So, have you bitched at your state rep about it yet?

I mean, yeah, if you were trying to get a game to run using bare WINE in like <2010 or something, you were gonna be troubleshooting it for a while (and might still fail just because the functionality hadn’t actually caught up yet). By 2017, though, DirectX etc. support had improved drastically (Valve’s first attempt at SteamOS was already a few years old by then), so the main issue was figuring out the right configuration (which version of Windows to mimic, installing supporting libraries, etc.) and tools like PlayOnLinux and Lutris went a long way towards crowdsourcing and automating that.

And on top of that, pretty much all the platforms, even all the way down to this one, are censored in at least one increasingly-relevant way.

In 2017? Well, that’s an interesting question. On one hand, it definitely wasn’t as easy as it is now. On the other hand, I was motivated to ditch Windows and willing to make the gaming sacrifices necessary to make that happen. The last version of Windows I used was 7, and I was determined that 10 would never touch this machine – or any computer of mine going forward, for that matter. I also was done putting up with 7, given that Microsoft was starting to backport 10’s spyware and forced-upgrade BS to it by then.

It’s been a while, so I’m fuzzy on the details of what I was playing between 2017 and 2018 (when Proton came out). I think I just limited myself to the subset of my Steam games that had native Linux versions (e.g. TF2 and other Valve first-party games, Don’t Starve, Cities Skylines, etc.), supplemented with PlayOnLinux for Star Trek Online, which, being an MMO I was already committed to, was pretty much the only exception I made. Otherwise, my attitude became “if the developer can’t be bothered to support my OS, that’s their loss, not mine, and I don’t need their shitty Windows-only game anyway.”

After Proton came out and I flipped that switch to “enable Steam Play for all other titles”, I think the majority of my Steam games “Just Worked” – yes, even back at that initial release – and the ones that didn’t became compatible pretty rapidly over the next couple of years. With one exception, I don’t think I’ve had trouble getting a game working since the start of the pandemic, if not earlier. At this point, I’ve softened my “I won’t buy a new game if it doesn’t natively support Linux stance” and instead simply expect every game I buy to work. And they have!

(That one exception was Star Trek Online, which I had continued running via PlayOnLinux because (a) why mess with a working config, and (b) the Steam version of STO wants to permanently link your STO account to your Steam account, which I didn’t want to do. One day, though, they updated the launcher or something and it quit working. I eventually gave up trying to fix it in PlayOnLinux and decided to use Proton for it instead. But I still didn’t want to link my accounts, so I had to jump through these weird hoops where I installed the Steam version, but didn’t log in or play it, and instead re-imported it as a non-Steam game pointing at the executable for the Steam version and then fiddled with the compatibility settings to find a version of Proton that worked. That’s still the configuration I’m using for it to this day.)

So basically, everybody switched from expensive UNIX™ to cheap “unix”-in-all-but-trademark-certification once it became feasible, and otherwise nothing has changed in 30 years.

Kubuntu, because when I got my Vega 56 GPU on release day (August 14, 2017), I had to download the proprietary driver straight from AMD to get it working, and Ubuntu was the only distro supported by both it and Steam at the time. (Otherwise, I would’ve picked Debian or Mint.)

I don’t love Ubuntu (especially how they push Snap), but I can’t be bothered with the hassle of reinstalling my OS.

GPLv3 is less proprietary than GPLv2, in the sense that it does a better job at protecting end-users from being abused by device makers that would try to close up their Linux-based system.

Imagine having such a hard-on for letting corporations exploit your work in abusive Tivoized products that you stoop to retaliation against a company that’s actually trying to protect their customers.

They know it’s better than v2.

Yes.

Not only can people be pretty dumb sometimes, once the screenshot is on the Internet, who knows where it might get reposted, potentially without context.

You should censor the scam bitcoin address when you screenshot things like this.

Same here, although that’s probably because it’s the only one I played extensively as a kid. I always thought the Atlantica/Aquatica course was incredibly cool.

It’s hardly going to help any to come out and announce that everything is fucked

Yes it fucking would! That kind of honest assessment of reality is exactly what millions of working-class people have been clamoring for from Democrats for years now and not fucking getting!

And by “millions,” I mean more than the margin of victory.

I mean, you say that, but even straight white guys often have wives and/or daughters.

Or maybe what media thinks their job is isn’t what you think it should be. Maybe the media is deliberately promoting fascism for profit, has become our enemy, and needs to be destroyed.

#goals

In most of the places French is spoken, it is the second language (instead of English or Spanish). Only place I can think of off the top of my head where Francophones would likely also know English is Quebec and, I guess, France itself.

The other languages in the sorts of places I was talking about are mostly ones like Arabic, various sub-Saharan African indigenous languages, or Polynesian.

I don’t know the answer, but I do know I’d at least start off looking for hardware with a dedicated ASIC for routing, not general-purpose PC hardware doing routing with the CPU.

Yeah, that’s the thing: “which language is spoken by the most people” is an easy question to answer, but “which language (or combination of languages) lets me communicate well enough to get by in the most places” is much harder because the statistics aren’t necessarily collected in a way that lend themselves to that kind of analysis.

For example, Hindi is spoken by a whole bunch of people, but I’m pretty sure the vast majority of those people also speak English, so if you already know English you don’t actually need to learn it.

Depends on the route you want to take while traveling. For example, if you want to circumnavigate in a sailboat through the tropics, French is a great choice because France includes a bunch of tropical islands:

French is also widely spoken in Africa, IIRC.