to annoy me on windows just because I don’t have that expectation that it’s trying to sell me something.

What even is the benefit of getting the users who don’t even give a fuck about any of the things that are useful to learn (and have for those who did learn enough to use them)?

Yeah, plus there’s other downsides to popularity, like it being worthwhile for advertisers and scammers to target. As much as I’d like to see MS fail, there are big advantages to having them run the noob friendly OS, similar to how reddit still existing benefits Lemmy.

Last thing I want to see is Linux selling its soul to appeal to the lowest common denominator because it just gets worse from there.

Personally, I’d take choice over adoption.

It does seem to be missing mining/quary land, logging operations, oil fields, non-urban infrastructure (like highways), and parkland that kinda straddles human and wild land.

Not sure any of those other than the parks would add up to over 1%, though.

Around where I am, I could believe it, though. Outside of the cities, there’s many areas where you just see farm fields split up by roads and power lines from horizon to horizon.

A man calls a waiter over to complain about his soup.

“Waiter, there’s a hair in my soup!”

“Shhh, not so loud or the other customers might get jealous!”

The sous chef minding the soup was wearing a hair net but disturbed it to scratch an itch on his scalp. Upon discovery of this while reviewing the kitchen footage (nothing to do with the complaint, the owner was just a control freak), said sous chef was fired. Which coincidentally benefited the customer because it meant the sous chef wasn’t able to buy the last toy both of their daughters wanted, so the customer got it and won that year’s competition of “buying daughter’s love over divorced wife”, but later bit him in the ass when his spoiled daughter threw a huge tantrum because the Mercedes he bought for her 16th birthday didn’t have the right trim package.

Of course, society was collapsing around them and this all became a moot point when the maintainer of a critical piece of software was put to death for daring to glance at a party member without even bobbing his head and even the best AIs couldn’t fix the bug that popped up the next day (because they also relied on that critical piece of software) and the LLC that did the hostile takeover of his estate refused to let anyone see the source code unless they paid a billion dollars, which they wanted to but payment systems also depended on that software, so instead society just finished collapsing.

Anything Mr. Bean.

I carried around a floppy drive (like through moves, not day to day) for a long time after I last used it but eventually realized tech has gotten to the point where I’ll probably never use one again.

But I did get an external bluray drive instead of throwing away all those discs I burned back in the day. Even though, in the process of checking them for data loss and ripping to move them to m-discs, I realized I didn’t really care if any had lost data (though none have so far).

I’ve been enjoying Tales of Maj’Eyal lately. It’s a roguelike, though you can set it to give several lives or infinite lives. But I’ve been enjoying just going until I die and then rolling a different build. You usually only die because you get overconfident and I’ll leave figuring out the specifics of that to you :)

It also has over 1100 achievements if you like chasing those.

Probably projection.

That one looks like it’s both. Not sure their eyes can turn that far to the sides, but the sockets seem to be positioned for both good focus ahead and a wide peripheral.

You’d collapse into a star well before that. And even before that, you’d be burnt up by molten sweaters. Though it’s not as bad as it sounds because you’d be crushed long before the heat got too much to stay solid.

I think it had more to do with farming families wanting the kids at home to help with the work during the growing season and out of their faces during winter.

I played a lot of games this year, but there were main ones that “stuck” more than others. I’m a patient gamer, so most of these aren’t new releases.

I was playing a lot of Satisfactory earlier in the year. Not much more recently but I know I’m not done with that game. I started a second save to organize things better, though not sure how well I’m accomplishing that. Though this second one uses more trains while the first one had more of a road setup, including a raised highway to access the oil area in the south east. Still nothing like some of the megaatructures I see in other builds online. I try to plan for expansion, so don’t tend to “finish” buildings, but rather build up a frame that can be added to in any direction. I’d give the game a 9/10 overall.

Another game I got into for a bit was TCG Card Shop Simulator. It was fun for a bit but then dropped off hard as the novelty wore off. I think that’s how “pretend to work a job” games generally go for me. Fun and satisfying at first, but then repetitive and unrewarding later on. I’m going through something similar with Ship Graveyard Simulator 2 right now, though I’ll get to that. I’d rate it about a 6.5/10, though it feels like an 8/10 at first before dropping off to more like a 4/10 once it gets old.

