I’m aware that there are community features on Steam, and some people must use them. There are stickers, profile pages, trading cards, and all kind of other things that I mostly ignore, but that other people must be using. But, I don’t think I’d ever call myself a member of the Steam community.

On the other hand, there are communities for games on Steam. The game-related forums and mod workshops are essential parts of some of the Steam games I play. I don’t post much in the forums, but I definitely use guides that other people post there.

What I think makes Steam work is:

• fair and honest prices, often with sales and discounts
• any DRM they use is something that normal users don’t notice – you really notice the difference when you end up with a Ubisoft game, even if it’s on Steam.
• updates that just work, so the next time you start the game it’s a new version and you don’t have to do anything
• a store that seems designed to sell you games you’ll actually enjoy playing, not one that pushes you to buy things that will make them the most money
• a client that makes it easy to play games with your friends, using a consistent interface, if you choose to do that. If not, they don’t try to push you to do things with friends.
• a decent review system that they’ve mostly managed to prevent people from gaming

I guess some of those, like playing games with friends, or even reviews could be seen as community features. But, I don’t feel like I’m “part of the steam community” when I play games with friends. We just happen to be two people playing a game using the same launcher. As for reviews, I don’t trust Steam reviews more than say Metacritic or Rock Paper Shotgun. I actually trust the “community” less than a good reviewer. There are admittedly some features of the Steam reviews that are useful, like saying how many hours someone has put into a game next to their review. I just mostly use the Steam reviews as a way to avoid buying something that’s a complete stinker because it looks interesting and is on sale.

Often the loser of a competition knows more about the competition than someone who wasn’t involved in the competition.

But, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll be honest about why they lost, maybe not even honest with themselves.

Whenever a game like this flops it gives me hope. Why? Because this kind of game isn’t something that interests me at all. I keep hoping that these companies are going to learn from getting burned, and switch to a style of game that I like more.

No, it’s a flop.

It’s hard to believe that a company would spend hundreds of millions to develop a game, only for it to flop. But, that’s how it works with live-service PVP only games. They depend on network effects. People want to play what their friends are playing. If a company gets this right they can be like Minecraft or Fortnite and it’s the game everyone plays, bringing in billions of dollars. If they miss, it can be a complete flop that nobody plays.

Whoosh.

If there’s more than one, is the plural Dollars General?

It helps that Tim Sweeney seems to always be wrong about everything.

Normally when the people rise up they’re slaughtered. When rich countries go through major changes normally there’s a lot of chaos and blood before things get better. If you’re someone who lives in one of those countries it’s better if you can ride the chaos out somewhere else. In fact, in a country where things are getting bad, it’s generally a good idea to get out long before the chaos starts.

Let’s say that Trump doesn’t manage to cancel or subvert the next couple of sets of elections and that in 2029 the US has a democratic president and a democratic congress. Let’s also imagine that the next president cares about monopolies and puts Lina Khan back in charge. I wonder if there’s anything that they can do about decisions made by Trump’s FTC. Or is Netflho just now legally in place and we’re stuck with them unless the FTC can prove they’re abusing their monopoly?

Content will eventually be produced by the masses

And it will be owned by one of the many monopolies.

Barring that, local community theatre productions.

Put on in a theatre owned by Ticketmaster.

Yo ho ho.

Pop it in your calendars? Maybe I’m using calendars wrong, but mine aren’t filled with things I should avoid doing. But, I’m willing to learn. What date should I put “Don’t Buy Subnautica 2” on?

Seeing the underwater world was so much fun. I got it to play in VR and only did that a couple of times, but I completed the original and Below Zero because the exploration and underwater scenes were just so good.

That’s not something that can be solved by changing interest rates. To increase wages you need unions and for those unions to go on strike.

The thing with autocorrect is that you don’t have to accept the correction.

If it’s a her, you mean fiancée, fiancé is used only for men. And, it’s basically a chromebook in how she uses it. But, chromebooks are designed so that you never have to do any system administration. You never have to upgrade drivers or figure out how to get to the next release.

She probably hasn’t had to deal with that yet, but eventually the system will have to be updated. Over time, cruft piles up and makes it harder and harder to upgrade and manage. Atomic distributions are designed to be much more like chromebooks. Someone else manages the upgrades and the tricky choices, and then you just install their base image.

Until I realised I should just work inside a container.

Yeah, it’s a game changer. Especially if you have different projects on the go. I’m used to having to deal with an ugly path with all kind of random things in it because I need them for one project. But, with containers / distroboxes / toolbx you can keep those changes isolated.

Yeah, I only use flatpak for GUI apps that don’t need any special handling. To be fair, that’s a decent number of the things I use most often: Firefox, Thunderbird, Signal, Kodi, Discord, Gimp, VLC. I think it’s also how I installed some themes for KDE / Plasma.

