Only recommendation: some wifi cards (with certain chips, I forget which) in my experience have required me to go hunt down a driver, so check reviews for any card you’re looking at to see if people report it working out of the box.

With Linux mint, with one machine, I had to explicitly open the driver manager and tell it to use the drivers for the wifi. It wasn’t obvious but I’d read it on some random forum and remembered. Once I knew that was a thing, it was easy. Opened the driver manager, plugged in the install media (USB stick) when it asked, and then told it to use the proprietary drivers.

My old desktop I went with Linux mint. I had some trouble with the installer that I didn’t solve, but switching to slightly older but still supported version of mint worked. Games worked out of the box with steam.

I was playing a MUD for a while (I’m old, but aardwolf is still going). They have a special client you can use. That worked just fine through WINE.

On my newer desktop, I tried mint. I foolishly didn’t test much on the live disk, and only after installing did I realize HDMI, Ethernet, WiFi, didn’t work. Proton also crashed explosively. That was a bad time.

I then tried pop!_os and that has worked fine. I haven’t played much yet on it- just my usual guild wars 2 and binding of Isaac, but it’s been fine.

There was a weird issue with audio crackling in gw2, but I think I fixed that by changing a setting somewhere.

I also recently installed mint on a ~2014 MacBook Air. Not for gaming, but so it can get security updates and stuff. I needed to fuss with grub - something I never would have figured out on my own by someone on stack exchange had figured out - and now it works fine. Haven’t done any games on it, but I bet it could run really light stuff better than it could have as a Mac.

Generally, I’m a big fan of it not nagging me. It doesn’t ask me to use OneDrive. It doesn’t want me to make an account anywhere. Pretty much everything can be changed if you’re determined enough. I’m pretty easy to please though, so all I’ve done for customization is add a clock widget to the desktop and turn off edge tiling.

One thing that I expect might be a headache is mods. A lot of mod tooling I think makes assumptions about windows. There’s probably a way to run like vortex in the same environment as whenever proton puts the game, but I’m not sure how to do it. You can also probably find where the game files are easily and edit them. I’m hoping the community starts adopting Linux more so people write guides (and please write them on the public web instead of making 20 minute videos or burying them in discord)

Luckily Baldur’s gate 3 (which also runs fine) has its own mod manager, and that works fine.

Oh, I did have a weird thing once where the desktop environment had a keybind that was interfering with a game once. I think middle click, maybe? I forget exactly what it was, but I just unmapped the keybind in the desktop env and the game was then fine.

In the romulan disruptor kind of way?

For many people, in-group is the only thing that matters.

I thought “Another one??” but clicked through and saw this is from June 17, 2025.

Good to know. I had some trouble a couple months back getting wifi and Ethernet working, and learned my phone can provide Internet over USB.

Social media was always kind of garbage, and the modern algorithmically sorted stuff is worse.

I’d rather just text my friends

The cops always park in the bike and pedestrian lanes in prospect park, and it makes me so mad.

Personally I feel like if you park in the bike lane for any reason that’s not life or death, people should be allowed to do what they want to your car. Maybe move it. Maybe key it. I don’t care. It’s a hazard for everyone.

I’ve lived here for almost two decades and I’ve almost never had a problem with bikes.

I did once see a driver make a right turn and hit a delivery bike kid, drag him for a few feet, and then speed off. Luckily, teenagers I guess are indestructible and the kid got up and rode away after a few minutes.

If you want better bike and pedestrian safety, the solution is probably build better bike lanes. There are a lot of spots with nothing, or a painted suggestion. There’s a spot near prospect park where they expect the bicyclist to turn right, pass through a lane of traffic, and then just hang out in the center lane with all the cars. It’s a nightmare.

Ds2 is worth playing if you like the franchise/genre. It tries some stuff different from the previous game, and some of it works.

It think it’s also easier than ds1, and maybe DS3. I almost cleared it without dying, just using a normal build. Because of the weird “lose max health on death” mechanic, if you die a lot it can snowball, but if you stay alive your max health is pretty generous.

Well, the context used to just be there. Now it’s not, and this is worse.

Fines should scale with wealth. Millionaire wants to speed? Okay, pay a $100,000 fine.

These same accounts keep denouncing tickets and speed cameras.

This is common conservative “Outgroups to bind, in-groups to protect” dysfunction. They’re bad people.

Cheaper if you ignore the externalized costs.

And yet the right wing is whining about moon laser climate control instead of this kind of thing.

Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. I think speed and accuracy of reading is also pretty low (I read like 80 wpm and 80% accuracy somewhere, but i couldn’t immediately find a good source for that).

If you’re on a text forum like this you’re probably well above the average person, and your experiences are not universal.

That said, I don’t have any data on hand about readability so you could be right. I’m sure people have studied it.

I think it’s partly because many people are only semi literate, and breaking the text up helps people read it. A larger block of text is "intimidating’

I’ve read that if you want to kill someone, the best way to do it is to hit them with your car. The authorities will just be like “Oh, well, he was walking and you hit him what a terrible accident. Well, couldn’t be helped.”

Maybe Kraft has a murder fetish. Probably he’s just a scumbag, though.

This kind of false equivalence is kind of annoying.

Doctors and serial killers both cut people, but they’re clearly not the same, are they?

I don’t know how difference france is from the US, but I generally believe people are kind of ignorant and thoughtless. These will pull in people. People click on “Four things that are secretly unhealthy - #3 will SHOCK you” chum all the time.

Yes, I am very aggressive about turning off notifications. The use case I had in mind is texts from friends, and I don’t want to turn those off. Like someone texts me something that requires thought or online connectivity, but I’m on the subway or at a concert. I want to snooze the message so it’ll remind me in a couple hours.

Sometimes for really important stuff I’ll set a timer myself, but that’s more steps than if the OS just had a “remind me later” built in.

I found a setting that alleged to enable snoozing, but it doesn’t seem to work. This is an older android phone though.