I’ll give Healed to Death an honourable mention, even though I moved on from it pretty quickly. It’s a great concept IMO, since sometimes I want to do a “healing the raid” type activity but don’t want to invest the time into a MMO to get there again. But this one isn’t just playing the healer, you also need to manage a constantly revolving party’s gear and switch them to follow mode (where they do no attacking even if they are ranged) to move them out of the fire during fights. So it’s basically healer simulator but your party is always the worst. If they (actually it’s one guy I believe, so impressive job even if it is lacking overall) added better AIs that didn’t need to be micromanaged, it would be much better. I’d give it a 4/10 in its current state but it could be a 9/10 with better execution.

TMNT: Splintered Fate is very similar to Hades (in fact, I’d call it a clone). I liked it but didn’t stick with it for long. 8/10.

Schedule I is another one of those “work that is fun at first but gets old”. Though they’ve added a bunch of stuff since I last played, so I will probably check it out again at some point. Game loop is basically find a spot, produce drugs, maybe modify them by adding shit to them, then selling them either directly or via a dealer. Then use the cash to produce more drugs or get new places (both areas to produce drugs and businesses to launder the proceeds, though I don’t know if laundering even makes a difference at this point), hire workers or buy vehicles and weapons. I believe they added competing cartels in an update since I last played, so it could be more interesting now. 7/10.

Then had a short period where I was interested in speed running, though mostly just against myself, since I’m nowhere close to the top charts on anything. Did a bit with Subnautica (best time to leave in rocket was under 10 hours now iirc) and Grim Dawn (I think I got my best Act 1 time to beat the record full game time lol). No rating for speed running in general (though it does not go well with ADHD unless you hyperfocus on one game), but Subnautica 10/10 and Grim Dawn 8/10 (it’s similar to Diablo).

Widget Inc was another, it’s pretty much an automation game without logistics, where each new production building rises in cost exponentially and prestiging to increase overall production. Apparently they just released a major update yesterday (looks like it adds enemies). Not sure I’ll look into it. 6/10.

Did House Flipper for a bit, which followed the job game pattern of being fun and engaging for a bit and then repetitive. At first, I intended to get the second game, but my interest in the whole thing waned before that. It was cool that they had Kame house in the game, with hidden dragon balls to find. 7/10.

Also was playing some Dark Souls this year off and on. I realized that there was a lot more to the world than just a hard path through tough enemies. Like there’s shops, blacksmiths, and a ton of hidden things. I also tried builds other than highly mobile swords builds and found 2H is actually easier because your hits often stagger the enemies (and do way more damage), so instead of dodging and timing carefully, you can rush in and overwhelm opponents, eliminating members of groups before the others can even react. Got stuck on the gargoyles, though there were some close attempts and I’ll probably get farther the next time I pick it up. 8.5/10.

I 100% Particle Fleet: Emergence. This game is great if you like systematically picking apart an opponent’s position. Took 15.8 hours to get 100% of achievements, though there’s also a bunch of other maps without achievements that I haven’t done yet and will return to when I feel the itch that those games scratch. 7/10.

I didn’t play it for very long but tried Breathedge, going for a subnautica kind of experience. It does feel like it, but I don’t think the game is tuned very well. I’m not sure if it changes later on in the game, but the part I was playing had me constantly returning to the start. I could go farther out as I upgraded, but progress felt stagnant and I gave up on it. The game did set goals at points of interest, but they were pretty far between and I felt like either I didn’t know what to do to extend my range that far or that it would be tedious as hell doing it the way I could see was possible. I’ll give it a 7/10 on the assumption that part of my issue was needing to git gud, but if I was right about it being the tedious route, I’d drop it to a 5/10.

