Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Little one can be Tails and play coop.

This. I’d say it’s perfect for people who don’t want to tinker at all, and it’s excellent for experts who either know or will enjoy learning how to make its containerization/sandboxing/whatever approaches work out. “Tinkering” is the specific doughnut hole where it is a problem. I replaced it with Tuxedo OS because I was frustrated with trying to set up the toolset for the QMK keyboard firmware, and it turned out there’s a whole layer of things you have to do to make it work, and some of the simpler ones simply break the immutability. A few other tools I wanted to use were running into similar hurdles.

NOw, it’s not that I beleive any of this stuff was a showstopper for everyone; I have too much confidence in the community for that. I am just old and dumb and while I love using Linux, I don’t necessarily want Linux itself to be my hobby. Now all that said, my Minecraft and Starfield installs were working really well on Bazzite, and I haven’t done any gaming in recent weeks so I hope they’ll be as good on Tuxedo.

We have a president who issues fascistic edicts from the toilet and then phrases them like a Karen in her first term on her HOA or Condo board.

I just wiped Bazzite in favor of Tuxedo OS. I liked Bazzite a lot until I wanted to do the faintest wisp of development (setting up a new DIY keyboard with QMK). At that point I realized I’m in a very specific doughnut hole where I will occasionally want to do things that are still not mindlessly simple on an immutable distro, but I’m still untutored enough to need the walkthroughs that never include how to properly layer or sandbox stuff without just fucking up the very immutability that made it a good idea in the first place.

Shame though, as it was dead easy to install and use for basic productivity and especially games. A person with different needs and/or more skill would do very well with it. In the meantime, Tuxedo seems like a good snap-free Kubuntu alternative, and I’ve been floating around in KDE-running Debian derivatives (off and on) for decades.

Not immune, but let’s say resistant. Due to federation, they couldn’t lock down existing federated content; due to open source they couldn’t lock down the user experience; and due to those two, nobody’s going to offer them a check for a couple million dollars.

There is test-taking software that locks out all other functions during the essay-writing period. Obviously, damn near anything is hackable, but it’s non-trivial, unlike asking ChatGPT to write your essay for you in the style of a B+ high student. There is some concern about students who learn differently or compose less efficiently, but as father to such a student, I’m still getting to the point where I’m not sure what’s left to do other than sandbox “exploitable” graded work in a controlled environment.

I do sometimes think there is a bit of hand-wringing that happens where people glom onto the most visible sign of changing times and blame it for things that probably aren’t as different as the adults think, but by the same token most schools in richer countries have screens everywhere with school-related interconnectivity and even tools that are not unlike social media.

I see very little downside here, even if it may not result in some magic rebirth of older forms of social interaction. It seems like the major benefit from the French pilot programs was “improved atmosphere,” in which case it’s still better than nothing. Having a period when kids are learning to deal with small-group dynamics is not a bad thing, and neither is taking “dealing with phone bullshit” off the teachers’ plates.

I mean… fine? France always does things kind of top-down and there’s certainly no reason you have to have your phone readily available, and plenty of evidence it’s good to be away from it.

It’s not like they need to get to their phones to tell their parents there’s an active shooter on campus. 😐

I very recently made a shift similar to yours, though I don’t play anything MMO. I’ve been playing Minecraft (finally moved to Java) and Starfield, and both work perfectly well on Bazzite Desktop. I keep Windows for my CAD app and some other little garbage apps.

Between Steam and Heroic, most Windows games seem to install fine, though I haven’t dived into many of them really. Because of Valve funding Proton development, gaming has gone from a huge liability for Linux to a significant strength.

Agreed. Can we have this article taken off the internet? I don’t want it accessible from any of my connections.

It never was, but unlike the current batch of LLM assistants that are now dominating the tops of “search” results, it never claimed to be. It was more, “here’s what triggered our algorithm as “relevant.” Figure out your life, human.”

Now, instead, you have a paragraph of natural text that will literally tell you all about cities that don’t exist and confidently assert that bestiality is celebrated in Washington DC because someone wrote popular werewolf slash fanfic set in Washington state. Teach the LLMs some fucking equivocation and this problem is immediately reduced, but then it makes it obvious that these things aren’t Majel Barrett in Star Trek and they’ve been pushed out much too quickly.

