Civ over mail. Physical mail. Like those old mail chess games in the times before online chess (use https://lichess.org/ btw <3 ).

Move a scout, wait 3-5 days for the answer.

I have said for a long time that I both want realistic video distortion in games instead of the usual color aberration and high-res fake pixel effects (like the stuff you see on fpv drone videos and unclassified military footage of a 420x zoom from the stratosphere and so on), and not want it, because it gives me a headache

In between the crypto scams and the AI hype, there was a brief moment of maybe a few months were GPU prices were affordable. Not good, but affordable enough so that normal people could buy them.

Oh boy, never look up big / little endian in computers

Oh, we had. Rats are common in all cities, and mice in the countryside. Sure, nowadays you'd just get an exterminator, but having a cat would prevent that as well. Our dog caught a rat in our basement once, and I'm pretty sure we avoided mice due to her presence as well.

Just wait until we have overturn the fascist system, then you'll be first against the wall!

I saw a historic photo in a magazine once, where some European colonial officers tried to tame and ride zebras

In this case, the game consists of players who choose to play it this way, without any repercussions for not playing it.

Seriously, that sounds like a person who perfected the skill of avoiding work. Something you'd laugh at as too ridiculous in a BOFH story. One should be honored to see such a master of his craft. I wish I had the poker face to pull stuff like that off.

Names are arbitrary anyway.

I see the point of something like euw-69-r47s11-vm420, but a memorisable name is more useful if you are small/specialised enough that you need to remember which box does what.

Also, let people have some fun, the world is bleak enough.

I've found myself in a similar, although, waaay less bad situation. Imho there are basically three ways:

1. Embrace the stupidity, do the bare minimum to stay employed, try to game the reviews, find meaning in your private life, side projects and hobbies

2. Enjoy that you get paid for drinking coffee while it lasts, and spend the time you have writing applications and acquiring stuff that looks good on a CV

3. Quit, whether on your own or by literally doing jack shit, accept the unemployment and/or worse job you might have to take. May or may not be an option, depending on the situation.

You are literally describing the idea of Debian. Yes, stable is old, but that is the whole purpose. You get (mostly) security updates only for a few years. No big updates, no surprises. Great for stuff like company PCs, servers, and other systems you want to just work™ with minimal admin work.

And testing is, well, for testing. Ironing out bugs and preparing the next stable. Although what you describes sounds more like unstable, the one where they explicitly say that they will break stuff to try out other stuff.

So, everything works as intended and advertised here. If you want a different approach to stability, I guess you will have to use a different distro, sorry.

I guess when you last tried it, it was at a time when a new stable came out, so testing was more or less equal to stable.

About the firefox: It ships Firefox ESR these days, meaning you get an older, less often updated tested firefox (with security updates, of course). Again, this is the whole point. Less updates, less admin work, more time to find and fix bugs. Remember the whole Quantum add-on mess, for example?

As others have said, you can install other versions of firefox (like the "normal" one) via flatpak, snap... nowadays. The same goes for other software, where you would need the newest and shiniest version sooner. I'm using debian on my work/uni laptop and a bunch of servers, and it works pretty well for me.