Definitely felt like everyone had one. Nintendogs, Cooking Mama, just something basic PictoChat were all super popular. I felt like Diamond and Pearl were really hyped up. The power of casual games and local multiplayer made the DS so much more popular than hardcore home console and PC gamers ever recognized. I imagine the Switch being the only console to be as much of a menace in the classroom for teachers as the DS was

I’ve had Super Bomberman R on the Switch since sometime 2017. There are probably Bomberman connoisseurs out there but for me, R is all I’ll ever need for playing with friends on occasion

The main thing is if you like or can stomach the combat. The games stories are connected but work fine standalone. I like XC 3 the most. They’re long games. The second games story takes a good while to really get going and the it’s entertaining the rest of the way. The environments are big, annoyingly big in my opinion, but I play the games for the real sincere passionate teenager saving the universe type story in a convoluted mess of a universe. It’s cheesy teenage scifi fantasy fun

My guess on Veilguard is that after the original creator left, now it was up to remaining writers to maintain passion in lore that they didn’t formulate. So Veilguard, it all gets watered down and anticlimactically rolled out and the focus ended up being relationship drama which still sucked.

A Dragon Age game that wants to be Lifetime channel medieval teenage fantasy romance but the characters are all seasoned combat veteran adults so it’s very weird for them to behaving so childish and unprofessional or even blase about the world ending/faith shattering reveals in the story. They are weirdly archetypal high school students placed in the wrong story

I played DA1-3 a bunch of times. Veilguard just sucks. ME1-3 I never liked like KOTOR 1and 2 but good enough. Andromeda, it’s not interesting. Dropped maybe halfway through. Good gunplay and movement but overly big uninteresting worlds. I don’t remember what any character wanted. At least Inquisition, the different areas were visually memorable

Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, Mass Effect Andromeda, Dragon Age Veilguard - each one of these games were touted for their improved combat, at least improved movement. That’s not to say any are great, just that they’re not as clunky as previous games. They are not standout in that regard. So for Bioware and Obsidian, it is still the case that their draw is writing in a higher budget RPG than the startup indie scene. Pretty much where Owlcat is now getting to with Warhammer and the Expanse licensed games, that’s where Bioware and Obsidian were 20-25 years ago. Narrative games

Bioware and Obsidian games aren’t so fun to play to appeal with mediocre writing. I think like an 80+% reduction of irony, snark, sarcasm, eye rolls, modern slang, knods to modern culture would do wonders for their games writing. Don’t have to get rid of all of it. Just have them be more fun finds in a dialog tree that make them memorable and each high quality while the rest of the narrative takes itself seriously. I’ll 5 great jokes over 100, “ehh I get it. I guess that’s funny.”

I feel like a lot of any residual bad talk on KDE stems from when Plasma 5 was new. It was rough for years. I’m guess by the Steam Deck it became pretty close to as visually consistent as all the default gnome applications. It’s a lot more stable now too compared to a decade ago. Not just the desktop environment, stuff like really wide appealing applications like Kdenlive are way better than they used to be. I think it makes sense that it’s only recent that Fedora promoted KDE Plasma to default/flagship along side gnome as equals. A decade ago, KDE Plasma 5 wasn’t there. Today KDE Plasma is. So maybe because of that and the Steam Deck, KDE is going to be more default than gnome in the future. I’m on KDE and I feel like a decade ago hot corners felt way more pleasant to me on gnome than KDE. It’s how I switch windows along with alt tab. Maybe more often use hot corner to see an overview of windows. Animations are great now

For me, needs to be good on a handheld. GOG mostly sells older games. Mobile/handheld gaming should be a major target to onboard users

At least GPD Win now considers Linux important enough to now try to make up claims to some sort of partnership. Lenovo ships SteamOS devices. Zotac ships Manjaro devices. Good trajectory for Linux on handhelds

They can’t really be trying as well as they can afford. The Steam Deck is almost 4 years old and they still have no answer for Steam Big Picture. No built into the EGS client remote play to an Android/iOS phone. They’re just a Fortnite company with a vestigial game engine and traditional games storefront. Their real video game storefront is now in fortnite

Here’s the comparability list for your motherboard. Upgrade the bios if you haven’t yet

https://www.asrock.com/mb/amd/fatal1ty b450 gaming k4/index.asp#CPU

I searched on ebay and 😂 there’s a big jump in price between a 5700x/5800x to 5700x3d/5800x3d. ~$150 to $350-400

It wasn’t done well but each Fable game were hyped up about how your actions would change how NPCs and the towns/cities/kingdom would evolve. It never amounted to a lot but Fable wasn’t a complete left turn from Lionheads god games. Super watered down to the point of barely being memorable but that was the hype of Fable. Changing evolving world based on your actions

My concern on it is whether the game leans too heavily into parodying folktales/fables/fantasies and missing out on the simulation aspect of fable. Way stronger tech than a 360 or the OG Xbox. I had hoped Fable would keep building up the world simulation aspect of it. Like a watered down Black and White but in the form of a third person storybook RPG

Without the Lionhead god game elements, I’d think it’d struggle to stand out. Pretty much banking on nostalgia for the first 2 Fables

ahhh damn. It was a post from the person that submitted the wine merge request for Adobe installer support. In it was a screenshot of a steamdeckhq post about his WINE patch he did and Tim Sweeney having a mocking reply to the post about Linux and Adobe users. The dev was celebrating that Tim for whatever reason got a bit triggered about people celebrating his work to get the Adobe installer working in WINE

Saw this today from the guy that did the WINE development to get the Adobe creative suite installers working

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1qidql1/it_appears_that_i_have_rage_baited_tim_with_my/

I went from Sony, Samsung, and LG to now buying TCL. At under $1000 for a 65", they’re the best option.

