I mean, even if just installing a different OS were an option, you’d need to install and setup that OS on a few hundred computers or more. I used to work for a place that would essentially do the enterprise enrollment in bulk before shipping off the computers to schools. I could only setup a bit under 100 over an 8 hour workday, assuming no major issues (like captchas on the login step, or the wifi going out). Keep in mind that we also had specialized little microcontroller* USBs specifically for doing all the enrollment keypresses, and enough of those for someone to setup multiple computers at once.

I am actually curious as to how you would make a locked down managed linux OS akin to ChromeOS. Maybe there would be a way to do something like that that’s also faster to setup, but idk.

*centipedes are the name for the ones we used.

I only ever do the ender dragon on multiplayer with friends so I don’t have to do the grind leading up to it.

Ethos MC vids in general. I also have a fair bit of nolstalgia for some of the old Chuggaconroy series (might have forced jokes, but tbh I can’t remember).

I’m working through some of the older Ace Combat games after playing Ace Combat 7 and really enjoying it. Finished Ace Combat 4, and I’m moving on to 5 next and then zero after that.

Honestly the pasta sounds pretty good from how it’s described.

I can only speak for the first 3 paid dlc, since I still haven’t played the castlevania one. The first 3 essentially add an alternate route to the game, so about 6ish levels and 5 bosses between them. With the exception of the queen and the sea*, the DLC content isn’t that much harder than base game stuff, and it’s all accessible in the games easiest difficulty (generally they’re easier than stuff from the free updates lol). They’re pretty good at adding a bit of extra variety in what routes you can take through the game, and add some extra items. Compared to some other games I play (stellaris), the DLC do feel pretty optional which is nice to see, and to the best of my knowledge they were also partially intended to support the creation of the free content as well.

*the bosses in that dlc are rough ngl. Queen boss fight is really fun though.

I use Ubuntu currently. I was considering daily driving Debian 12 now that it works on my desktop, but I couldn’t think of any significant reason to use Debian 12 instead of Ubuntu (I’m mostly just indifferent towards a certain packaging format that a vocal contingent of the linux community hates). I’d say any distro is “good for gaming” as long as it has good drivers for your GPU of choice. I’ve kind of just lost interest in the “latest and greatest” tech in the Linux ecosystem so LTS distros like Ubuntu (and stuff based on it) and Debian stable are what I gravitate towards now.

I mean, free software is somewhat political by nature. Of course there’s those who refuse to use anything nonfree, but I can’t imagine any movement in general that doesn’t end up with some vocal extremists. I do find some of the attempts at stuff like fully foss hardware neat though.

I do think GPL makes it a bit more feasible to dual license your project as commercial and open source though, which makes a bit more sense to me for anything you still want to make money off of (especially considering some of the horror stories of popular open source libraries that get next to nothing in funding). I don’t really care what other people license their stuff as though.

The irony is that if my memory of how it’s described in the book serves me correctly, the OASIS there was basically a pay to win free to play game even without the big bad corporation taking over. Like it’s an entire plot point during the beginning of the book that the main character is stuck on the world for a virtual school because he can’t afford the in game transportation fare to leave it.

I never got into the genre, but in general I just don’t really go for competitive multiplayer games anymore. I’ll try one every now and then but I don’t tend to last for more than a month or two before burnout hits.

I do like playing challenging single player games though.

Minecraft: Both due to nolstalgia, and because it’s just a really good relaxing set of albums (the post C418 tracks are also good in my opinion)

Celeste: It’s just good and also enhances the narrative.

Everhood: Wouldn’t be a good music focused game without good music.

Furi: Listen to/buy the OST if you like synths.

ULTRAKILL: I don’t know how the OST keeps getting better with each episode, but it keeps getting better with each episode.

and most recently… Pizza Tower: funky

Thank you for reading me finding slightly different ways to say “it’s just good” 6 times in a row.

On desktop there’s Freetube, which is an accountless youtube frontend, which I’ve basically been daily driving for over a year now. It’s not the best experience in the world, as it still lacks some features like playlists.

I tried using Comic Mono for coding once after seeing this video about Comic Code. Honestly it was a pretty good experience.

I do think apple’s new ARM chips are neat. Other than that, it’s been so long since I last used anything made by Apple that I can’t say I have much of an opinion on them. My opinion on mobile phones in general is that I have a pick between two ecosystems (android or iOS), both of which have their own significant issues for me personally. I want a third serious competitor in that space more than anything.

I do think people outside the tech field should look into FOSS stuff, but not necessarily that they should drop everything they’re doing and install linux (unless you really want to, in which case try it out in a vm, or backup all your files and go for it lol). Tbh unless you’ve got issues with your current setup, just keep using what you’re using as long as it makes you happy. Odds are you already use some open source stuff, since a ton of libraries/components used by various programs are open source. There’s a ton of FOSS applications that are cross platform, so you could always try those out on MacOS or iOS.

My guess is it was the situation where DDG couldn’t block Microsoft trackers in their tracking blocker applications (their browser and browser extension and not the search itself), because of the contract they had with Microsoft to use the bing search index for DDG search. I believe the problem was resolved, and never affected the search itself.

Minecraft mostly. I have a group of friends I play with in multiplayer that tend to start a new server when a new version releases.