Console stuff I’ve either done in a distrobox using the conventions of that OS (apt for the Ubuntu one, DNF for the Fedora one), or I’ve used homebrew. But, I haven’t used too much homebrew because I want my “normal” console to be as unchanged as possible.

There are a few things I’ve used distrobox-export to make available outside the distrobox.

It took me a little while to understand how you’re supposed to think about the system, but now that I think I get it, I really like it. My one frustration is that there’s an nVidia driver bug that’s affecting me, and nVidia has been unable to fix it for a few months. I think I’d be in exactly the same situation with a traditional distro. The difference is that if they ever fix it, I’ll have to wait a couple of weeks until the fix makes it to the Bazzite stable build. I suppose I could switch to Bazzite testing and get it within days of it being fixed instead of weeks. Apparently just use a “rebase” command and reboot. But, I’m hesitant to do that because other than the nVidia driver, everything’s so stable.

So, there are multiple ways of installing things. For GUI apps the standard way is flatpaks. Some non-GUI things are installed that way, but it’s less common.

For CLI apps, homebrew is installed by default and it’s recommended as a way to install CLI things.

The method I like for apps that have a lot of interdependencies is to use a distrobox. If you want a development environment where multiple apps all talk to each-other, you can isolate them on their own distrobox and install them however you like there.

I currently have a distrobox running ubuntu that I use for a kubernetes project. In that distrobox I install anything I need with apt, or sometimes from source. Within that kubernetes project I use mise-en-place to manage tools just for that particular sub-project. What I like about doing things this way is that when I’m working on that project I have all the tools I need, and don’t have to worry about the tools for other projects. My base bazzite image is basically unchanged, but my k8s project is highly customized.

If you really want to, you can still install RPMs as overlays to the base system, it’s just not recommended because that slows down upgrades.

More details here:

https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/

Has your fiancé had to update drivers? Has he had to upgrade to a new release? Has he had to figure out how to install a version of something that isn’t in the Debian stable repositories?

If the only application your fiancé uses is Firefox, then he might go a long time before having any kind of problem. It all depends on how he uses it.

Debian is fine as an introduction to Linux, if that’s what you want. But, as a beginner, you’re going to screw up, and Debian doesn’t do anything to protect you from that.

Atomic distributions let you use Linux but make it harder to shoot yourself in the foot. It’s much harder to break the system in a way you can’t just reboot to fix it.

It all depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to learn Linux by using it, then by all means, go for a traditional distribution. Debian is nice, but I’d go for Ubuntu. But, if your goal is to have a stable system that you can’t screw up as a beginner I’d go with an atomic distribution. If your goal is to play games, Bazzite is hard to beat.

You can still learn Linux if you use an atomic distribution. Configuring and using the desktop environment is basically the same. But, you don’t need to worry about your drivers, and you don’t install packages the traditional way. If you want to learn those things, you can run a VM or a distrobox.

I completely disagree. Debian is not beginner-friendly. Go with Bazzite if your focus is gaming.

It is a gaming-focused distribution. It’s also an “atomic” distribution, which basically means it’s really hard to break it. It’s more like Android or IOS where the OS and base system are managed by someone else. They’re read-only so you can’t accidentally break them.

For example, instead of trying to manage your own video card drivers, they come packaged with the base system image, and they’re tested to make sure they work with all the other base components.

I’ve been using Linux since the 1990s, so I’ve run my share of distributions: Slackware, RedHat, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. Even for someone experienced, atomic distributions are great. But, for a newcomer they’re so much better.

Depending on what happens with GPUs for datacenters, external GPUs might be so rare that nobody does it anymore.

My impression right now is that for nVidia gamer cards are an afterthought now. Millions of gamers can’t compete with every company in Silicon Valley building entire datacenters stacked with as many “GPUs” as they can find.

AMD isn’t the main choice for datacenter CPUs or GPUs. Maybe for them, gamers will be a focus, and there are some real advantages with APUs. For example, you’re not stuck with one particular amount of GPU RAM and a different amount of CPU RAM. Because you’re not multitasking as much when gaming, you need less CPU RAM, so you can dedicate more RAM to games and less to other apps. So, you can have the best of both worlds: tons of system RAM when you’re browsing websites and have a thousand tabs open, then start a game and you have gobs of RAM dedicated to the game.

It’s probably also more efficient to have one enormous cooler for a combined GPU and CPU vs. a GPU with one set of heatsinks and fans and a separate CPU heatsink and fan.

External GPUs are also a pain in the ass to manage. They’re getting bigger and heavier, and they take up more and more space in your case. Not to mention the problems their power draw is causing.

