It’s not the game everyone hoped to be but it’s very good when including the expansion Phantom Liberty. You should give that one a try. It’s probably the best expansion CDPR has made so far, or at least on par with W3 Blood & Wine (I’m still not sure, but I have to give credit for their huge effort with Phantom Liberty). It (alongside the 2.x patches) was CDPRs genuine effort to save the game and their reputation, and I think they succeeded. The base game without the expansion can get very boring in the second half of the game which is why I consider PL to be mandatory. A good time to start Phantom Liberty is just before going to Embers to meet Hanako. If you haven’t played it for a long time, you should play it again with PL, it’s really well made.
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I’ll do a (simplified) Windows analogy, if you’re already familiar with Windows.
Microsoft Windows is closed-source/proprietary, which means only Microsoft has the source code for it, and only Microsoft is legally allowed to create or distribute copies of Windows. “Windows 11” for example is a “distribution” of Windows containing the “Windows NT kernel” (core of the OS) alongside other important software to make the OS usable, like a boot loader, service layer, graphical interface, desktop environment, and lots of included “system” applications like a file explorer, a web browser, apps to adjust settings, apps to display menus and task bars, and so on.
“Linux” by itself is just the kernel, the core of the OS. Which is by itself not a “usable” operating system yet, just like holding a CPU in your hand doesn’t allow you to use it yet. More components are needed for that. Since Linux is open source and under a permissive license, anyone (even you) can go ahead and create an operating system made with the Linux kernel. If you do that, this is called a distribution or “distro” of Linux. Since there’s not just one company allowed to do that, many distributions exist. They all made their own operating system on top of the Linux kernel. Even though hundreds of distros exist, only a handful of them are actually popular, stable, secure and recommended for general use. They all use similar, but sometimes different software to include in the distribution. Like the Linux kernel, most of that software is open source so it can also be modified or extended.
Since “Linux distribution” is rather long to write, people often just write “Linux” but mean the whole distribution, not just the kernel. These are just common inaccuracies in communication, but what the person meant should be obvious from the context.
Common and recommendable Linux distributions (= full, usable operating systems) include: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Arch, Debian. These are full operating systems and they all include the Linux kernel at their core. Of course, the similarities go further than that. Most distros are similar enough that if you’ve learned one, you can also use any other with little additional things to learn. However, some distros are deliberately a bit more different or tailored to more specific users or use-cases, for example Arch targets more experienced Linux users because it’s a very minimalistic distro, it expects the user to know which packages he wants to install. It pre-installs almost nothing. You can think of this like “Windows Server Core” where it just boots into a minimalistic terminal by default, no usable GUI yet, but you can of course install the desktop environment and everything if you need it and make a full-featured desktop out of it. The distro just doesn’t want to preinstall anything which you later might not like, which is why it gives you the choice, but that makes it a minimalistic distro and it’s harder for beginners to use that way. Other distros like Mint are much more similar to the client editions of MS Windows in that they preinstall everything the user needs for a desktop OS and more, so that the user can boot into and use the desktop as quickly and easily as possible. And then there are even more special-purpose distributions like Kali Linux which includes things like penetration testing tools (i.e. “hacker tools”), which makes it a distribution for IT security people, so they can boot into it and have access to most needed tools right away without installing much else (also good on a bootable USB stick). But usually, in general threads like this one, people don’t talk about specific-use distros, but about generalist distros which you can install and use as a regular desktop OS.
Desktop environments also exist on Windows but there’s basically only one, made by Microsoft. In the Linux world there are several to choose from. The most common ones are: KDE Plasma, Gnome, Cinnamon, XFCE. These desktop environments contain window managers or compositors, task bars or panels, menus, various tools like file managers, process viewers and text editors, and various background programs. This is all needed for the user to have what is commonly known as “a desktop environment”, because if you didn’t have one, you’d be basically staring at a screen containing at most a cursor and a wallpaper, with no way for you to interact with anything. Of course, these can look and feel different from each other (just like Windows looks and feels different than MacOS), and they have different features and strengths and weaknesses, but their goal is always the same. And as usual in the open source world, there’s not just one project but multiple, and out of those multiple a couple are popular, viable and stable enough so that they are usually included in most Linux distributions. Which is why most distros also give the user the choice to have a specific variant of the distribution with a specific desktop preinstalled. For example, Ubuntu also has Kubuntu (= Ubuntu with preinstalled KDE Plasma) or Xubuntu (= Ubuntu with preinstalled XFCE). These can have various names but in the end it’s just the base distribution (“Ubuntu”) with a different preinstalled “face” so to say (and you can change those faces or desktops from within the same distro, of course). Most other things are exactly the same between those distribution variants.
