Portrait of Ruin is a direct sequel to Bloodlines/New Generation as well.

Order of Ecclesia is the only ds game that doesn’t rely on touch screen gimmicks too, and it’s so much better for it. Portraits of Ruin is still playable at least without touchscreen, but some of the bonus modes, like playing as the sisters require it. Dawn of Sorrow sadly was absolutely gimped by touchscreen crap, but a romhack is available to remove it.

Unfortunate turn of art style in the DS era too. They lean heavily into a crisp anime style compared to the earlier look of Symphony and the gba titles which were anime inspired but had a very fitting gothic painting style.

I don’t know mate. I thought we were having a cool discussion about Linux shit but you seem really hostile now. Get lost, clown.

And also PCLinuxOS and Mandriva, those were the big recommendations as well. But we’re pre-dating the common distro hopping discussions I think we had in mind by going back that far too.

I’m not discussing quality of distro here, but people’s changing perception of Debian over the years. The way that people currently use/suggest/recommend distros has put Debian more in favour than say 10 years ago, 15 years ago.

It’s always been good depending on use case, but people currently are recommending it more for general use than has been typical before. And I think it is, as you said, that some of those past limiting factors are not a big problem anymore. I did suggest that in my first post.

Oh yeah, there’s a big difference now in distro conversations.

Debian was never talked about as a serious contender in distro hopping, discussions around “best distro for me”, starter for new users, etc. Just an occasional; “of you’re going to choose Ubuntu, just pick Debian and go straight to the source”.

But it was often pointed out that Debians pros is what made it not recommended for general end-user. It’s strong for servers and productivity. But its stability meant kernel and mesa updates were slow, many programs lagged. Gaming performance suffers and new hardware support is weaker. It was recognised that Ubuntu and Mint would add convenience for everyday use cases on top of Debian.

Especially the early to mid 2010s was all about “bleeding edge/rolling release is too likely to break, Debian is too stable to get updates, pick something in between”

Now, this problem is being lessened, at the same time people are liking the stability for general desktop use. Bleeding edge became highly recommended 5 - 8 years ago, and now in 2025 people care less about that and it’s easy to make stable distros work for your needs just as well.

Now people will regularly say “use Debian, it’s solid and reliable” and not follow up with “you’ll have to deal with old packages though”

The Arch derivatives, CachyOS and EndeavourOS. They’ve really done a good job with Arch and cultivating their own communities. It’s paid off for them and Arch isn’t really seen as just a hobby distro like 15 years ago, or a meme like the last 5 years.

Bazzite, for both general desktop use or dedicated for gaming. Just strength to strength from the project. I hope Fedora’s proposal to remove 32-bit libs doesn’t hurt them. By far the best, just untouchable, atomic distro.

Linux Mint for the first time in about 10 years is being seriously recommended to new users and not laughed off as a Linux Windows clone. That team has never stopped putting in the effort and deserve it. I don’t know how they’re going with/plans for Wayland, but I hope smoothly.

Fedora. I’ve never used it personally. But since starting with Linux in 2006 I’ve only ever seen or heard of it as kind of “being there” but not really talked about much. People are talking about it now as being a reliable and solid choice for new users and intermediate users.

Debian. I do see Debian mentioned now a lot more than it has been in years. I think people generally are becoming more satisfied with the idea of a stable OS, ages not writing it off as being left behind, constantly out of date, can’t run latest AMD graphics, etc. In my mind, flatpak helps that a lot, since you don’t need to wait years to get the latest versions of programs, but I don’t know for sure that is helping this current wave of success.

On the other hand:

Tumbleweed seems to be stagnating. They’ve made some changes and moving away from yast for the first in forever. The switch to selinux has affected proton usage in a way that it’s not super “new user friendly”.

PopOs’ cosmic desktop is still in early stages, and you do hear good things, but popos seems even less talked about now. They might have hit their peak 3-5 years ago, or maybe it will come around again for them like some of the distros above.

