i like my AMD ATI Radeon RX 5600. after I figured out it has a tiny tiny TINY hidden physical overclock switch they don't ever mention for some godforsaken reason (which is put "on" by default, also for some godforsaken reason) to turn off, it's the most stable graphics card i've ever used.
...i just recommend turning off the tiny evil hidden crash switch of doom.
amd in general is pretty chill on linux for a large portion of people.
I exclusively use "could you repeat that?" Cuz otherwise... yeah.
Rarely, even with being careful, they do still try to expound instead of repeating, which is annoying when I'm trying to accommodate them with specific directions. But it is at least done less.
for someone totally new?
i guess it depends on what you mean by "addicting," so i'll try to put in "potential hours" as a reference. regardless i think all of these are quite fun and consuming for me for a while.
The Binding of Isaac Rebirth.
its difficulty sort of "scales" with how well you do in your runs: if you never beat mom, the next boss, the next boss etc, it'll stay "easier" for as long as that takes. (and if it gets too hard when you start beating stuff, you can always wipe your save and start over, or start a new save, hah!)
the control scheme is extremely simple and it's fine to not be completely perfect at it if you're just going for basic runs and okay with relying more on "lucking" into victory. you really don't have to take on mega-satan or whatever.
up to you if the horror-to-horror-adjacent visuals appeal or not. you do also have to be okay with the idea of dying, it's a roguelike.
you can play this for literally thousands of hours.
Slime Rancher 1.
just a fun time shlorping up slimes. very low stakes and silly and cute. meant to be pretty accessible. if you're brand new i could see it taking up some time, and it's a good way to learn "video game logic." i've spent 80 hours in SR1, playtimes can be a bit varied.
Plants vs Zombies (the original GOTY edition, and definitely not the ad-ridden mobile port)
old 2000's popcap games in general were onboarding for many a gamer back in the day. i've spent 60 hours of it on steam, no idea how much back in the 2000's. playtimes overall can be a bit all over the map on this one.
Garden Paws,
if you like cutesy and the idea of gathering stuff for villagers, with farming / animal raising mechanics. it's slightly jank but it's very endearing. no fail condition. (it's somewhat similar to stardew valley with some differences!) this can be played almost infinitely, if you really like the loop, decorating, or have a few people to play with. playtimes tend to be 40-200 hours roughly.
Wobbledogs,
if you like the idea of raising cute pets with a genome and don't mind the very subtle horror/bizarre aspects (they can die, eat each other's bodies, and they pupate like caterpillars lol.) pretty sandbox game, and you can turn death off if you want. (or "clone" dogs you want to keep with the export/import tool in the menu.) this is a newer one for me so i've only put in 35 hours, but i fully intend to go back and try for some Huge Dogs TM. average seems about 20 hours but you can spend a lot if you like raising weirdo pets.
their "hello fellow kids" energy works better for their goofy insignificant patch notes than it does for combating bad PR.
i was very on the fence about keeping it installed on a potato windows laptop i don't use for much else. this article absolutely convinced me fully not to. they could not have written a worse case for themselves if they had tried.
they have stated they even intend to try getting anticheat on macs as soon as possible. even if it is not possible, (which seems likely to me, considering the ecosystem?) their argument for axing linux could easily be used to just ditch macs. "we don't know how to secure it, and there were only 800 players [on a random, cherry picked day.]"
having a section in which they claim there are zero false positives is delusional. that's not how technology works. there will literally always be bugs, glitches, edge cases.
they claim they can currently read stuff in user mode, so it'll be essentially analogous in invasiveness, and it's straight bullshit.
this is several degrees of trust beyond "can read stuff in user mode when running"
this is "can read anything in user mode, in admin mode, on all other users on your computer, can restrict your bios and hardware, and has full potential to have permanent root access to any user or system you install in the future"
either they do not understand what they are implementing, which is a really bad sign for trusting them with it,
or they know exactly what they are doing and lying about it, which is another really bad sign for trusting them with it.
i'm gonna be honest, if they had taken the hardline "we know it's more invasive, but we need this" and kept it straight, i might have kept playing. it's the only multiplayer competitive game i have anymore.
but the ad hominem attacks in here, the calls to the "angry twitter mobs," the disingenuous and extremely loose way they play with the truth, ~~(it's not running all the time! well, it is, but we don't really think it should count)~~ that in just a few paragraphs has burned any goodwill i had towards them. they are weaponizing their own playerbase to cannibalize themselves and attack their friends for having legitimate concerns about degrees of personal invasion and that's unconscionable. that disgusts me more than the crappy implementation and the cavalier attitude ever could.
props to them, i guess, for making the only choice to be to quit a game i played happily for about a decade.
my cat didn't learn to unhook her claws until she lived with other cats and could see how they did it. was cute how much she learned from living around them for a while
I had far more issues on windows than I ever have on mint.
