I gotta be honest, there was, and always seems to be so much more to fight against whenever I use linux pretty much purely because there is just less third party support for it.

The number of things that I just give up on because I know itll be another multi hour fight for something basic are too high.

Like KDE Plasma is goated, but I just, from personal experience, just don’t buy the idea that you don’t fight more on linux. You have more agency, but you also have to use it more.

I have 2 modern desktop systems, so Ill probably continue to play with it, and I certainly will obviously keep using it for my NAS, self hosting projects, but in terms of a desktop os, oof; I don’t have the energy/fight/will and resolve.

I’ve used linux systems for years btw, in jobs, in my personal life etc, so really the only thing that was new was trying to use it as my main desktop self administrated OS for general purposes.

I’m not into CAD stuff at the moment but I’m pretty sure there are some really good open source ones out there at the moment that are Linux native also.

Oh I wish, but the only thing worth anything is FreeCAD, and it is literally pain to use. The UI is infamously horrific, they’re only now sort of fixing basic issues like the infamous topology issue, and it seems like the devs are dead set on breaking all the standard UI and UX conventions of every other CAD program since the beginning of time, and its just pain to use or learn.

Then it breaks your designs all the time too with cryptic errors.

The other ones, some of them only have basic modelling capabilities, are completely programatic, and you have no hopes of doing things like FEA or anything like that, much less motion studies or the other basics you need to successfully make a lot of things.

Its in a painful state, and CAD, if you even want to make a cent with other CAD software is bare minimum almost 1000 USD per year.

Its very depressing if you are a more creative person and not made out of money.

Keep in mind with bazzite and cachyos i also didn’t need to do any tinkering to get the games to work. They just do.

I’ve been told this many times, and sure its true for single player games without awful DRM schemes, but you can basically count multiplayer games out, and many games that have awful phone home systems.

Its ultimately like, how much do i want to fight my own operating system, and when people have a finite level of burn before burnout, how much do you really want to spend of that burn on an operating system you use daily?

Its a heavy cost for not that much benefit, especially with so much on fire right now.

Maybe Ill try again eventually if there is at least a competent CAD package available.

I listen to podcasts featuring people who used to score games in that separated way for Gamespot, and it frequently led to scores that were out of sync with what the content of the review actually said.

This is my point about why a single number doesnt make sense.

Things are not a simple sum of their parts.

Plus, who’s to say if the visuals of Clair Obscur are better or worse than Hades II when they’ve got very different goals and art styles?

Also in support of what I’m saying.

How grindy a game is or how it’s monetized often makes its way into a review.

Before I completely gave up on written reviews, I feel like it was increasingly obvious that reviewers were purposefully just glossing over painfully obvious mtxs and marketting dark patterns to the point I felt like they were clearly being influenced by the fear of losing special access to ignore what they knew games companies felt strongly about.

Some ex media org folks have talked about the politics internally that went into pressuring people not to acknowledge problems like this, though I don’t recall the name of any specific source. I feel like there was a large group that split up and some of them talked about it. I want to say Jim “Stephanie” Sterling (I believe thats how they title themselves) has talked about it, but I can’t quite recall.

Anyhow, I don’t think the knobs being cranked can be fully to blame as I don’t think that happens all that often because they dont even need to. It has happened a few times infamously though and devs regularly try to boil the frog in modern games

So many multiplayer modes are not designed to last, and no one, often times not even the people updating the features list on the Steam store page, care to mention if a game supports offline multiplayer like LAN. Some games blur the line, like Hitman, on just how offline their game and its content can be. That’s what I’m missing from review outlets.

Definitely true.

Feels like the sort of thing movements like StopKillingGames would hope regulation would solve. Id love to see like, a mandatory nutrition facts label on games dictating a minimum amount of time from launch the servers will be active, whether you can play without servers, etc etc.

Real change has been happening by way of reporting on unionization and crunch. Harassers are being taken to court or otherwise removed from their position of power in their companies.

True and good, but with current admin, I think we’re going to see a lot of these positive changes reverting as we come to realize that crime is legal for those affiliated and who bend the knee.

Understandable. I just feel like amalgamated scores tend not to truly reflect the subjective opinions of the reviewer as sometimes games are more or less than the sum of their parts, and then it doesn’t represent anything close to objectivity because it ignores that different people value different things more or less than others, therefore making this score not all that useful for them.

I can completely understand just wanting a quick score at a glance from a favourite review or outlet though.

I eventually plan to watch it, but I usually try to avoid watching things until they are finished to know if they just rapidly gave the thing a bad end or if it has a satisfying conclusion.

Also because if there is a long time between seasons, Ill forget the story line.

