So, not graphic, just verbose.

pegging -v

Barclay, stop pissing the holosuite!

The 2 live crew bowl cut.

I’m currently using this. It doesn’t appear to have a way to auto import a list of subscriptions. But it fits all of OPs other requests. It also has a jellyfin add on to import the videos into a library there with title and thumbnail.

The funny thing is that, contrary to how they act in their roles as Captain, Kirk was a studious nerd and a bit of teacher’s pet at the academy while Picard was a hard-partying drunk who not only participated in, but started bar fights.

Kirk would do his best to defend you in a bar fight and then would punish you after the fact, according to Star Fleet rules.

Picard would try to stop the bar fight from happening to begin with, would break it up if it escalated, but probably wouldn’t defend you specifically unless you had a good reason for being in the fight. He would only punish you if you were in the wrong and then it would probably be something more creative, more immediately punishing, and less impactful (career-wise), then Star Fleet’s regulations prescribe.

If it’s been more than 30 or 60 days (can’t remember which) you will be unable to sign in if you don’t have an active internet connection. I found that out in 2022 when I had to travel for work (90 days in a fairly remote area) and the only internet connection I had was at the worksite on a company computer.

That 30% cut is also done on the Xbox and Playstation stores. I would assume Nintendo does the same thing.

It also sounds like Valve’s price parity agreement only applies to Steam keys. So, if a developer or publisher wanted to provide the game through their own storefront or on another third-party platform then they could charge whatever they wanted.

As for the 30% cut being excessive, I don’t know if it is or not, but storing data at the scale that Valve does costs a lot of money, not to mention the costs associated with ensuring the data’s integrity and distributing the data to their users all over the world at reasonable speeds. In all likelihood they are running multiple data centers on multiple continents with 100s of petabytes of storage each with some extremely high speed networking within the individual data centers, between the data centers, and out to the wider internet. Data hosting, especially for global availability, is damn expensive.

The candy crush thing, or more generally the fact that since Windows 8 they preload third-party applications, is a relatively speaking small problem. However, the fact the specific applications that get preinstalled are based on a targeted advertising profile for the user signed into the PC, assuming you sign in with a Microsoft account is a bigger problem. While I’m sure they take every possible effort to make those profiles anonymous the data in aggregate is impossible to anonymize. There is a setting in Windows to disable that data collection, at least for advertising purposes, but it gets toggled back on “accidentally” after some updates.

They also have a number of features, like copilot (the chat bot), previously they had Cortana, that do similar kinds of data extraction. Mostly, in order to actually process the user request, but also to be used to train the model. They store it in an anonymized form, but again, it’s impossible to actually do that in practice.

That’s just two things that are installed and enabled by default that: collect user data for, what I and many others find to be unwanted purposes, don’t give the user the option to disable that data collection (only limit it), and seemingly doesn’t even consistently respect the users choice in that matter. That is by definition spyware.

They also place advertising on the desktop for things like OneDrive subscriptions, MS Office, and other paid Microsoft services. Those preinstalled apps I mentioned before are effectively ads for those applications, many of which are paid apps or have paid components to them. That is by definition adware.

Spyware and adware are forms of malware. Which makes Microsoft a malware vendor.

So, between the inherent security nightmare that is this feature and the myriad of other things in Windows that push ads, steal user data, and generally make the simple act of using the computer less secure, when do we give Microsoft an APT designation and start treating them as the world’s largest vendor of malware on the planet?

I haven’t tried any RT stuff on linux since the 30 series launched and then it was very hit or miss, a cursory google search makes it sound like things have improved substantially though.

Honestly, if you don’t have the time to tinker and learn the system you’d probably have a pretty bad time with Linux.

Pretty much regardless of distro or DE, you are going to find games that either outright will fail to run or will require some tinkering and additional troubleshooting on your part to get them to run. Nvidia GPU support, while improving, is still pretty lackluster. Especially if you want things like raytracing or DLSS.

Also, it’ll be an entirely new OS, with its own learning curve just to figure out how to do basic things.

If you only have two hours a week to game and you want to be able to just jump into a game, know that it’s going to work, and not worry about it, I wouldn’t even say stick with Windows. I’d say stick with game consoles. All of the current gen consoles have some pretty good accessibility features for people who visually impaired.

All of that said, if you still wanted to try out a Linux distro, since your main focus is gaming, I’d recommend Bazzite. It’s generally pretty stable, is very easy to rollback if an update breaks something, and has a version that is preconfigured for nvidia gpus. In its installer you can choose your DE, I’d say go with KDE, since it has all of the accessibility features you listed, you’d just need to enable them in settings.

It’s DNS. Always DNS.

I wouldn’t say I’m new to Ubisoft, more that they haven’t released a game I’ve been interested in playing since Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.

As for day one patches being a necessity for games, I would argue that if a game has major game breaking bugs on final release (AKA launch day) then the game isn’t worth playing, much less spending money on.

If a game can’t even install on a system that meets its minimum requirements without needing a patch, then I’d say that’s a feature not a bug. Since it tells me that I should strongly reconsider purchasing anything from that publisher in the future.

Bit late to respond, but as someone else pointed out, physical PC games are virtually nonexistent. Even the collector’s edition of Baldur’s Gate 3 I recently bought came as a steam key and a disk with the steam client installer and a few files for the game to make Steam think the game is installed and force an update. I was pretty disappointed by that.

And no, most people don’t have a blu-ray drive or any kind of optical media reader in their PCs these days.

As for whether or not disks that large are printed on by publishers, most physical PS5 games are printed in disks of that capacity as are 4K blu-ray releases of movies.

As others pointed out, you’re missing Vista from your list. You’re also missing Windows 2000 for Workstations (between 98SE and ME) and 8.1 (between 8 and 10) both of which were pretty good releases.

I believe they call those “Elder Gods” or “Great Old Ones.” They are far from powerless.

Makes me think of the “How it feels to chew 5 gum” ad campaign.

Which, fun fact, ended in 2007.

I’m not old. You’re old.

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The hot-take would be that Generations is the best TNG movie because we get to see Kirk die.

…Kirk was the worst captain of the Enterprise.

Do you know how many times Microsoft has had a supply chain attack inject a critical vulnerability into Windows? Or how many times a malicious insider at Apple has added a backdoor to iOS?

Nope, and you cant possibly know because those systems are closed.

With open source software you have the ability to audit the code for vulnerabilities. We have the ability to reasonably state that that incident was an exception to the rule because its so easy to see the available code and major security incidents tend to become major news.