TheHarpyEagle

Ah sorry, I meant using Vim in a GUI program. I wanted something with the flexibility of a mouse (quick navigation, context menu actions, etc.) without using a mouse. Using just the arrow keys, shift highlighting, etc. is just too slow when writing lots of text, and it doesn’t follow the natural position of typing.

I actually use VIM bindings in PyCharm, slightly cursed but actually works really well and meshes fairly nicely with the other IDE shortcuts. Being able to use it in any terminal is a nice bonus.

I honestly learned it just because I hated having to change hand position to use a mouse.

I avoided it for a while because it felt so clunky, but it has really improved in the last decade.

For me it’s definitely Viscera Cleanup Detail. Super chill and satisfying cleaning game that I often boot up when I just want to shoot the shit with someone. There’s also quite a few custom maps after you get through the official ones.

Also Cities Skylines (the first one). Sometimes I just spend a couple hours watching my trains go around with a first person vehicle mod while I watch videos.

I agree that most people won’t care but take issue with calling them “dumb”. Everyone has a limited amount of time on this planet to build skills and chase hobbies. A lot of people on this site have tech-related jobs and hobbies, so of course this matters to us. I might expect someone who buys pre-built gaming PCs to keep this on their radar, but the vast majority of folks who use computers as email and social media machines, including those who only use it for data entry type jobs, have little reason to care about the specifics of their CPU or any other single component of their computer. If their computer breaks, that’s annoying, but that’s life. They’ll spend the same amount on a new laptop as we might spend on a new CPU and get on with their day.

I don’t know what brand of spark plugs are in my car, and maybe a mechanic or car enthusiast would find that dumb. But hey, I’m too busy caring about my CPU to spend time worrying about my car unless it breaks.

Windows into I went to college for development and decided to check out this Linux thing. At the time, I wanted something as different from Windows as possible, so I went with Ubuntu with Gnome 3 (I know) for about a year. Tried out Fedora, couldn’t get my sound to work and accidentally uninstalled the desktop environment trying to fix it, slunk back to Ubuntu, tried out a Debian briefly, and eventually ended up on Linux Mint with Cinnamon and KDE.

At one time I really wanted to try a bunch of stuff and probably would’ve hopped a lot more if Fedora didn’t shatter my confidence, but nowadays I want as little disruption between machines as possible. I have to use Windows for work, so I keep my Linux setup pretty vanilla so I don’t miss features between the two very much. I’ll probably still play with other distros every now and then on old laptops, but I’ve fallen into a “if it ain’t broke” mindset with my daily machines.

You might still try using Proton or Lutris to run it. It may be a pain to get working, but hopefully someone out there has a guide for the mod manager you’re using.

Just seems odd if this is supposed to be a gaming device. How much typing do you really do on a steam deck?

The inclusion of the keyboard is a little perplexing. On paper it makes sense that a lot of PC games are built for or work best with a keyboard, but that’s because you’re using stuff as hotkeys, not because you’re typing. How do you comfortably do that with this form factor? I feel like a panel of fewer programmable buttons would’ve made more sense.

Really hoping that we see more stuff like Second Wind, though that took some real name recognition (and I suspect some pre-planning) to pull off.

As a huge fan of these games… absolutely. I keep coming back because I love the characters so much and the story arcs within each game can be fairly satisfying, but the overarching plot is a complete mess.

Proton is a godsend. Some games can be a little unstable, but I’ve yet to find one that doesn’t work at all. Even was able to install and mod a game from 2000. For what doesn’t work on Proton, Lutris can hopefully handle. Takes a little doing sometimes but I got Battlenet/WoW working almost prefectly with CurseForge.

Nvidia drivers are a huge pain in the ass, though, and haven’t played nice with Wayland in my experience.

My advice would probably be to try every wild idea for a deck. It’s easy to find one deck build that basically works and try to recreate it each run, but that’s pretty boring. Make yourself pick up a joker you wouldn’t normally use and try to make it work. Also go for planet cards early in the run, the boost they give often moves the hand up like 4 places on the score list, making it more viable and fun to do something other than just chasing the regular high scoring hands.

Yeah, this same article can be written for Mini Golf games, or shmups, or visual novels, or any other genre that’s relatively easy to develop for. Once one gets popular, others will jump on because the barrier to entry is fairly low. Lots will be low effort clones, but some will really try to build something new.

Everyone and their mother is playing Balatro, and for good reason. Super fun deck builder based on a normal playing card deck and poker hands. Great music and visuals, too.

Also, check out Inscryption. Truth be told, it’s not really a true roguelike deckbuilder, rather it uses the genre as a storytelling medium. Still, really fun game with solid core gameplay and an engaging story. There’s also DLC that lets you play more of the deckbuilder part indefinitely.

Thank you for this comprehensive writeup! I’m a big Mint user and like not having to mess too much with the OS itself, but I’ve run into a few issues where the stable release of something doesn’t have newer features I want. I might try Arch out on a spare laptop.

What is the practical difference between Arch and Debian based systems? Like what can you actually do on one that you can’t on the other?

I really hope so, defect was my favorite.

That’s a heartbreaking read, and I can’t imagine how it feels now to know that someone who finally helped lighten the load may be involved with such an egregious breach of trust and safety.

I think this is why I can’t get behind Linus-style takedowns, even if the prospective maintainer has made bad a mistake. Entitled consumers make things hard enough already with direct access to the developers, they don’t need any help getting burned out.