As a new user, you don’t need to learn about everything. Just pick an easy to use generalist desktop distro like Linux Mint and use the default desktop environment or variant which they provide or recommend by default. You can start experimenting with more choices later on if you want, but you also don’t need to. If you have something you’re comfortable using, then you can just stick with that.
Experience with relatives who had no prior experience with Windows or Linux: installing Linux for them was great, painless and also facilitates troubleshooting for me. No problems here. Mostly using Linux Mint for those purposes, it’s a great distro for non-techy people.
Experience with relatives with prior Windows experience (but no Linux experience): a mixed bag. Some use Linux happily now (thankfully), some returned to Windows because they couldn’t change their habits or have weird specific incompatibility issues with niche hardware which they also don’t want to solve in a different way. I’ve kind of stopped giving support to those, since I don’t want to give Windows support in my free time. I sometimes have to do it work-related, that’s more than enough Windows contact for me. I also refuse to give buying advice on any products by Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Amazon or Google, with only very few exceptions (e.g. Pixel phones, because they’re very secure and with GrapheneOS installed they’re the best general mobile phone option). It’s a bit of an ethical dilemma because I’d like to help the people but also don’t want to directly or indirectly support those companies. I always offer them help if they use Linux or the things I recommend.
- GUI: Thunderbird
- TUI: neomutt
- Android: K-9 (soon to be Thunderbird)
Dumb user friendly (having no particular background): yes
Dumb user friendly (having Windows background): no
Windows knowledge makes learning other OS harder because Windows is the weirdest OS out there.
Windows will continue to get more and more user-hostile as time goes on, and they want everyone to have a subscription to Microsoft’s cloud services, so they can be in total control of what they deliver to the user and how the user is using their services/apps, and they also will be able to increase pricing regularly of course once the users are dependent enough (“got all my work-related data there, can’t just leave”).
The next big step that will follow after the whole M365 and Azure will be that businesses can only deploy their Windows clients by using MS Intune, which means MS will deploy your organization’s Windows clients, not your organization. So they’re always shifting more and more control away from you and into MS’ hands. Privacy is always an obvious issue, at the very least since Nadella is CEO, but unfortunately the privacy-conscious people have kind of lost that war, because the common user (private AND business sector) doesn’t care at all, so we will have to wait and see how those things will turn out in the future, they will start caring once they are being billed more due to their openly known behavior (driving, health, eating/drinking, psychology, …) or once they are being legally threatened more (e.g. your vehicle automatically reports by itself when you’ve driven too fast, or some AI has concluded based on your gathered data that you’re likely to cause some kind of problem), or once they are rejected at or before job interviews because of leaked health data or just some (maybe wrong) AI-created prognosis of your health. So I think there will be a point when the common user will start caring, we just haven’t reached that point yet because while current data collection and profile building is problematic because it’s the stepping stone to more dystopian follow-ups, it alone is still too abstract of an issue for most people to care about it. Media is also partly to blame here when they do reviews or news about new devices and then just go like “great camera and display, MUST BUY” and never mention the absurd amount of telemetry data the device sends home. MS is also partnering with Palantir and OpenAI which will probably give them even more opportunities to automatically surveil every single one of their business and private sector users. I think M365 also already gives good analytics tools to business owners to monitor what their employees are doing, how much time they spend in each application, how “efficient” they are, things like that. Plus they have this whole person and object recognition stuff going on using “smart” cameras and some Azure service which analyzes the video material constantly. Where the employees (mostly workers in that case) are constantly surveilled and if anything abnormal happens then an automatic alert is sent, and things like that. Probably a lot of businesses will love that, and no one cares enough about the common worker’s rights. It can be sold as a security plus so it will be sold. So I think MS is heavily going into the direction of employee surveillance, since they are well-integrated into the business world anyway (especially small and medium businesses) and with Windows in particular I think they will move everything sloooowly into the cloud, maybe in 10-15 years you won’t have a “personal” computer anymore, you’re using Microsoft’s hardware and software directly from Microsoft’s servers and they will gain full, unlimited, 100% surveillance and control of every little detail you’re doing on your computer, because once you hand away that control, they can do literally anything behind your back and also never tell you about it. Most of the surveillance stuff going on all the time already is heavily shrouded in secrecy and as long as that’s the case there will be no justice system in the world being able to save you from it, because they’d first need concrete evidence. Guess why the western law enforcement and secret services hunted Snowden and Assange so heavily? Because they shone some light into what is otherwise a massive, constant cover-up that is also probably highly illegal in most countries. So it needs to be kept a secret. So the MS (and Apple, …) route stands for total dependence and total loss of control. They just have to move slowly enough for the common user not to notice. Boil the frog slowly. Make sure businesses can adapt. Make sure commercial software vendors can adapt. Then slowly direct the train into cloud-only territory where MS rules over and can log everything you do on the computer.
