Do you have any experience using it with large modlists? Like a couple thousand mods at a time?

How does it compare to Fluorine Manager?

Looks like it has support for Wabbajack and Nexus modlists. Nice.

Matrix has its own issues and, frankly, it’s a shitshow;

For what it’s worth, I use it daily with no significant trouble.

I guess it depends on your usage patterns.

For anyone else thinking about Matrix for public chat rooms, consider setting them up without encryption. This will remove friction for your less patient and less technical users, and may avoid frustrating glitches in some client apps.

There’s not really much point in encrypting a public room anyway, so you might as well keep it simple. The client-to-server connection will still be encrypted, which is the same level of privacy that Discord has. (And you can enable encryption on a room later if you want.)

Steam’s top games of the year in Japan, in contrast to consoles where Nintendo’s Switch and Switch 2 exclusives dominate, are driven by global free-to-play titles, with Counter-Strike 2, PUBG: Battlegrounds, and Apex Legends being the three biggest games in terms of revenue. Of the top twelve titles, only Monster Hunter Wilds from Capcom was developed by a Japanese company, with hits like ARC Raiders and Call of Duty also making the list. In terms of playtime, Left 4 Dead 2 was top, followed by Terraria, with DOTA 2 and Stardew Valley also making the list.

it feeds you lies about sandboxes. AND YOU BELIEVED IT!

No, you simply failed to comprehend what I wrote.

Literally every distro has seamless gaming.

To expand on this: Some distros want a little more setup than others for gaming, but it’s generally a one-time thing and not particularly hard. Even my Debian Stable system plays games beautifully with a handful of Backports installed.

Is flatpak the way?

Steam can be installed natively or in a Flatpak. The latter can be a little fussy every once in a while, depending on your setup, but has the advantage of somewhat better sandboxing. (For better privacy protection, do your gaming on a dedicated machine or at least in a dedicated user account.)

What about Proton?

Proton is great. Steam comes with several versions, allowing you to choose the one best fitting any game that doesn’t work with the latest/default version. Some users choose to add third-party Proton builds (like GE-Proton) to Steam alongside the standard ones, but it usually isn’t necessary.

I wonder how well I would manage in a 2e world after years of familiarity with 5e, and how difficult it would be to adjust back to 5e afterward.

Do you mean that survival is hard at those levels? Were you by any chance playing a wizard?

Thanks for the write-up. I’ve been pondering Baldur’s Gate 1 or 2 in part because I think some of BG3’s characters first appeared in the earlier games.

Which edition of D&D rules does the first game follow?

How much are they going to pay me in advance to make shackling my work to their future licensing whims seem wise?

Actually, never mind. I think I’ll godot instead.

This so-called article contains absolutely no information to support the headline. It’s worthless garbage.

All in all you ended up at the whole point I was making, but somehow you first had to claim that it’s all nonsense.

No, I pointed out that the problem you described is completely avoidable, which wasn’t apparent in your original comment. This is an important distinction to other readers who are considering a move to Linux, since they otherwise might be put off by your suggestion that doing so is necessarily a hardware lottery.

It’s a different perspective, not a personal attack.

Your combative, snarky response is unpleasant, unwarranted, and unnecessary. Goodbye.

Spoiler the actual copy protection removal is kept secret by people who do it.

Indeed. My point is that the PlayStation situation is not comparable to what we can do with Steam games, where it’s all out in the open, with multiple independent implementations, at least one of which is open-source and multi-platform.

(I’m glad there are people working on PS5 hacks, though.)

Where are the instructions for doing this?

Trying whatever hardware one has on hand is perfectly reasonable, but it’s not a lottery.

Bear in mind that an OS image captured from a bare metal installation might fail to boot in a VM, depending on whether the original installation included the drivers needed in the VM environment. In that case, I would suggest learning about whatever recovery tools Windows offers these days, and trying to add the needed drivers.

This isn’t a good point, how many people do you think remove the steam dependency from their games?

Not many, because Steam hasn’t given them a reason to. That’s not the point.

The point is that if Steam ever does shut down or start revoking games, people can keep playing them without it.

taking care that they only select components that work fine under Windows is a big part of why there isn’t a hardware lottery under Windows.

There isn’t a hardware lottery under Linux, either, unless you buy random hardware instead of choosing known-good components or turning to one of the system vendors who do this for you.

I find it kind of weird that people who would never take mystery medication without it being prescribed to them, and would never buy a paycheck worth of food without considering its contents against their allergies and tastes, would buy a computer without checking whether it will run the software they intend to use.

Perhaps the perceived problem would fade if we taught people that computers and operating systems are not all equal, and that just as MacOS is more likely to run on a machine made for it, Linux is more likely to run on a machine made for it. (Edit: The same is true for Windows, for what it’s worth.)