When I had issues on windows, which i would run into multiple times a week, the "fixes" would be hacky, slapped-together nonsense that don't even make sense on paper. I had to change almost every program manually to run as administrator. Installing old games was a nightmare and didn't always work properly, even with compatibility modes. New drivers would break stuff. Trying to learn anything new was a rabbit hole that took countless hours and then I only learned the fix for that one specific use-case, and not anything... overarching. System updates were so intrusive, installing crap I didn't want or removed manually, I disabled them completely. It was slow and boot took forever. Ending system processes via task manager didn't always work and the system would freeze often when something went wrong. Often uninstalling programs was messy and left shit all over in the system registry and files and you would have to defrag and system clean once it started getting bloated.
When my windows install finally broke completely just trying to get shit to work the way I wanted, I bailed.
Transitioning to mint was certainly a learning experience.
Reorganizing your workflow will always be more upfront work, but I found I took to the changes fairly quickly. I found the file structure the most odd, but I became very used to it and very much prefer it over how hard it is to find stuff spread scattershot in windows files. It had a lot of little quality of life things that I really appreciate, mounting and unmounting external drives felt better, way more stuff worked out of the box, old games were not a nightmare to get working because they're had longstanding fixes for years that actually make sense. Solutions, in general, make way more sense to me, and I actually get a sense that I understand why they function. My boot time is very fast and I've never broken my system (I came close once doing something incredibly stupid and very niche, but I just timeshifted back and voila, fixed.)
Fixes or changes for preference tend to "stick" for me, like when I swapped to pipewire myself it's been very smooth sailing. I can pick and choose updates or ignore packages that don't work. There was an issue with kernels for a while that significantly increased my boot times; I just postponed that update for a few versions until one of the newer ones worked. I find I can get down similar rabbit holes to learn some stuff, but it both feels more like "lasting" solutions (and I learn more about how to do other stuff) as well as just more fun. Documentation is a lot better with users who know what they're doing instead of the guesswork "well I dunno but this might have worked for me, I tried 20 fixes so it's probably one of these!" I would run into on windows troubleshooting...
I think my favourite part of linux is a lot of things I wanted solutions to, for years, usually have at least one person out there with a similar issue that wrote a small program that just does it. Does it well. For free. I spent so much time digging for really basic stuff like a sound equalizer that wasn't garbage, bloatware, full of trackers, or ransomware! I don't have to spend hours trying to find a stinkin' RGB controller that isn't awful because the choices available are just better! I don't have to spend weeks comparing and contrasting antivirus-es and hate all of them in the end!
I find mint extremely stable and have no urge to swap nor return to windows. I find it much more stable for my use-case. I really like it, actually, and I appreciate how a lot of it is set up. Been using it daily for 4 years.
I loathed windows the entire time I used it, and had been side-eyeing linux for quite a while before committing. I don't know if I'm a "normal" use-case, probably not. Possibly it is best to take my experience as, "if you keep hitting walls often in windows that frustrate the hell out of you, linux might be a decent choice for you, and might "feel easier."" Both have their own quirks and own troubleshooting, I just prefer the ones on mint and they make more sense to me. (And take me far less time.)
While you are technically correct, this is a massive PITA to turn off manually every single boot and rebooting just to play a game isn't very fun, ha. (It also breaks linux, where I play.)
For the forseeable future, unless someone is committed enough to making Darling work.
(Mac layer instead of Windowz, the mac version does not and will not have vanguard.)
This. An always-on rootkit is worlds different in terms of privacy and security than most conventional ones like EAC.
(Not like conventional ACs are good for these things either, of course. But it is many degrees less invasive.)
it's just gambling. the thrill of getting something "good" or FOMO with limited editions is what they operate on.
hello yes, i would like to grow 10,000 teeth
i'm fairly sure the point (whether calculated, or more likely, mostly not) of having politics moved there is because there is no political topic that could be discussed properly there. it makes for good, distracting noise.
it makes for a lack of meaningful critique, or for that critique to be instantly buried in bad actors. noise is a shield. noise is easily dismissable.
monetized social media, in general, is made to be clickbait, to feed negative emotions because that's what gets people addicted to outrage, it steers people towards thinking less and reacting more. nuanced discussion and thoughtful spaces are drowned out and cast aside for the loudest and most obnoxious players. this is appealing for someone trying to uphold the status quo or push society towards hate.
i don't think it's a coincidence that politicians have moved there, that spaces have become so polarized and negatively charged, and that the most prime example of both of these happenings is xwitter. everything is connected in this big, terrible, and vaguely randomly evolved system. i do think evolution is the best word for it. what lives, survives to propagate. it doesn't matter how healthy it is. the result is this blind, meandering, gargantuan worm, following the scent of blood, feeding on the worst of it all.
xwitter is easy and, notably, if you're a powerful white man, you can build your base with no accountability. it exists in this space where it's the most serious news source that almost no one takes that seriously. of course it's appealing.