Godot all the way. Roblox is not the future, and it’s owned and controlled entirely by a corporation. Your creations are owned by the corporation, and will be used to make them money, don’t be a sucker and build their next hot mini-game.

Godot is fully Open Source and community controlled. It is a real proper game engine with some really powerful features. It is harder to get started using, but there are hundreds of great tutorials for complete beginners that you can follow, and tens of thousands of community assets to get you started quickly.

The community is very welcoming and friendly to newbies, and Godot is taken more and more seriously as a real game engine, especially by indie devs and studios.

Steam Deck easily. Everything you said you’re worried about Valve possibly doing in the future goes double for Microsoft.

Steam Deck is a great platform for playing any games on, pirated included. I have my whole GBA ROM collection on my Deck and play them through RetroArch, works perfectly.

I only mentioned it because it’s what I’ve been using for a while and it’s been a good experience so far. Cheap, runs well on Linux, and is one of the few that still allows you to port forward.

There are several good ones to pick from, defs would stay away from Nord because of their advertising practices, but Mullvad is solid. I think they removed port forwarding though.

Don’t subject your family to nasty letters in their mail from your ISP. You won’t go to jail, but you might risk your internet service getting canceled, which won’t be a fun conversation with your parents.

If you’re 18 and healthy, go donate plasma at a local clinic. In the USA depending on where you are, you can make $40-$80 per week, sometimes even more if they have a big shortage. Takes about 90 minutes a session, and you just chill with a needle in your arm and browse on your phone, super easy.

Proton VPN’s most expensive plan is $108 for 2 years, you can afford that. Go to your friends or neighbors and offer to do some yard work for cash. Mow their lawn, shovel bark, dig up dead shrubs, whatever. That’s the main way I made money when I was in my teens. People will pay 20-30 bucks an hour in most places for that kind of work, so a few hours of that in a week or two and you’ve got your $108 for Proton VPN, or whatever other VPN you want to use.

Sell some crap on eBay, FB marketplace, Craig’s List, etc. Old clothes, computer parts, consoles, weights, people will buy anything. You’d be surprised how fast I’ve gotten rid of junk buy posting it online for 10 bucks.

I’ll check it out. Even if it doesn’t work conceptually, it’s still cool to think about alternatives to the Capitalist markets and currencies that are dominant.

I use Nobara with KDE for my gaming computer, Mint with Cinnamon for pretty much everything else.

Mint is the closest to a “Just Works” experience for me. Cinnamon is rock stable, especially on Mint Debian Edition. I don’t remember the last time Cinnamon crashed or had any major bugs for me.

I use Debian for most of my servers, stable and simple. Arch on a junker Thinkpad to test and mess around with new programs and window managers.

~50x

My policy is double my download, minimum. But I almost always hit much higher than that, my average is probably between 5-10x

All my torrents are public sites, and I only torrent pretty common stuff, so I don’t feel too bad about killing a torrent after a week or two. I figure 5-10x average on easy-to-find, mid quality media is plenty in the karmic sense lol.

As far as I am concerned, always give better than you get, even if that’s 1.01 but try to aim higher.

Of course, if you’re seeding a rare or otherwise hard to find piece of media, then you should keep it alive for longer. I am in the process of upgrading my torrent machine, and once that happens, I will be able to hold far more active torrents, and my average ratios will be significantly improved.

Happy sailing!

Flatpaks are pretty great for getting the latest software without having to have a cutting edge rolling release distro or installing special repos and making sure stuff doesn’t break down the line.

I use Flatpaks for my software that I need the latest and greatest version of, and my distros native package for CLI apps and older software that I don’t care about being super up to date.

My updater script handles all of it in one action anyways, so no biggie on that either.

Flatpaks are the best all-in-one solution when compared to Appimages or Snaps imo.

You’re totally right, and this is supported the data! The USA has the least restrictive gun laws of any major developed country but has similar rates of gun violence as all other developed…oh wait, never mind, the USA has by far the highest gun violence rates of any major developed nation.

Our per capita rate of gun violence is comparable to countries like Somalia, Iraq, and Haiti.

And also, car deaths is a huge issue too, and we should restrict car ownership and encourage mass transit and related infrastructure. Making more of our cities pedestrian-only locations protected by bollards, would also make people even safer from both accidental and intentional car deaths.

It’s also way better for the environment and thus, people’s long term health, leading to even higher life spans and better happiness.

Hell yeah! Love seeing old hardware like this still running a modern OS.