I tried to use OpenSUSE tumbleweed for about 6 months as my main desktop, but eventually due to many of the things I wanted to do being a real pain to do in linux, said fuck it and went back to windows whilst building a new high end gaming rig.

It really sucks as I hate Microsoft with a burning passion, but if you want to play games, or use many CAD packages or make music, or watch videos (specifically with pot player for me, as it absolutely dunks on VLC unfortunately), then you just have to use Windows.

I haaaaaate the obvious attempts by the new taskbar to control user behaviour.

I hate the spying which it takes a while to turn most of it off, I hate… a lot, but the world is how it is.

I’m very thankful for Steamdecks gaining steam so that one day hopefully gaming on linux will be possible, and maybe adoption goes up and then maybe other apps follow.

Maybe the US collapse will have Europe mass switching, causing professional apps to also move over, especially CAD.

I think they’re almost kinda right.

I think these platforms need to adapt. They need to make short form, entertaining videos like The Washington Post or the break off with Dave Jorgenson called Local News International.

There is too much news for anyone to actually bother reading the long form articles that theyre used to having awfully agitating formats designed to get the reader to read the whole thing and scroll past ads.

Short form, entertaining, and factual is the best route. Do a little skit, explain the concept simply, bingo bango.

Absolutely agree. A youtube video where you can mostly ignore what theyre saying and just see the game and problems with it along with some benchmarks is all you need.

If its online, watching someone play online to get a feeling of how the community is also works, particularly if its just them playing solo for a long stretch of time not editing out toxicity.

I’ve never remembered seeing quality video games journalism.

The tyypes that they’re describing as that always seemed hacky and liable to push very subjective opinions as facts.

Their scores almost always seemed wonky and part of that is probably because individual scores for something as complex as a game don’t really make sense. They rarely make sense for anything.

Instead what you want are scores in multiple areas with no single amalgamated score.

Anyhow, for the longest while video games journalism has been rife with controversy about pulling negative reviews for ad deals etc.

I think unfortunately written media is pretty much dying due to finances, and for video games, due to never being all that good in the first place.

The details I care about, like monetization, grind, and performance, are the details that most games journalists just completely skim over or they’ll glaze game companies while they perform awfully here.

My way of buying games is basically watching video reviews of someone playing and mostly ignoring their commentary to figure out those details for myself.

That and benchmarks of course… and figuring out whether they’re owned by the saudi government…

Anyways, yea, video content for games both makes more sense, and more money.

I can totally get this feeling for PC/consumer electronics hardware related articles and reviews, but for video games? Meh. I won’t cry.

I think Europeans have a chance, and Canadians would have so many chances with so many things if we just got proportional representation, but that’ll happen when Pierre Poilievre stops being a racist alcoholic aka when pigs fly.

It truly is absurd to see Germany slowly slipping backwards.

Once the US breaks, all hell will probably break lose in Germany, especially since Im imagining a lot of countries will be trying to make concessions to appease full blown fascist US.

Russia is losing a war, but ultimately it seems they’re going to win, not through weapons, but corruption.

Fitting for Russia really.

Mildly disappointed that they are releasing episodically.

Also disappointed that they isn’t a rewind feature in case you miss dialog lines. Felt like a pretty big exclusion when I played the demo.

Still bought it and plan to play it since I love this alt superhero meta that is going on what with the boys (though the last seasons sucked), and with Invincible (which is also starting to head down the drain).

I just love the lack of hollywood morality where the good guy doesnt kill, and the superheros don’t really have meaningful personal difficulties or problems.

Let Activision come check up on us and cry because for all their efforts no one even cares to hate on their game.

The reality is that we are on a relatively small decentralized reddit clone.

We truly are the most exceptional exceptions.

Most people cant even begin to think of caring about what we care about.

Activision certainly doesnt.

And they don’t understand why people pirate, run away from AAA games and go for indie games instead.

They completely understand… the numbers saying that they’re making money hand over fist and the number of people who care is sadly minuscule.

These games have hit a critical mass where people will casually buy them because they’re friends are and so its a common ground game to play with buddies.

I don’t think we can ever rely on consumers pushing back on anti consumer practises because of the reality of people.

Not everyone can afford to care about every issue.

As a result, boycotts are very unlikely to work in the modern world. There is just too much all at once for any one person to care about all of them, so even if you, lets say, care about 1% (a really high estimate) of things that are wrong in the world, and are willing to act, if we extrapolated that out to the whole population, the only things that would move would need to have double digit percentages of peoples care overlapping before anything stuck.

Really, the answer is that you simply need a government that cares about its people/consumer rights.

The USA and Canada, both are very far away from having governments like that.

Europeans are a lot luckier, but yet still, there is plenty to go.

If this tip of the iceberg is already so damming I can’t even imagine how horrible this ring must have been.