Thrift stores almost always have desk or standing lamps. Combined with cheap, warm colored low wattage LED bulbs (25w equivalent or lower), they add wonderful ambiance without breaking the bank.

You can play the game here on Archive.org, or you can download a copy from that page and play it in DOSBox Staging.

Here’s all the physical documentation you’ll need, such as the short story, how to play manual, and an in-world map (you’ll have to draw your own, but it’ll give you a rough idea of the land. If you find map making tedious, you could use a map someone else made).

Lastly, you’ll need this interactive copy protection wheel when it prompts you for a combination in game, right before entering a simulation.

Good luck! :D

A Mind Forever Voyaging, by Infocom.

It’s an old text adventure from the 80’s with a particularly cool and oddly relevant concept: You take the role of an AI that’s been meticulously raised in a simulation to truly become a general intelligence. The reason this project was undertaken was to eventually send you, the AI, into other simulations based in the near future to test the outcomes of various political policies of the new republican government, record your interactions, and report back to the engineers who created you.

The game’s designer said that he created the game in response to the despair he felt from Ronald Reagan being elected.

I haven’t gotten super far in it, but it has an incredibly well written short story in the manual that details all the events leading up to the start of the game, and so far the game itself is unlike anything else I’ve ever played.

Many brands incorporate either plastic fibers or a polypropylene based glue in their paper bags, so be sure to look up each brand, even if it looks like paper.

Something to bear in mind: most teabags are made with plastic, and release thousands upon thousands of microplastics that you then ingest.

As it’s becoming more clear how dangerous microplastic ingestion is, I would recommend opting for loose leaf tea with a strainer whenever possible. You can use up your existing tea by ripping open the bags and pouring the contents in a strainer.

Dreamweb.

90’s cyberpunk point’n’click with a dark mature story and a rocking soundtrack.

I disagree that stable distros aren’t good at general purpose gaming systems, they work fine unless you have very new hardware.

And sometimes the newer stuff csn bring more problems than a stable distro, depending on your hardware.

As an example, my system is an nvidia laptop with an external monitor. Unfortunately, the Nvidia driver is absolutely unusable under Wayland with this setup, which was a bummer for me, as I wanted to use Fedora with it, but starting with Fedora 41, X11 was completely phased out, so I couldn’t fall back to it.

I’m not a fan of openSUSE tumbleweed or Arch based distros, which do still support X11, which left me with the more Stable distros. Mint worked flawlessly with my setup, and I have no issue gaming.

Tl;dr there’s more nuance to stability vs bleeding edge, and both have their place.

Only issue with uBlue distros is the lack of documentation and limited help resources (many questions in the forum are left unanswered, as the uBlue team is quite small and likely can’t get to them all).

Eyyy! I see you got mint up and running, congrats dude! :D

But I guess my GPU is to «blame» for being too new

Unfortunately yes :(

The stable distros aren’t super good when it comes to the latest hardware, but but for slightly older stuff they’re pretty great.

I hope you succeed in getting mint into shape, though! :)

I tried both Bazzite and Fedora the past couple months, and this was my personal experience:

While Fedora does have a codec installing option in the installer now, it still doesn’t seem to include some common ones (couldn’t play certain formats until I installed the non-fedora flatpak VLC player).

Bazzite was very nice, though apps seemed a little slow to open. At some point all apps refused to open, which may have been my fault, but it was at that point that I noticed how incredibly sparse help documentation was, and how many questions (that were relevant to my issue) remained unanswered on the uBlue forum for months.

I think for a new user, access to good help documentation and resources is essential, so I currently don’t recommend it for newbies.

If someone comes across an active well moderated community filled with on-topic content of an objectively high quality where everyone seems to be having fun, and that someone downvotes everything in that community every day, how is that beneficial? Why don’t they post content they like? If they hate everything, why don’t they block the community? Why are they spending time and effort to downvote so much stuff every day when it would be easier, and seemingly better for their mental health, to either block and move on, or contribute the flavor of content they want to see?

No one is getting banned for downvoting content here and there, but if they’re putting effort in ensuring everything in a community is downvoted, they’d just be spreading illwill for no good reason :(

A good mod will help their community grow and flourish and have a good vibe. A mass downvoter who contributes nothing else is harmful to those things, and it makes sense a mod would want to defend their community against that.

Edit: kind’ve ironic that you simply downvoted both me and Blaze 😅

I agree that reaching out to a user like that and having them stop would be the best outcome. Though In the context of the thread, I don’t think a mod who didn’t reach out before banning would be a PTB (not that you’re suggesting that, just elaborating my thoughts).

Hm, just to be sure, you’re trying sudo apt upgrade (not update) at the end?

A distro with newer stuff likely would work out of the box, though they tend to be a bit less new user friendly compared to Mint and Pop.

Fedora is generally recommended as the best compromise, but with it comes the need to use a third party repository called RPMFusion to get patent encumbered software like video codecs and steam. After it’s setup it’s usually smooth sailing, but something to bear in mind.

A non-lts version of Ubuntu should also work, as that’s more up to date.

If you’d like to troubleshoot pop a bit more, I believe a newer kernel should be available in your repository, 6.11 perhaps? (I’m not actually sure, I just know Linux Mint has it available). If it’s not available, you could grab the Xanmod kernel, which I recall being pretty easy to install, and is very up to date.

Ah. I don’t think I’ve encountered that type of user yet. For the users I described in my comment, I give them a full instance ban. But In the case you describe, I think it’d be appropriate for a mod of the targeted community to ban them, but otherwise leave them be.

Since Pop OS is based on the LTS version of Ubuntu (long term support), it may lag behind a bit on having drivers for the very latest hardware. Mint is also based on Ubuntu LTS, which would explain why it didn’t work there either.

This guide shows how to use a PPA (basically like a mini repository with newer stuff back ported to work with the LTS) to upgrade to a newer Mesa version. Hopefully that gets you up and running!

What jumps out to me is that you mention installing a GPU driver, but most of the time with AMD cards you don’t have to mess with that as it uses the open source driver that comes with the distro.

How did you install this driver?

As your card is very new, it may benefit from a newer version of the MESA driver and a newer kernel.

The biggest advantage of private email is that it stops the email provider itself from data mining some of your most sensitive info, as Gmail and other free emails most certainly do. Basically it’s protection from surveillance capitalism, but you rightfully can’t consider it a secure way to send messages or info to other, non-encrypted users.

Posteo is only 12€ a year, so a bit cheaper. Doesn’t support custom domains though.

It’s possible to hide posts without downvoting as well.