You sound like me lol. I had a lemur first snd upgraded to a pangolin a few years ago. I do a lot of gaming on my pangolin, but mostly indie games. Per Aspera, parkitect, firewatch, stuff like that. It will play Valheim but it’s a little choppy on low.

I expect the latest version of the pangolin would run better. Not only is it a much improved APU, it looks like it has vastly improved cooling.

I recently got a TCL TV that has Google TV on it. The reason I chose it, even tho it’s not the highest quality 4K capable TV, is that on first boot it gives you the option to choose dumb TV or smart TV modes. Have never connected it to the internet. Maybe you would have some luck looking into that!

Very nice! I don’t find this a one up but I love the ingenuity. I managed to salvage this NUC from work because we shut down a zoom room from a agency we acquired at work and then disposed all the unneeded /nonuniform hardware. Before that point, I was looking at doing something quite similar to you.

I also had to use get an hdmi dummy plug. That was an annoying stumbling block. Just, why??

I have an i7 NUC that I use as my jellyfin server cause it has hardware transcoding. It absolutely rips and takes up less electricity at full bore than my gaming desktop at idle. I agree that there’s a place for mini computers, but it’s probably not serious gaming.

FF VII and FF VIII where the first two games I played in the series, but i was very young and didn’t really know what I was doing. I think we had rented one game, and borrowed another. I really don’t remember much about either game, but FF IX came out on ps1, and to this day it’s my image of what FF means.

The unique worlds, characters, incredible (at the time and not bad for today) cutscene cinematic. It was the first game I discovered you can outpace yourself and wind up in a battle with a level 60 dragon when you’re only level 13.

My brother really got into FF X and i remember watching him play. To this day, I hate Blitzball lol. We both sucked at it.

FF VII-2 for the psp was actually really cool. I don’t remember much anymore but the story, gameplay, and music were all great. I would like to try replaying it!

I played a little of XIII and quite a few hours of XV. The games have really changed. Especially XV, some things have improved for the better but there’s a lot of tropes and unfortunate stereotypes that could have been…removed.

Edit: Vivi is the best FF character! 😊

I feel this. In some ways it was a relief discovering that I didn’t need to keep up with gaming anymore. I would just play what I want want to play, when. But unfortunately I’ve missed (or even forgotten) about a lot of games I really wanted to play.

When we were purchasing new dell laptops for work a 2 years ago, the change to lpddr was an oversight and we bought models with 8gb of ram. Since these are effectively not upgradeable for us, they’re going to age out sooner than they should. We were not very happy…

Luckily we caught this fairly quickly at least, and it only represents a few percent of our total inventory. I hate this anti consumer design.

I’ve been using Pop for a few years. I purchased a System76 laptop and decided to give it a spin since it was already installed. There’s a lot of I like about, and overall appreciate System76’s effort. It’s very stable, works flawlessly with Lutris, and the Pop store is a refreshing take on package management. Ive continued using it since at this point I’m just settled in on my OS and don’t want to bother setting anything else up lol.

That said, I’m still a much bigger fan of KDE over gnome and gnome derivatives. Pop lacks a lot of UI customization I’d really like to have. There’s also only two themes,( and im not particularly interested in learning how to replace is manually).

I am looking forward to trying out their next iteration of the Cosmic DE though. The previews look awesome and it would be a big step forward for Pop.

I’ve sunk over a dozen hours into it so far. It’s a really enjoyable game, however it is truly in early access stage and the developer has made no illusions about that. It’s playable, and largely bug free, but there’s not a lot of depth available since many of the features are still in progress. Up to the release of the game, it’s been developed by 1 person and he’s hiring some additional staff but that all takes time to see fruition.

The graphics are beautiful, and the game has a great atmosphere. I love watching the buildings being constructed. The mechanics in the game work well, but there’s a lot of buildings, resources, and advanced stages that need tweaking/implementing.

If you like what you see in the videos, and are OK with an actual early access game, knowing that features and improvements will be coming slowly, then id suggest getting it now. Otherwise, wait for the official release.