Nobara was massively talked up a few years back. But not so much now. And you do see discussions like “Nobara had too many problems on this machine, I just went straight-up Fedora”.

The other main hobby/enthusiast distros that were getting discussed more in the last few years - NixOS, Void Linux, Alpine. Not so much anymore. NixOS definitely did take off a lot more than the others, but it still just doesn’t come up as often as a couple years ago.

Everyone here thinks their shit tier 2018 laptop is made of gold or something.

Do you mean How To Save A Life by The Fray?

Touché Amore- Stage Four.

With Radical Dreamers so you don’t need to patch a snes rom for that either.

Sex workers deserve to get paid. But there are plenty of people offering free porn out there, and those sites aren’t hard to find.

Ublue will happily include media codecs, nvidia drivers, ootb hardware acceleration… the things you would likely do with a Fedora image - but Fedora can’t or won’t include by default due to strict guidelines on their project or legal concerns.

Side other niceties like ublue includes distrobox, which is commonly used in other immutable distros, but Fedora don’t include it.

It’s basically overcoming Fedora’s limitations as a starting point. And It’s not downstream, it’s more alongside Fedora, you’re essentially running Fedora with ublue’s optimisations plugged in. When Fedora’s updates come through, you’ve got them.

And here’s the mission statement https://universal-blue.org/mission.html

Only those first 4 are within the ublue project. The others are just part of Fedora, different variations of Fedora immutable distro.

A ublue can be rebased to the Fedora images. So you could go from having Aurora to having Kinoite for example.

That repository of images you linked to you can get from the project pages. Like the Bazzite page will say “are you on handheld?”, “do you need game mode?” “Do you have nvidia?” And then link you to the appropriate version from that repository.

There might be deprecated versions in there, for example I know they don’t maintain the Surface kernel version anymore.

Their website has a rundown of each, links to each projects page, and notes on what makes ublue different.

https://universal-blue.org/

But ignore all the “cloud native” talk. It’s got nothing to do with end user experience and I don’t know why they still feel the need to highlight it.

It’s all part of the same project, Universal Blue.

Aurora -desktop KDE

Bluefin - desktop Gnome

Bazzite - gaming and handheld focused with KDE

I installed Bazzite on a desktop I recently gave away to some local people. I also used Bazzite for two years as a htpc before I got a steam deck. It was good stuff, never had problems with it.

Aurora is going to come setup with things like non-free codecs, distrobox, rocm stuff. It’ll make life a bit simpler.

Brotato was the only game I played this week.

Do you play devilution x with trackpad mouse?

I always find the sentiment of “no updates, no downloads” to be not quite right in the context.

The chameleon likely would’ve been more at home with Indie/retro-inspired games. The games that have mastered the concept of ongoing updates without punishing the consumer.

Terraria and Stardew Valley in a state of constant evolution, still getting better 10 years, 15 years after their release.

Dead Cells, Dredge, Vampire Survivors, Binding of Isaac, Grim Dawn, No Man’s Sky, Brotato, any number of other indie games that have lived on for years due either massive or incremental updates.

The solution works for the AAA games problem. “The game should be playable and feature complete at launch”. For these games, the DLC is often just cash grabs, looking for reasons to milk customers. The “gold release” state not being updated later requires the multi billion dollar studios to finish, polish and deliver.

But these are not the kind of games the chameleon would have been able to play, its wheelhouse would have been the indie games that started out as fun games and became something a hundred times more over time.

Yeah, it’s a satire site that got big in punk rock circles some years ago making fun of the Punk and Hardcore scene.

I didn’t know it was still going.

Edit: there it is! https://thehardtimes.net/about/

I got a humble bundle full of Star Wars books/magazines the other week. I haven’t bought a humble bundle in a few years so I didn’t realise I was actually buying Kobo estore licenses for them.

I’ve now spent a week trying to strip the Adobe drm using calibre, with no luck. I either get an error message from calibre or the output still has drm on it.