Anything under $1500 I’d bet on TCL. Keep in mind TCL manufacturers a great chunk of the worlds LCDs that aren’t just for TCL. Pretty sure they bought LGs LCD plants. Maybe Samsung too.

Their TVs have a lot of dimming zones. Sony I don’t think makes LCDs or OLED panels themselves. At least one line of their TVs use TCL panels already. They buy from others

Here’s a review for the model that came out last year. At this point where’s it’s regularly on “sale” for $1000. TVs are MSRP for like half a year and then the discounts always seem to me to be happening

https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/tcl/qm8k

1,680 dimming zones in the 65" model and from what I’ve read, the global models are usually one year behind China. So in 2025 China had TCL TVs with even more dimming zones. 8 years ago sub $1000 65" with array LED backlight zones were like 100-200 zones. OLED were incredibly better and would kill off LCDs when prices came down. The density of dimming zones I think progressed faster than people expected

So TCL has solid image processing while Sony has great image processing but not so much better for me to think it’s worth it. Same with the $1000-2000 mini-led backlit LCDs vs OLED. Yes OLED looks better. Don’t feel like it’s large enough for me to go much higher than a $1000 TV. That’s a reality for home theater brands today. TVs, speakers, receivers/amplifiers, headphones, mics, etc - there’s good stuff at low prices.

Everyone’s competing on value now. There used to always be rumors about a Apple TV (actual TV) and Apple EVs. Never hear about rumors for those anymore. Don’t think the quality difference possibility and profit margins exist to make those appealing anymore for Apple. Sony like Apple is increasingly a services/media company.

Samsung - Tizen sucks. I don’t recall how LG and WebOS looks, but to me Tizen is leagues above Android and Roku in making your TV into a loud billboard. At least Android you can install a different launcher.

The current free game are the two Styx games. I grabbed them on Steam when I saw they went 90% off so I’d have an easier time running them on my legion go and my Android phone. I learned of the games because of them being the EGS free game and the game looked up my alley

https://store.steampowered.com/app/242640/Styx_Master_of_Shadows/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/355790/Styx_Shards_of_Darkness/

As email, both are fine. I like the Proton email web ui and mobile apps more. I don’t push either hard, just feels more responsive to me. Visually I like it more. In terms of security, my expectations for email are incredibly low so it’s more me wanting to move away from gmail than proton mail being encrypted. I’ve had no troubles sending and receiving emails.

I subscribe because I wanted the VPN and Drive storage. And since then, I’ve found the unlimited email aliases in Proton Pass to be incredibly nice to have. Those have a nonsense to read address but in Proton mail subscribed, I get 15 email aliases that are just like any other proton email address. Didn’t subscribe for it but now use it. I barely use it as a password manager. I still mostly use a local keepassxc and manage backups myself but it is a value add for those that want to store their passwords in a streamlined format. So Proton Pass became a surprise like of mine. VPN no complaints other than I guess the Windows app looks a lot nicer compared to the Linux one. Drive, good enough to store stuff in I want to backup but not using it for sharing files.

Drive isn’t as good as Google Drive and there’s no Linux application yet but at least my data isn’t being used for Google Gemini. Their docs/sheets aren’t as good as Google and not as good as Collabora Online but good enough for me for writing infrequent drafts of things when I need. It’s a start. Calendar, I’m basic. Good enough for me.

Proton purchased Standard Notes but it’s not a part of proton unlimited. I expect someday we’ll be getting a Proton Notes so I can fully get away from google notes. It probably won’t be as good and that will make many angry but my usage is basic. I’ve been pretty pleased with the additional services that Proton keeps adding even if I don’t use them and them not being as good as google. Got to start somewhere and iterate

Here’s a video about kdenlive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dIqJDy78TI

Switched when the OG Steam Machines came out. It wasn’t great then. It wasn’t really good until Proton Steam integration. Became great after the fast iteration with the Steam Deck

I know the hot thing is Bazzite but if you want to use it as a desktop as well, please at least use Fedora Kinoite or Silverblue. Personally I use the latest Kubuntu release so now I’m on Kubuntu 25.10, will upgrade to 26.04 when prompted, do the same with 26.10. Update cycle not so different than the larger windows updates each year. Just that every now and then a new Windows software ports to Linux, it’ll almost always be a deb installer is reason enough to me to prefer Debian based distributions than Fedora or Arch especially for new users. Don’t need to get people to install distrobox and boxbuddy. Kubuntu should just be enabling flatpaks and flathub by default rather than it being a option in the software center settings

It doesn’t take 3nm/2nm chips to make a great computer. The Switch 2 is has a Samsung 8nm SoC. Steam Deck is TSMC 7nm. A Steam Deck has a better processor than my Intel N150 NAS. We don’t need the strongest hardware for self hosting. Don’t need it for a good gaming experience. Someday we’ll get second hand server parts salvaged into home equipment. The PS5 had that jailbreak. That can someday be a useful Linux machine. Someday the Xbox Series. Someday there’ll be a wave of RISC-V SBC’s that are better than the most recent raspberry pi