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.

It’s also early access, so it will presumably help with it being a bit shallow. There are a surprising amount of things locked behind various mechanics that I’m starting to stumble across. For example, if you’re a jerk to people enough your karma score will fall and now you have access to rifle through vending machines looking for loose change or robbing an ATM. I have a feeling there are a lot more of these kinds of things to discover.

Just getting out of the Sims price hell is worth it for me. I’ve had some good experiences with early access games in the past so I’m reasonably upbeat about what may come down the line.

I would characterize it as “hit or miss”. It works great for me on Ubuntu and I can’t remember any problems I’ve had in the last few years anyway. I’m not on Wayland yet, though. I would recommend AMD GPUs to people though myself to avoid them hitting the “miss” part of “hit and miss” phrase.

Also, if you’re okay downloading and installing mods manually, many of them “just work”, even some of the more tricky ones if you’re willing to tinker a bit. Some games have mod installers that are cross platform (for example, Satisfactory Mod Manager has a linux version and it works great).

Skyrim and Satisfactory.

Now that Satisfactory came out of early access and is now 1.0, I’m starting a new playthrough. I’ve got 1400+ hours in the game, 30 or so in my new save.

Linux has come a long way since I last tried it ~15 years ago

100% this. Linux has been my daily driver since ~2005 and it seems like suddenly one day I went from playing tux racer and trying to get Skyrim to work to some degree with wine to buying games on steam with little fear of having to anything more than choose proton experimental and maybe add gamemoderun to the settings. It’s a completely different world now.

Satisfactory, I’m hoping to get employee of the planet cup before 1.0 comes out.

Angband. I don’t stick with it long, but I always come back, even though I’ve never killed Morgoth or the Balrog in Moria before that. Still, I enjoy it for a while and then move on again.

I use NVIDIA gpus and they have worked fine for me.

I’m feeling old. I have a folder called Notes with a directory hierarchy with text files in them. If I want to edit something, I navigate to the appropriate directory and type “vim -S”. If I want to get to them remotely (which I haven’t really needed) I would SSH in to my system with whatever terminal emulator I had available.

The visibility of fonts to websites has been restricted to system fonts and language pack fonts in Enhanced Tracking Protection strict mode to mitigate font fingerprinting.

I’m happy to see this. It’s crazy how hard advertisers try to determine who I am when I’m actively attempting not to be shown their garbage and won’t buy it from their links. Browsers should be sending far fewer html headers, and restricting the listed fonts to a common list is a good step forward.

Bodhi Linux. I have an old System76 Starling netbook that stopped working after some updates left it in the dust. I think it had a netbook version of Ubuntu on it originally. Years later I installed Bodhi Linux on it (since it was supposed to be good for low spec machines) and I currently use it as an Angband terminal, a photo slideshow device, and occasionally surf the web with it just because I can :)

I’m amazed at how well it works with an Intel Atom processor, 2GB of ram, and a 250GB disk drive. Kudos to the Bodhi Linux team.

Ms. Pacman :)

I must be lucky. I’ve been using Linux (Debian then Ubuntu then PC Linux OS then back to Kubuntu) since approx 2002. I don’t remember ever having to reinstall my OS because an application borked on install or otherwise. Reboot, maybe, but it was normally fixable. I have been annoyed at my favorite apps disappearing in a new release and having to change my workflow, but that’s about it.

Even all the pain I had to go through to get X11 working correctly in the early days didn’t require reinstalls.

Are these built to handle pipes? If I bat a file and redirect it to a file, does it work as expected or does it add in the escape sequences for the colors, for example?