If I could get equivalent system performance with an APU vs. a combined CPU and GPU, I’d probably go for it, even with the upgradeability concerns. OTOH, soldered-in RAM is not appealing because I’ve upgraded my RAM more often than other components on my PCs, and having to buy a whole new motherboard to get a RAM upgrade is not appealing.

The Crypto to AI transition was brutal. Just as demand for GPUs was coming down because people were starting to use ASICs to mine Bitcoin, along comes AI to drive up non-gaming demand again.

The only good news is that eventually when the AI bubble pops there will be massive R&D and manufacturing geared towards producing GPUs. Unless something else comes along… But really, I can’t see that happening because the AI bubble is so immense and is such an enormous part of the entire world’s economy.

All I did was point out your weird parasocial relationship with a CEO of a game store company. It’s very strange how you reacted to that. You must realize just how weird it is, how empty your life is. Get help dude.

Says the guy who’s passionate and on a first name basis with the CEO of a game store chain.

You’re on a first name basis, even a parasocial relationship with the CEO of Gamestop despite never having met him. Who here is intellectually deficient?

It’s a bad sign that you know the CEO’s name.

I guess whatever you’ve been playing since November, when 25 would normally have come out.

I don’t think anybody would be surprised at that.

Launching 25 this late would have been a disaster anyhow. 25 would have cannibalized sales from 26, but it might not have sold well to begin with because people want to buy FM for the current season, not for the season that just ended.

What would be really good is if they got their act together enough to launch FM 26 early, like pre-launch before the transfer window closes, and launch a patch with the new squads as soon as the transfer window is done. It has always been a bit annoying that they launch in November, when the season has been underway for months.

Like all Church schisms it’s “we’re the only ones who are right about how our god is supposed to be worshiped”, so they don’t feel bad about taking the names of Anglicans or Catholics because they think that those other groups are doing religion wrong, so who cares if it’s confusing.

Anglican really just means a version of the Catholic church splintered off by Anglo-Saxons

The proto-Anglicans stopped being Catholics when King Henry the 8th couldn’t get the pope to annul his marriage, so he split the English church from the Catholic church. So, for 500 years, the Anglicans haven’t been Catholics. And it has nothing to do with “Anglo-Saxons”. Anglo-Saxons are a cultural group from the middle ages. The Church of England and Anglicanism comes from centuries later and applies to the country of England under the king Henry the 8th. The Church of England and/or Anglicanism doesn’t date from the middle ages, it was effectively a political construction due to the king wanting a divorce and not to have to answer to the pope. But, the reasons behind the split don’t really matter as much as the fact that the people following churches related to that split haven’t recognized the authority of the pope for centuries, so they’re not Catholics.

In this case, the name is really misleading because the Anglicans don’t consider them to be Anglican, the Catholics definitely don’t consider them to be Catholics, and you can’t really merge the Anglican and Catholic faiths because they’re so different.

Not according to the Catholic church. They’re not Anglicans according to the Anglican church either.

Australia’s Anglican church is the Anglican Church of Australia, which has 3.1 million members. The Anglican Catholic church is a very confused and tiny church with only 35k members.

The Anglican Catholics split from the American Episcopal church, which itself split from the Anglicans when the US split from England. After all, having the king as the head of your church doesn’t make much sense if you just had a revolution to declare independence from that king.

So, it’s pretty weird, the Anglican Catholics want to be connected to the Anglican church, after their church split from the Anglicans in the American Revolution, and to the Catholics who split from the Protestants in the 1500s. It’s almost as confused as something like Jews for Jesus.

Yeah, the Nazi who’s an Anglican Catholic priest runs a gamer website. Sure, it sounds like Mad Libs, but it’s just 2025.

It’s not the Anglican church.

He’s not Catholic.

I haven’t used Critical Roles new systems but I assume they could get a big switch over if they push it hard

It’s launching sometime in 2025, so we’ll see how hard they push it when it’s ready. So far, they’ve only hinted at it. I don’t know if they’d want to do this, but they could also try to convince other smaller (but still big) streamers to use it too. There are some streamers they’re pretty close with (the Dropout guys for example) and others who they’re on friendly terms with (like Penny Arcade’s guys).

If WotC / Hasbro wanted to mount a charm offensive to get people to keep using D&D, I don’t know how influential they are. Other than Chris Perkins, I can’t think of any well known D&D employees at all.

I think what might be different this time is influencers. If Critical Role abandoned D&D completely, I think they’d probably stay popular and whatever system they switched to would get a lot of attention. I also think that they’d be likely to use a system that isn’t math heavy, and allows for a lot of role playing and acting.

The problem would probably be splintering. But, if a tiny company like Paizo made such a big impact on the D&D ecosystem with virtually no ad money back in the 3.5 days, just imagine what could happen today when so many D&D influencers exist. If they worked together on something, it could be a major change to the D&D ecosystem.