Not really that big of a deal, but Baldur’s Gate 3 can be launched with the --skip-launcher command line parameter to, well, skip the launcher.

I wanted to be a bit more productive in my spare time, but I have made a huge mistake:
I started playing Vagrus - The Riven Realms again.

The world building in Vagrus is excellent. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic fantasy Roman empire, and there is a massive amount of text that details the world, and the people living in it. There is so much to read, that the devs even thought it necessary (and rightfully so) to display a warning about the sheer amount of text on the game’s startup screen, with the suggestion to refund it if one doesn’t enjoy a lot of reading. Sooo, of course this is the perfect game for me - or would be if I had more spare time.

The game is a mixture of trading sim and role playing game. You play a vagrus (a caravan leader), and travel the land trading wares, transporting passengers, spreading gossip and doing missions for different factions, you also have a lot of story elements that you can (and should) follow. There is turn-based combat, and during story events there are plenty of skill checks.

The game is relatively difficult, due to its interwoven mechanics. You need to calculate relatively tightly in order to make a profit, but if you loose people in combat, not having reserves might lead into a morale-loss and hunger death spiral… Also, due to the game’s grim settings, the choices one faces are more often than not to either do what is right, or to survive.

Acquisitions felt kinda cool when Microsoft was dishing them out like nobody’s business prior to the pandemic.

No, it did not. Consolidation usually is bad for employees and customers, and anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the last 150 years has had plenty of opportunities to observe this.

I have been using Linux for more than 15 years and would consider myself a semi-advanced user, but that thing in the screenshot - it scares me.

Android has become such an unusable mess otherwise…

I mean, you can’t even find the option to allow sideloading on my Android TV box without first enabling developer mode…

It really depends on what you are doing with your system…

On my main PC I want the full Linux Desktop experience, including some Gnome tools that require webkit - and since I am running Gentoo, installing/updating webkit takes a lot of RAM - I would recommend 32 GiB at least.

My laptop on the other hand is an MNT Reform, powered by a Banana Pi CM4 with merely 4 GiB of memory. There I am putting in some effort to keep the system lightweight, and that seems to work well for me up to now. As long as I can avoid installing webkit or compiling the Rust compiler from source, I am perfectly happy with 4 GiB. So happy actually, that I currently don’t feel the need to upgrade the Reform to the newly released RK3588 processor module, despite it being a lot faster and it having 32 GiB of memory.

Oh, and last, but not least, my work PC… I’m doing Unreal game development at work, and there the 64 GiB main memory and 8 GiB VRAM I have are the absolute bare minimum. If it were an option, I would prefer to have 128 GiB of RAM, and 16 GiB of VRAM, to prevent swapping and to prevent spilling of VRAM into main memory…

I would recommend to play this on Switch though. That’s because, unlike the PC version, the Switch version can be played without an Ubisoft Account. All one has to do is to disconnect the Switch from the internet, and suddenly the game runs without login.

I would recommend to play Skyrim on PC though. Even if your computer is old, you should be able to get a much better experience from it than the Switch version.

I mean, I played it on the Xbox 360, and it worked like a charm. On an ancient three-core console with 256 MiB of RAM.

Then I wanted to replay it on the Switch, and was disappointed. There are a lot of physics glitches on the Switch, but what is worse is that the NPC pathfinding takes a lot longer on the Switch, such that NPCs move in nonsensical directions during combat, as they start to follow paths that they would have needed several seconds earlier. Instead of moving near the player to attack, they move near the position where the player had been some time ago. This is particularly bad on the overworld, but also noticeable in dungeons.

I loved that game, and completed it twice, but the last chapter (or last 2 chapters - depending on which ending you get) is super annoying. The encounters are repetitive, and there are quite a lot of them. It’s almost the same group of enemies again, and again, and again. Once you have a working strategy those encounters aren’t even that challenging, but if you play turn-based, they take a lot of time…

I’m still hooked on Backpack Battles. It’s slow enough that medicine-induced-brain-fog ridden me can play it, and it’s a lot of fun.

Backpack Battles. I should have never bought this. It’s eating all my spare time.

If you are using systemd, there’s a tool called coredumpctl.

• Book of Hours. It’s a strange game, set in the Secret Histories, the same setting that Cultist Simulator had. Unlike Cultist Simulator, which was rather gruesome, Book of Hours is a relaxed game, about cleaning out and restoring an abandoned library, reading the occult books left in it, and drinking tea with your guests.
• Potionomics. While it’s primarily a puzzle game about brewing potions, it has a lot of heartwarming dialogue.
• Settlers 2 (the original DOS game, not the remake). The Settlers series was what brought up the term “Wuselfaktor” (No clue how to translate this. There is an English explanation of the term in this article.), and imho Settlers 2 is (by far) the best part of that series.
• Kerbal Space Program. I can’t say why this game makes me happy, but it does. There’s something strangely relaxing about drifting through space in free-fall, seeing the planetary surface pass by at high speed below.

I feel like I have to link this here: The open source project (which also has builds for other platforms than Windows): https://sc2.sourceforge.net/

Who knew electing fascists would lead to fundamental freedoms being removed?

FIFY

I don’t know that particular system, so I can’t give any hardware-specific suggestions. However, it might be worth checking out the games that previously were included in Humble Mobile Bundles, especially the very first ones. Sorry, I don’t have a nice to browse list, but this site seems usable enough: https://barter.vg/bundles/3/76/

That said, OpenTTD is available on F-Droid. That should keep you busy for a while 😉

Ubuntu was pretty good, until 2010 or so. People who still recommend it probably haven’t used it in the last 10 years.

“PPA” is Ubuntu’s branding for third party repositories. So, of course you will have a hard time adding a Ubuntu-specific third-party repository to anything that isn’t the Ubuntu version it’s made for…

Debian of course supports third party repos, just like Ubuntu. On Debian they just aren’t called “PPA”.

For more information on how to add third party repos to Debian (or Ubuntu, if you don’t use Canonical’s weird tooling), check out the Debian Wiki page on UseThirdParty or SourcesList. There’s also an (incomplete) list of third party repositories on the wiki: Unofficial. And just like with PPAs, anyone can host a Debian repo.

It’s basically what the Steam Deck does, and for a gaming device it makes a lot of sense. The vast majority of games will probably be installed to the user’s home folder anyhow…

It might be that some games require additional libraries that don’t come with the immutable base OS, but you can always install them in a custom folder (like, the game’s install dir), or just install Steam and use the Steam Runtime for everything.

And, as you said, a lot of open source tools and games (DosBox for instance) are available as Flatpaks too.

After finishing my second playthrough of Loren the Amazon Princess, I’ve now started Tales of Aravorn: An Elven Marriage. And I must say, it is pretty good. From what I can tell up to now, I like Elven Marriage more than Loren, so it’s a bit sad, that it didn’t sell that well…

Apart from that I’m playing way too much Against the Storm. It’s a pretty fun city builder rogue-like. Basically Settlers, but only the fun parts, with a bit of random challenges sprinkled in.

I also tried to play Albion (the DOS game) again, but I died in my second battle and hadn’t saved from the beginning… 90s games were something different, when it comes to difficulty. I will definitely start over again soon, this time actually saving frequently.