There’s also a complete rehash of the Wikipedia article about the game, its release and reception, and maybe even a slideshow of memes before you get to the “No confirmation” part. And then a list of all the times the developers have said, “yeah, if they want to do another one, we’d take their money.”

Looking through their portfolio, I honestly don’t know how XDA and Android Police maintain their quality levels. Everything else is Taboola-level click farming junk.

Mass layoffs, though. That doesn’t usually presage a great time in a news site’s life.

Aftermath is the only gaming site I really pay attention to anymore. I still have Kotaku and PCGamer in my RSS reader, but I don’t really read any of their articles.

Support independent people who are struggling through the collapse of capitalism the same as you are. The multinational conglomerates are doing ok, though.

Because this here is for support. That there is for evangelism.

I’m a newcomer to Linux (only about a year in), but here’s what I’ve got so far:

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

Mine wasn’t at all. Valve has done a lot of work to make this seamless so that more games can be played on the Steam Deck. Check the Proton DB to see what your gamea look like.

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

I have very little experience with this, but probably. Linux users tend to be tinkerers.

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

Same answer for both: There’s Wine, and a whole bunch of setup scripts that can get even stuff like Adobe Creative Suite working with it. Worst case scenario, there’s VirtualBox for the one or two apps you might need to run Windows for. But I find that the open source options, while they might have a learning curve, tend to be substantially better than either of those options.

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

More or less, but you can pick and choose what updates you want to install and when. Most distros have a package manager that’ll let you update the kernel, the drivers, the middleware, the desktop environment, all your apps, and even the package manager itself on your schedule, from one interface. You can also just ignore it and never update anything, though I wouldn’t recommend that.

How does digital security work on Linux?

Very well. It’s much more locked-down by default, for one thing.

Is it more vulnerable due to being open source?

Quite the opposite. Open source projects are well known for being less vulnerable out of the box; Linux in particular is used by huge companies as a lightweight server OS, so it has a lot of highly-paid people committing security fixes back down to the open source project.

Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

Antivirus is a bandaid on Windows, provided because the OS was written with certain naive assumptions that let attackers get access they shouldn’t have. On Linux, those assumptions were not made. No application can be installed without your root password, for instance; downloaded files can’t even be executed without specifically making them executable; and access to edit system files is restricted by a very robust permissions system.

All of that, plus Linux’s much lower market share, also means that no malware authors are really wasting their time trying to write Linux malware. The attack vector just isn’t worth the extra effort.

So no, there’s no integrated antivirus; but for most users in most situations, it’s not needed at all.

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

Your mileage may vary significantly, but anecdotally it seems like most architectures from AMD and Nvidia have good support.

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

Maybe, but like with Windows, I assume you have to really go out of your way to do so.

And also, what distro might be best for me?

I’ve only used Ubuntu and Mint. Mint has so far been the easiest and most user-friendly of the two. It’s also regularly touted as the best for newcomers.

This ain’t it, Chief.

I have one that was proven false, and then later re-proven true: the existence of the brontosaurus.

When I was in elementary school, we were taught that they existed, they were big, etc. Then, at some point while I was in college, I discovered that actually what we thought was a brontosaur was a brachiosaur or an apatosaur. And then, when my kids went to school and learned about the brontosaur, I discovered that actually, they did exist!

There’s an old adage that says “doctors make the worst patients.”

I wonder if the same is true for game devs making the worst players.

“But what if the developers don’t think it’s important but I’m going to wish I had it? I’ll go ahead and check anyway.”

Borderlands 3 added an “auto-sell loot below [x] rarity” option, and it is amazing.

It’s ok. We’re all here for each other.

This, plus looking at a tiny little toe-sized piece of unexplored minimap on the opposite side of the world and thinking, “but what if there’s something important there?!”

You got lucky. Somebody snuck a wyrm into my codex that got all of my thralls mining for coin bits.

“Oh, dude, you gotta stop using TJ’s Action Rune of Changed Files. That runebook has a backdoor to one of the hells now. Didn’t you see the patch notes?”

“Thank you for playing Wing Commander”

This is the exact same instinct that drives us to run away from the obvious path first. “Clearly that’s where the final boss is. Let me just check what’s down this way first…”

“…oh no wait, there’s a point-of-no-return ledge here. Ok, so maybe that other way was actually where the secret was. I’ll go back…”

“…hmm, there’s another ledge on this side too. Let me just put in a save point and…ok, yeah, this one is the final boss. Let me reload and check the other path…”

“…ugh, it restarted me way back here? And respawned all the enemies when I reloaded? That’s frustrating…”

“…THEY BOTH. LED. TO THE SAME. EXACT. PLACE.”

Let’s just say this happens a lot in my house.

I need to get on that, I guess.