Played a bunch of Dota 2 for a few months. They give you free dota plus access when you start, which gives access to some useful meta information, but then when it expires, the amount they want for a subscription is kinda high. I’ll give credit for coming up with a f2p system that can generate revenue without any p2w (between the dota plus and cosmetics), but the price turned me off and I didn’t feel like playing as much without that info. Maybe I’ll return to it eventually, as I did enjoy the game itself and like that the full hero list is free (unlike LoL with a rotating set of free ones, though I also don’t mind that monetization system, but I’m on Linux so LoL doesn’t really exist anymore). 7/10.

Stuck in Time is an interesting idle-ish game. You play a regressor, so a character for whom the world resets and plays out exactly the same (depending on your actions) each loop, and as you loop, you get better at doing everything. You give a series of actions to perform each loop and can tweak that list as you go for the next loop. 7/10.

Icarus is a survival game on an alien planet that was teraformed and seeded with a bunch of earth life. You start out with stone age tech (though with a modern understanding, like you can build stone age tools for water purification). I like that, even though there’s oxygen on the planet, they still have you in a atmospheric isolation suit because the air contains microbes we can’t breathe safely (though no idea how it would be safe to consume food and water in those conditions, but hey, it’s still more accurate than most “visit alien planet with oxygen” fictions are which usually just do analysis that says it’s safe to breathe the air). The open world mode is very well done, a nice combination of freedom to do what you want plus missions to do something more specific for a reward or direction. I’ve more or less mastered the forest biome and have started branching out into the arctic biome. The wildlife can be tough to deal with before you figure out how to fight certain animals (like bears and polar bears), especially when you’re stuck with stone or iron age weapons. I almost rage quit the game a few times due to a scenario that spawns a bear, which then tends to stick by your corpse and gear. But there are multiple strategies to handle them, so I suggest sticking with it and even looking up how others do it if you’re really stuck (I did for bears, though they get easier to handle with shotguns). 9.5/10.

Nova Drift is a recent game I’ve been playing, a bullet hell roguelike, so far 2.8 hours in, it’s a lot of fun. 8.5/10.

And Ship Graveyard Simulator 2 is the latest in the job games I’ve been playing. It’s following the trend, as I’ve finished tearing down the biggest ship in the vanilla game and am now on the fence about whether to a) finish up the smaller ships I skipped along the way to the biggest, b) buy some DLC with more ships, or c) just move on from this game. I will say that it is more satisfying than other job games I’ve played, but at only 23 hours in, it’s hard to say if it will have more staying power than the others. 8/10.

And on my playstation, I’ve been playing through FFX remastered. FF7 was always the “main” FF in my mind, but I think I like the FFX gang better now. I’m not as into JRPGs and the turn-based combat as I used to be, but don’t mind it so much in this game. 9.5/10.

Or that you’ll ever get paid if you do win.

I think it’s because people know that those who really need that kind of help aren’t going to benefit from some corporate approved form “we care!” message.

So the people who use it are either the “wants to be helpful but is very bad at determining who needs help and how to help” type or the trolling type.

Your second paragraph tells me you haven’t even tried because the first part is just checking a checkbox in the steam settings to automatically use proton for games without linux support, and occasionally going in to the game settings (again in steam) to force it to use proton instead of a broken linux version.

And there’s no performance limitations running them on Linux. If anything, performance is even better on Linux because it isn’t running every single possible service MS wants to minimize support time and gobble up data.

Only exceptions to this are if you play games that want to do things in your kernel, or maybe if you’re using an nvidia gpu, depending on your distro it might take effort to get that set up properly.

If you have an AMD GPU, it’s actually quicker to go from start installing the OS to playing a game on linux than it is in windows between a) it not trying to steal focus to upsell you on other ms products, b) gpu drivers being included in the distro, and c) the defaults just being better on linux, thus less time spent making it less annoying to use.

It’s just no longer true that windows is the right tool for gaming, except for a list of specific games that want to invade the kernel and thus I’m kinda happy that I won’t accidentally run one. They don’t even stop cheating (which should be done on the server side anyways).

Not to mention they often cheap out on both the software and hardware, so you end up having to slowly navigate through poorly designed UIs that it struggles to display.