Thanks for the information! Or perhaps I should say merci.

What is MP in this context?

Works well for cans, though, in my experience.

For a while I had a fiber SFP that was amazing at opening cans, too.

I used to have a Linux laptop at work. I was even allowed to install my chosen distro. Then the IT department said “we don’t really know Puppet or how to manage Linux, but we know JAMF, so you’re all getting Macs now.”

My job satisfaction has gone down since then. However, in more positive news, they did end up giving away the old Linux laptops to the employees when they moved office.

I like the steam deck and use it as a controller, but you could make the same argument about the switch. Regarding the switch, my answer would be that while it is a controller, it is - IMHO - a poorly designed and uncomfortable-to-use controller.

While you and I like the ergonomics of the deck, others may not. One can hardly blame those people for wanting something they feel more usable.

Yes. I also use the heel of my hand, at least on the left side, at least for modifier keys. Everyone who has ever observed this (well, minus one, to be technically accurate) seems to have been personally offended by it.

Originally they started the title with … Sigh … A hashtag. In markdown, starting a line with this makes it a header, which generally increases the size of the text. Probably your client tried to respect this, though I think it’s unusual for a client to do that for a post title.

Worth giving it a shot!

This, in fact, seems to be the only option.

Well, fair enough that you were exposed to them. I didn’t have a lot of friends, especially not those even remotely into any kind of tech, as a kid; I think I first heard of trackballs from a programming teacher in about 1996 and bought one to try out of curiosity. Ever since then I’ve used one whenever it was an option.

I’ve even mostly used the same model. If you look in my comment history, you can see I recently mentioned that most of what I use is Kensington Orbits. I’ve tried other models, but they don’t work for me.

The one PC gaming exception for me is Minecraft. In that game you have to right-click a lot (as I’m sure you know) and I guess I haven’t developed the muscles for that because it makes my wrist very tired very quickly. Still, I play a lot of FPS games and have no problem holding the right click for zoom and such; only quick, repetitive right-clicking causes problems for me.

edit: To address your original comment, I have one friend who uses a trackball at work but a regular mouse for anything else. Other than that, I rarely meet anyone who has even heard of them, let alone used them, let alone consistently done so.

On PC, I game exclusively with trackballs and have since the nineties. I’ve never not been given the side eye when someone found out that’s how I play.

When was this magical time during which they were popular?

It’s been a year or two, but I had no issues with Star Citizen in Linux. IIRC, I ran it through Lutris.

The person perhaps (eventually) most qualified to answer this might be Graeldon, who is on a quest to play every Steam game in alphabetical order.

I don’t know if it is, but you can always just use yt-dlp or something similar.

Back in the good old days, RPS used to deliberately do this kind of thing to troll their readers.

That must be how they named this.

You have convinced me to investigate The Thaumaturge.

Also … Excellent points, all.

edit: s/Everyone/Excellent/

FWIW, my understanding is that the owner of Epic is actively anti-Linux, so your third feature is a unlikely at best. The fourth was only remotely likely due to market share.

It sounds like you already have this problem solved, but just in case:

Back when I still used Windows, the workaround was just to make sure you didn’t have a network connection when installing the OS. This could be done by unplugging the NIC during install on a physical system or by deleting the NIC in a VM (or other ways, obviously, but these were the simplest). It still took some convincing, but then you could make your username whatever you wanted.

I don’t know if that still works - it’s been years - but if you still use Windows and still have that problem, this might be worth a try.

edit: program -> problem

Two things coming together finalized my choice to leave Windows:

• the ability to play almost every game on Linux thanks to Valve
• the fact that you couldn’t create a local account during a Windows install (back when I discovered this you still technically could with some workarounds; I don’t know if you still can but you shouldn’t have to put in any effort IMHO)