No, that’s the PlayStation -1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLx2VEx0LmA

I guess this isn’t really even “news” to Linux gamers now, but once in a while it’s nice to make an article about what constant progress has happened in a certain sphere. Certainly many people staying on Windows out of inertia blinked and missed it.

My fervent hope is that, someday in the future, people can build a gaming PC and just forego Windows to save $100.

I’m not really qualified to answer, we might need a deep-sublayer geologist.

The one I’m on has a very functional “search and install” app, but I still find myself habitually opening up terminal for installation out of “fastness”. Maybe it’s a poor impulse I should correct.

Probably the biggest thing driving terminal use is opening and configuring system files. You can do that with the file explorer and an elevated text editor, but a lot of guides aiming for conciseness will give you some command to wget a long file online, then insert content into a text file by path in one line.

I kinda get there’s some common meme about Nvidia being Linux’s kryptonite, but everything’s been okay for me on CachyOS. This after some issues earlier in the year on Mint and even Bazzite.

(Yes, I get the joke)

What the hell causes people to believe there’s a large political faction that wants people in media to be unattractive? At worst, some people just get taken out of a fantasy world if the women are wearing straight bikinis for no reason, but there’s many ways to make them look sexy without attire being totally impractical.

I’m a little half and half on it. A lot of people like myself are fed up with the obsessive way AI is pushed into everything, but I can see it having uses.

For instance, sifting through 20,000 “This user didn’t accept my argument evidence” reports to find some that have merit; that can be worthwhile, even if all it does is alert a human to take a look and make a full judgment. Besides, the bar for quality moderators on sites like Reddit is low.

I can give my historical experience. Early 2025, I saw horrific articles on Copilot and decided to switch early. I had a bad distro hopping experience. First tried Linux Mint, might have been a slightly old install, but even my wifi didn’t work. Tried a later install, and it was much better, but game performance wasn’t great. Hitman WOA didn’t even load levels. Helldivers 2 had an annoying white border (I eventually fixed this a year later using an odd hack)

I then tried Bazzite. I didn’t quite like the layout, but it functioned. I had a hard time installing apps; it tried to simplify this with various virtualization/containerized solutions, but it meant so many tutorials for basic native-Linux apps didn’t work.

When W10 EOL came around, I tried another distro well touted: CachyOS. It was very smooth. I learned it’s Arch, same as the Steam Deck, and does have some “technical complexities” which I felt I wanted to avoid, but I guess in the end it’s been nothing I’m not a little used to from my work as a programmer. It mostly uses okay UIs for system settings, and some programs require you to use another package installer rather than their default “Octopi”. Some of my early issues came from installing Flatpaks rather than Arch User Repository items.

Games have been fantastic. Rarely when something uses video I need ProtonGE, which is an easy toggle; I should probably just make it default. Helldivers 2 and Division 2 seem to run better than on Windows.

The biggest decider has been: Changing to Linux was NOT annoyance free. There was transition, there was fiddly configuration, and I replaced some apps I use. A key thing is, Windows was quickly moving away from being annoyance free - stuffing Copilot and OneDrive ads into EVERYTHING. So, even accepting a few Linux struggles ended up being an overall lesser frustration.

The main thing I think is a valid fear is losing things necessary to reinstall Windows in case of emergency.

With 11, they tie it to MS account which makes a reinstall easier. Some devices, I think it’s tied to the hardware though? That’s actually something I’d like to learn more about so people doing Linux tryouts have a safety net.

The silliest ones I’ve seen now are ads for mobile games that put censor stickers over the “parts” of fully clothed women. (Yes, even in the game, they’re fully clothed)

Oh…sorry, I thought it was “bread”. I just love baguettes.

I have a particular term for certain kinds of edginess I just call “Shadow the Hedgehog writing”, where it’s more likely to come from a teenager trying to seem grown up/cool than an actual adult.

Plenty of anime/VNs have fallen in this category, giving early content warnings that the content will be dark; and then just having non sequitor turnouts like “And then the heroine stepped in a trap that severed her spine. She screamed for hours, praying for help, but none came.”

There’s a particular game whose name rhymes with “Tomato” that did this for me once. You bring some children to safety, and then go fight the attackers sending tanks after them. I came back to the kids, joking to myself “Sorry, hero, it’s too late; we already drowned in our own fear and sadness…!” And then I laughed out loud when my joke turned out right.

Worst part is, there is some grim and depressing stuff in the world, and yet so many grimdark writers don’t see any nuance in it.

My iPhone is up to 5 years, and has no issues. If it had battery problems, I could just replace it.

If your phone contractor says they can give you a free phone with lock in, question how they’re paying for it. I pay my provider $240/yr ($20/mo). They have some less favorable phone-buying plans but work fine. To avoid being an advertising shill, I won’t name them; just make sure you include yearly prepaid options in your price comparison.

Introducing Microsoft Sepukku.

I’ve been writing a long work, using Office for web editing. Every so often in proofreading, I find spots where it looks like words were just missing. Now I feel like I may have some explanation…

Funny thing is, I’m offhand compiling some Pros/Cons to Windows/Linux, and this has caused the topic of “Support” to completely swing. Used to be, if Windows fucked up, I could complain to Microsoft and they might put someone on a support call intended to fix it. Now, if my OS fucks up, Microsoft will blow me off and send me to a useless AI, while the community for my Linux distro has pros that may genuinely be willing to take some time out to figure out what’s wrong. (Not always a guarantee, but better than nothing)

Plenty of people can point to a beautiful sunrise and say “See? There’s your evidence that God exists.” And of course, you’d try to point them to genocide in Sudan, and they’d ignore you.

It becomes much the same issue.

The term “faith” made a lot more sense to me once I thought of believing in the goodness of other people like a faith.

You have no logic saying it’s there, even get disproved often. But you keep believing in it in spite of the absence of evidence.

Yes, but as it exists that distro is very dedicated to the task of supporting Valve hardware, and has done very little to generalize support to other generic hardware.