loopgru

Came here to say this. The new player experience is an awesome upgrade in terms of getting people into the world and narrative, but you’re still thrown into an ocean of systems and content without a map. If you’re not following a guide or piecing things together from the wiki it’s very easy to get totally overwhelmed.

Always nice to meet another dad.

I would look at some of the tech demos for Unreal Engine 5 and its capabilities. We’re at the point now where the engine itself, with sufficient art assets, can look photorealistic more or less out of the box.

Where this is still hardest- and likely always will be- is in faces, because our brains are so thoroughly wired to spot micro-expressions and subtle facial and body language as social animals.

That said, for a game like Doom or Path of Exile, sure, I think we’re way past the point of diminishing returns. But for games where you’re actually experiencing a story and interested in the relationships and characters involved? Things like Death Stranding, RDR, Cyberpunk 2077, or more recently BG3? All of those same nuances of expression can definitely add to the experience- it’s the difference between a mediocre actor and a good or great one.

Seconding this. Garuda has been great, all of the advantages of aur and bleeding edge with some fool proofing and ease of use features. It’s like pop_os for folks who don’t want to jump on the Ubuntu train.

This is 100% the way.

Pine hides their hobby-grade hardware behind in-development software. I owned both a PBP and PPP and much as I’d like to say otherwise, really can’t say anything to recommend either.

Imagine all that Obama didn’t accomplish facing a GOP controlled Congress, then amplify that tenfold. That’s the best case scenario for a 3rd party candidate for president. If you want to pull us politics to the left- I sure as hell do- you have to start with Congress. Otherwise your next case is a lame duck while your likely outcome is a spoiler.

Did FW ever solve the issue with battery drain during sleep? I owned one of the original batch and sold it because I couldn’t effectively use it as a laptop. Other than that it was awesome, great build quality, loved the ethics of it and the form factor, but being unable to use it as a portable computer was a deal breaker.

All things you mentioned are hardware issues. […] Because no one will buy an expensive GNU/Linux phone.

There’s a difference between budget or low end components and flawed implementation or design. I didn’t go in expecting a newer Snapdragon and a 144hz display- but neither did I go in expecting that it couldn’t charge when dead. I didn’t go to Denny’s expecting filet mignon, but neither was I expecting a dirty tennis shoe on a plate. That was the whole point of my comment. The last thing mobile Linux needs is for people’s first experience of it to be a semi-functional piece of hacked-together hardware- even if someone’s willing to deal with in-dev software, when the thing straight up won’t work it’s not a good look.

I owned a Pine Phone Pro for a while and it was a disaster. The software is still coming together, which is expected, but the hardware was also hobby project grade. As the previous poster mentioned, battery, camera, and screen were all bad, and on top of that the phone would refuse to charge with most chargers and could not charge at all while not booted, so once the battery was dead you had zero recourse beyond an external charger. The clamshell keyboard also wouldn’t work without shimming the pogo pin connectors forward, and even then it was hit or miss. The company was terrible to deal with and only finally accepted a return after escalating a dispute with Paypal. I hate dumping on a company providing hardware for mobile Linux, but these guys seriously do more harm than good.

This is it for me, too. Back before I got into Linux I was forever tinkering with third party stuff to try to make the UI more efficient with things like Enso and Docker, and make it prettier with other stuff, but it was always a ramshackle cludged together mess. GNOME just resolves all of those issues neatly for me, runs faster, and isn’t crammed full of bloatware ad crap like modern versions of Windows. And it’s more secure, free, and ethically satisfying as a cooperative, trans-national project.

I watched this and Reich’s video on distinguishing patriotism from nationalism, and honestly it still seems kind of like a contrived, arbitrary distinction. Ultimately it seems like the former is on a feeling of duty to serve a given country, while the latter is pride in it- but either way, the object of the affection is the country, the state. I could be wrong, but I can’t immediately think of any given national entity that is actually worthy of that kind of unmitigated veneration- they’re all a mix of good and bad, and for all of the socialized goods they provide they also monopolize power and control in oftentimes highly unjust ways.

We already have a moderate centrist party- they’re called Democrats. This is explicitly right of them, so even as an unaffiliated voter, the likelihood of NL getting my vote is roughly zero.

Just be careful with sugar alcohols (including erythritol)- tolerances vary, but if you overindulge it’ll corkscrew your guts like nothing else and turn you into a walking biohazard. Most infamously, sugar free gummi bears are sweetened with this, and while the results are miserable to experience, they do lead to some fantastic reading material…

https://www.amazon.com/review/R2JGNJ5ZPJT4YC

Lots of console titles in the comments here. Easy answer there is Zelda 2.

To answer the question as posed, though, Star Control 3 was a massive disappointment after its amazing predecessor.

The Legend of Zelda. So many amazing, visceral memories associated with that game- cracking open the package and gawping at the golden cartridge, leafing through the manual, looking at the paper map while running around in game, exploring, sweating through the labyrinthine later dungeons, hacking my way out of a like-a-like, braving the graveyard for the magic sword, the music… It was like 35 years ago and it’s still a helluva thing.