With Linux, if your hardware is a decade old, you’ve barely even reached middle-age.

Meanwhile Windows 11 won’t even allow an official install on hardware that’s 4-5 years old.

Long live Linux & FOSS ✊

Cool!

Valve doubling down on Linux as the default OS on the Steam Deck was such a great decision. It obviously has given them a massive competitive edge. Windows has become so horribly bloated, and Microsoft has almost zero interest in making it run more efficiently.

In my early teens, I got really into computers, built my first PC when I was about 13, started learning Windows batch scripting and using GameMaker to make goofy PC games.

Along the way, I found Trinity Rescue Kit and was also introduced to Fedora Core by a nerdy guy who worked at my local YMCA.

I didn’t actually enjoy it too much back then, so I left it alone for years until about 5 years ago when I started to get back into the free software movement and related interests.

I’ve been 100% on Linux for about 4 years now and never looked back.

It’s designed to be more compatible with MS’ .docx formats, less weird formatting issues when converting between them. But the actual features it has is less than LibreOffice.

Two different focuses, LibreOffice is designed with more powerful features and uses the .odf file format by default.

OnlyOffice is lighter weight and designed with MS Office compatibility first and foremost, although both suites support both file formats and in my experience, both work great with either file types and for basic users, have all the features you would need.

I’m constantly shocked how poorly Windows 11 runs on brand new high end hardware.

My current company uses brand new $1,500 HP enterprise grade laptops and they frequently freeze up, stutter, and get really hot from basic office work.

My old Debian servers I used to have there were running butter smooth with KDE Plasma on 12 year old hardware.

+1 I used LibreOffice all through university, wrote dozens of papers, did class presentations, résumés, etc. Never had a problem. I use it at work too and collaborate with O365 users often.

Such an awesome piece of software. I used OnlyOffice as well, really nice if you don’t need the fancier features that LibreOffice has.

I’ve been using KDE for over 4 years on over a dozen different machines and 5+ distros and I’ve never had major problems with crashing.

I do experience small bugs fairly often. Maybe once every month or two, little glitches or odd window behavior. Nothing huge, but they do happen. To be fair, I like to modify and customize KDE quite a bit, so that is probably causing some of my issues.

In my experience, Cinnamon is the most stable DE I’ve used by far. Least amount of random bugs, simple but stable. I don’t think I’ve ever had Cinnamon crash on me actually.

Depends on the use case.

I use Nobara on my gaming rig because I wanted up-to-date packages without being on the cutting edge like Arch. And I also wanted all the lower level gaming optimizations without having to set it all up manually. Plus, KDE is soooooo nice.

Debian on my servers because I want extreme stability with a community-driven distro.

Linux Mint on my personal laptops, because I like having the good things from Ubuntu without all the junk. Plus the Cinnamon desktop environment has been rock stable for me. It’s my goto workhorse distro. If I don’t need something with a specialized or specific use case, I throw Mint on.

Arch on my old junker devices that I don’t use much because I like making them run super fast and look sexy and testing out different WM’s and DE’s.

Void on my junkers that I actually want to use frequently because it’s super performant and light on resources without needing to be built manually like Arch.

Ubuntu server if I am feeling stanky and lazy and just need something quick for a testing VM or container host in my home lab.

Aww man, not Arco :(

Sad to see this, but glad the educational material is staying up for a while.

Hopefully some pieces of this are carried on and maintained/forked.

Man, I wish the Windows-only shop I support as a sysadmin “just worked.” I spend the majority of my time troubleshooting random Windows issues.

Driver issues, firmware issues, Teams breaking, Outlook breaking, SharePoint and OneDrive sync issues, Edge freezing/crashing, UI scaling issues, routine updates failing, random connectivity issues, random audio issues, printer issues…

I won’t lie, my Linux computers have random issues too, but way less often than the Windows machines I have to support every day. And when I encounter the Linux issues, I actually can fix them in a way that is permanent almost always.

Windows on the other hand, I typically fix and then the same problem starts happening again a few months later after an update, or the only “fix” that works is restarting the computer several times in a row.

To be fair to the Windows defenders, Windows 11 has easily been the worst for this in my experience. Windows 10 was more stable, and Windows 7 was even better. XP had lots of random issues, but back then you could still get under the hood pretty easily and make Windows do what you wanted.

Every personal device I have runs Linux and has for several years. I removed Windows completely from my life thank God, and I can’t imagine going back. I honestly would be more likely to stop using computers altogether before I went back to the horror show that is Windows/Microsoft.