…Revolt is the FOSS alternate for discord right?

Yes, or for a more limited feature set, Matrix.

I recently had a dream that involved a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin. I have never been to Green Bay Wisconsin. I know it as a rather small city that is the home to the Green Bay Packers, an administratively anachronistic NFL team that draws a large plurality of its fan base from the greater Milwaukee area. Off the top of my head, I don’t know if Green Bay has “suburbs” in the usual American sense at all.

I googled the name of this completely nonexistent community, along with the words “Green Bay,” and the AI very confidently hallucinated it into existence, describing it as a lovely shopping and residential area just over the bridge of the same name.

You say “looming data apocalypse.”

I say, “free high quality neodymium magnets!”

I poked around a few other articles. A few are identical. Most are slight variations. Few are as different as these two. My guess would be that the original submission from the author or initial editor locks in a headline for the tab/title bar, but then the CMS lets them edit what appears in the main body of the webpage.

I am glad to see us respect our link-aggregation heritage of ignoring the article and starting heated discussions based on what we infer from the headline. 😂

It also seems that the headline currently on the article is different and switches out clickbait tactics from misleading omission to absurd pearl-clutching: “Are noise-cancelling headphones to blame for young people’s hearing problems?” If you combine them, you get something closer to actual content of the article.

I had a “Diamond Mako,” aka a Psion Revo Plus. Neat device, but I just wasn’t “on the go” enough to really need it. It was slightly smaller than the 5, IIRC, and it definitely wasn’t as good for typing as even a Netbook (another good candidate for a “writerDeck” btw), but it was very slick, and the word processor in particular I remember being very good. IIRC it had NiCAD or NiMH AAA batteries hard-wired into it.

Strolls nervously through room with RX 580…

If you’re ready to take the plunge into mechanical, Keychrons are a solid way to get one that is not absurd if all you want is “one nice keyboard,” but usually has enough customizability to be satisfying if you fall down that particular rabbit hole. For a bog standard board, any of your listed options are fine, as are most of the options on pcpartpicker.com, and even dumb ol’ Walmart will have a couple of logitechs and some rebranded thing stuff no worse than your average pack-in desktop keyboard, and potentially even a couple of mildly satisfying low-end mech boards, once you turn off the godwaful RGB.

If you shop the actual electronics at Amazon, I’d recommend “sold by Amazon” or at a minimum fulfilled by them. If you do Prime, limit to Prime listings. Your includion of BestBuy implies you’re in the US, in which case I might avoid vendors that ship from China, at least until the tariff situation stabilizes.

Wasn’t gaming basically aynonymous with gambling at that time though?

Yes, in large part, and certainly to the way that the introduction to a book of that era would have been presented to the censors; there would often be a wink and a nod, though: “what a horrible thing to be doing! Now, so you can be completely sure how not to get caught up up in it, here are the complete rules to every game we can think of.” This book is almost entirely consumed with games that were most often used for gambling, though stakes can be set at any level and played for fun at any time.

I think gaming as a recreation without gambling didnt really come about until the 1940s - 1950s, right? Commonly, of course.

I’m sure there’s an element of truth in that certain direct modern lineages of trends in non-gambling gaming are sort of post-WW2 phenomena, but overall I don’t think that’s fair. Even just in the narrow sense, Monopoly was released in 1935, and other American board games date back much farther, which at east one scholar referring to the 1880s to the 1920s as a “Golden Age” for board games in the US. Also, certain games, like chess, have always had cultural associations beyond gambling. Children’s board games have also been common forever. Additionally, TTRPGs and Wargames trace back not to gambling, but to military planning and education.

EDIT: Also of important note, in 1638 the Puritans in the US state of Massachusetts (colonial at the time) enacted a law that made gambling illegal. It outlawed ownership of everything gaming related from dice to cards, and citizens were not allowed to even play in their own home.

True enough, but there’s an important context that they banned all forms of “idleness,” and gaming got wrapped up in that.