I’m currently playing Astrox Imperium. The dev was out of communication for a while and is now back, though he is going to finish it up as best he can and then later on make it open source since I guess he’s burned out on it or something. It’s a game I really like. It’s a sandbox space trading/combat single player game that is often referred to as “Eve Offline”.

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

For the most part, yes. I’ve modded Skyrim, with SKSE and haven’t run into any mods I couldn’t add. Satisfactory has linux support for mods through the community-built mod launcher, so I haven’t had any problems there. If you are comfortable copying files around, sometimes editing text files, uncompressing files, and other like tasks then you’ll be fine. The only troubles I have had are running trainers that run alongside the game and connect to the running executable. There is one of the Resident Evil 2 remake I wasn’t able to get going. I think there are methods to do this, I just haven’t looked into them in detail yet.

For most things involving games in Linux, you need to have a small amount of tweaking skills, and that’s it. You might have to copy a launch string into the Steam launch setup, or you might need to download a tweaked copy of Proton to get something running well (Glorious Eggroll builds). If you have those skills or can learn them, you’ll be fine. It’s kind of fun, too. If you don’t have those skills or want to learn them, you’ll be restricted to not being able to get the best experience when running some games and there will be the occasional game in your backlog that won’t run at all without it.

Not trying to scare anyone off, but that’s been my experience with Linux gaming. I’m comfortable enough on Linux that it hasn’t been a problem, but some people might find it more of a hurdle to get over.

When people get in a rage about “the rich”, those kinds of distinctions generally go out the window.

Yeah, Ubuntu has been consistently pissing me off. Just not enough to go distro hopping yet. The worst part for me is that apt now tells you that you are missing some security updates to temp you into buying whatever their service is. Great, thanks. Maybe I’ll try KDE Neon or Pop! OS soon.

+1 for the package manager. No need to find some website to download what you want while having to worry about whether you’re at the right one and if you’re going to download a virus or ransomware or something. I can’t believe that’s the normal way to install software on windows, download something from a website and hope it’s the right thing. Much better to browse a bunch of software that is designed to work well on your system and is free besides.

One big thing for me is that linux doesn’t try to push you to do anything. I run simulations and they are a pain to set up again sometimes so having the computer decide to update itself out of the blue is completely unwanted. Linux will wait until you are ready. This can have a downside if you don’t keep up on updates, but it’s far less a concern than it is in the Windows ecosystem.

I bought myself a copy of NT 4.0 back in the day.

It’s amazing to me that some company writes some awesome tech that allows users of one OS to run games on another OS that the game was never designed for and they complain because they might have to read protondb.com and copy something into a box in settings and maybe click another checkbox and select proton experimental from a drop-down list. I’ve been on linux as my daily driver at home since 2002-ish. I went years without playing most games (other than some wine experiments and old school rogue-likes), and right now the world has completely changed. If the AAA studios would enable a checkbox, most of their games would work with anti-cheat, but they want too much control of your system. I play games on an older nvidia cpu that work amazingly well. I had no desire to go back to Windows before, let alone now that gaming went from famine to feast in just a few years on linux. Valve has completely changed the linux landscape and has made it much much easier to get rid of Windows for good.

For the jetpack doubters (I was one too), someone posted this link on slashdot. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see a picture of a girl who snapped a picture on her phone of what is very clearly a guy in a jetpack of some kind. The theory is the miners use them to scout new locations to see if enough minerals are present to clear a road to them.

I’m a mess of un-ticked off mental loose ends :)

I could totally see having something like this take hold of me, but it just hasn’t as far as video games are concerned.

I tend to treat books differently, for what it’s worth. I don’t review them or list them, but a book sitting around that I haven’t read is more of a mental loose end for me than a video game is. Not sure why. I also feel obligated to give a book a really good try before finally bouncing off it forever. Like, this is the 4th time I’ve read this book and have never gotten beyond page 700 before. Calling this one done.

This might sound negative, but I don’t mean it that way. I just think differently about this. I’m glad for those who do enjoy keeping logs and writing about and reviewing games, but it’s not something I really want to do.

I guess I’ve never felt the need to keep a log of what I play. I’m either enjoying myself, or I bounce off of it to something else. I’ve also never really been stressed about a backlog. To me my backlog of games isn’t a list I need to complete, it’s a list of choices I currently have if I’m looking for something to do. I don’t even really have a backlog, just a list of games on steam and/or my hard drive. Along that same vein, I don’t feel pressured to finish games. If I’m really into one and I’ve made a lot of progress, I’ll push it through. If I’m not feeling it, I don’t. Games to me shouldn’t be a chore. I do give them a good try, though, because it sometimes takes a while for a game to hit it’s stride.

To me, because I’m not feeling those urges, keeping a list would be more of a chore for me than anything else.

I honestly believe a HUD minimap is one of the worst game UI elements a game can have. There is rarely a canonical explanation to begin with as to why your character magically knows the layout of rooms they haven’t entered and even worse that they know the position of enemies.

I agree. I like the way old-school rogue-likes would handle it (where you’re an @ symbol). You wouldn’t see anything you haven’t seen, but your map would remember where you have been and what things looked like at the time you last saw it (more or less). I’d personally just rather have a compass than a minimap, that way it could tell me which way I was facing and I’d have to rely on environmental cues for the rest. Maybe footprints if you have walked by there lately (or something has).

An unpopular opinion I know, but most of the Boomers you’ll ever run across are just average joes who worked shit jobs trying to get by on small amounts of money in a world ruled by the mega rich, just like most of us are. If you have to bring judgement down like some kind of vengeful god, maybe worry a bit more about collateral damage.