Linux has come a long way since I last tried it ~15 years ago

100% this. Linux has been my daily driver since ~2005 and it seems like suddenly one day I went from playing tux racer and trying to get Skyrim to work to some degree with wine to buying games on steam with little fear of having to anything more than choose proton experimental and maybe add gamemoderun to the settings. It’s a completely different world now.

I haven’t read Dune for decades, and haven’t seen the latest movies, but I did want to give a shout out to Quinn’s Ideas, one of my favorite YT creators.

Satisfactory, I’m hoping to get employee of the planet cup before 1.0 comes out.

Angband. I don’t stick with it long, but I always come back, even though I’ve never killed Morgoth or the Balrog in Moria before that. Still, I enjoy it for a while and then move on again.

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.

Ms. Pacman :)

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.

It’s amazing to me that some company writes some awesome tech that allows users of one OS to run games on another OS that the game was never designed for and they complain because they might have to read protondb.com and copy something into a box in settings and maybe click another checkbox and select proton experimental from a drop-down list. I’ve been on linux as my daily driver at home since 2002-ish. I went years without playing most games (other than some wine experiments and old school rogue-likes), and right now the world has completely changed. If the AAA studios would enable a checkbox, most of their games would work with anti-cheat, but they want too much control of your system. I play games on an older nvidia cpu that work amazingly well. I had no desire to go back to Windows before, let alone now that gaming went from famine to feast in just a few years on linux. Valve has completely changed the linux landscape and has made it much much easier to get rid of Windows for good.

I figure people need to pick up on new slang or risk becoming the old man or woman that yells at kids to get off their lawn one day.

I honestly believe a HUD minimap is one of the worst game UI elements a game can have. There is rarely a canonical explanation to begin with as to why your character magically knows the layout of rooms they haven’t entered and even worse that they know the position of enemies.

I agree. I like the way old-school rogue-likes would handle it (where you’re an @ symbol). You wouldn’t see anything you haven’t seen, but your map would remember where you have been and what things looked like at the time you last saw it (more or less). I’d personally just rather have a compass than a minimap, that way it could tell me which way I was facing and I’d have to rely on environmental cues for the rest. Maybe footprints if you have walked by there lately (or something has).