yeah, it was wild. I was trying to do set up some computer labs. Debian was the first suggestion in the guide:
After the second reinstall of Debian, I gave Fedora a try as it was the second to be suggested. Only to be greeted with this:
It took me forever to realize that dash-dot at the top left was not some stylization and was a button to show the overview.
funny you should say it like that. I just recently I tried using Debian’s default GNOME desktop and thought I had corrupted the install somehow. I reinstalled the OS two more times because it kept dumping me into a nearly blank screen with no obvious buttons to click aside network/sound/power.
I’m used to LXDE, KDE, and Cinnamon, so this was completely foreign to me… and trying to find the web browser had me at a caveman level of confusion.
I buy mainly physical games.
Will I preorder a AAA game that will have 18,000,000 copies sitting around after 6 months? Hell no.
Will I preorder a physical title from a small-medium dev/publisher that I will never see again? If they have a track record of making stuff I like.
I swear 95% of the stuff Steam recommended is reasoned with because it is popular and not because it’s something I would play.
Even when they say it’s related to a library item, it’s not even tangential. Like… Escape the Backrooms is not like Terraria. In any sense. They put that there because Youtubers are selling it.
Yeah, for me it was Technos Collection 1. :(
I’d like to add two more things:
It was the generation of HD remasters, so a lot of older (high quality) titles are available on the platform, such as the Dead Rising games, the Mega Man collections, almost all the Resident Evil titles, Devil May Cry collection, Bioshock collection, Final Fantasty X/X-2.
And most importantly, since they are last gen, they are not stupidly hard to find yet.
you missed fear
Might be an unpopular opinion (but that’s what makes it cheap): An Xbox One.
It’s got a fairly sizeable library at 3,067 titles and a backwards compatible list with 632 games from Xbox 360 and 63 original Xbox titles. So you have plenty of choice depending on your gaming tastes.
It’s the last generation, so many stores will be clearing out the old inventory at a discount. Popular titles like Mass Effect Trilogy or Borderlands Handsome Collection will be a great value for the money. If those are your style.
ooh, that’s a tough sell. I absolutely love my Evercade, but the library is hard to get. If you don’t snap up a popular new release, it’s likely to vanish forever. Major FOMO.
Yup, 60W.
More than enough to power one or two drives but when 3+ were writing I’d have a random disconnect.
Tried different hubs, of increasing power. Same thing.
How do you keep it properly powered? When I tried something similar, some drives would randomly vanish because the peak power demand exceeded the supply of the hub.
Can’t recall the first with certainty, but I think it was when I was driving in a heavy snowstorm on the highway and witnessed an 18-wheeler jackknife in the opposing lane, eventually coming to a rest in the divider. Since stopping was only going to put me in danger, I had it call it in and give the mile marker.
I’m fairly certain it wasn’t a medical emergency, but given the snowy conditions it wasn’t going to be fun for anyone involved.
I learned the VP9 sort after I saw how randomly abysmal the encoding is for AV1.
Just look at these numbers:
and a direct comparison, same frame from AV1:
and then VP9:
use --compat-options prefer-vp9-sort
yt-dlp -f bv*[ext=mp4]+ba[ext=m4a]/b[ext=mp4] -S height:1080 --compat-options prefer-vp9-sort --all-subs --no-warnings -v https://www.youtube.com/watchx
No joke! I see nothing on shelves to resist purchasing.
and of course, this will be misconstrued. The executives will shout “look! people don’t want physical ownership!” and the push to digital rentals will continue… and result in even higher prices when they pull a Netflix.
I had used Lubuntu to rescue an underpowered laptop back in community college. At university, I was on the campus tech support team… and ended up “the Linux guy” for the few foreigners who had installations (I knew how to run apt and that’s about it). Out of uni, I ended up in a career supporting RHEL. Of course Raspberry Pis skyrocketed in popularity as well, so I got to sink my teeth into a Debian-derivative and blow up a few installs without having to worry about change management.
When time came to build a system in 2025, I figured I’d try it as an experiment. I stumbled at first and learned Debian does not play well with new hardware, but after switching to Linux Mint it’s been nearly painless. Most of the software I had been using in Windows was already open source (because I couldn’t afford to buy software), so almost everything migrated 1:1. Excluding Winamp… :(
My place switched their backup service for OneDrive, and I lost everything twice.