Linux, on the other hand, stands for independence. It means you can pick and choose what components you want, run them whereever and however you want, build your own cloud, and so on. You can build your own distro or find one that fits your use case the most. You’re in a lot of control as the user or administrator and this will not change considering the nature of open source / free software. If the project turns to sh!t, you’re not forced to stick with it. You can fork it, develop an alternative. Or wait until someone else does. Or just write a patch that fixes the problematic behavior. This alone makes open source / free software inherently better than closed source where the users have no control over the project and always have to either use it as it is or stop using it altogether. There’s no middle ground, no fixes possible, no alternatives that can be made from the same code base because the code base is the developer’s secret. Also, open source software can be audited at will all the time. That alone makes it much more trustworthy. On the basis of trustworthiness and security alone, you should only use open source software. Linux on its own is “just” the kernel but it’s a very good kernel powering a ton of highly diverse array of systems out there, from embedded to supercomputer. I think the Linux kernel can’t be beaten and will become (or is already) the objective best operating system kernel there is out there. Now, as a desktop user, you don’t care that much about the kernel you just expect it to work in the background, and it does. What you care more is UI/UX, consistency and application/game compatibility. We can say the Linux desktop ecosystem is still lacking in that regard, always behind super polished and user-friendly coherent UIs coming from especially Apple in that regard (maybe also a little bit by Microsoft but coherent and beautiful UIs aren’t Microsoft’s strong point either, I think that crown goes to Apple). That said, Apple is very much alike Microsoft in that they have a fully locked-down ecosystem, so it’s similar to MS, maybe slightly less bad smelling still but it will probably also go in the same direction as MS does, just more slowly and with details being different. Apple’s products also appeal to a different kind of audience and businesses than MS’ products do. Apple is kind of smart in their marketing and general behavior that they always manage to kind of fly under the radar and dodge most of the shitstorms. Like they also violate the privacy of their users, but they do it slightly less than MS or Google do, so they’re less of a target and they even use that to claim they’re the privacy guys (in comparison), but they also aren’t. You still shouldn’t use Apple products/services. “Less bad than utterly terrible” doesn’t equal “good”. There’s a lot of room between that. Still, back to Linux. It’s also obviously a matter of quality code/projects and resources. Big projects like the Linux kernel itself or the major desktop environments or super important components like systemd or Mesa are well funded, have quality developers behind them and produce high quality output. Then you also have a lot of applications and components where just single community developers, not well funded at all, are hacking away in their free time, often delivering something usable but maybe less polished or less userfriendly or less good looking or maybe slightly more annoying to use but overall usable. Those applications/projects could use some help. Especially if they matter a lot on the desktop because there’s little to no alternative available. On the server side, Linux is well established, software for that scenario is plentiful and powerful. Compared to the desktop, it’s no wonder why it’s successful on servers. Yes, having corporations fund developers and in turn open source projects is important and the more that do it, the more successful those projects become. It’s no wonder that gaming for example took off so hugely after Valve poured resources and developers into every component related to it. Without that big push, it would have happened very slowly, if at all. So even the biggest corpo haters have to acknowledge that in capitalism, things can move very fast if enough money is being thrown at the problem, and very slowly if it isn’t. But the great thing about the Linux ecosystem is that almost everything is open source, so when you fund open source projects, you accelerate their growth and quality but these projects still can’t screw you over as a user, because once they do that, they can be forked and fixed. Proprietary closed-source software can always screw over the user, no one can prevent that, and it also has a tendency to do just that. In the open source software world, there are very few black sheep with anti-user features, invasive telemetry, things like that. In the corporate software world, it’s often the other way around.
So by using Linux and (mostly) open source products, you as the user/admin remain in control, and it’s rare that you get screwed over. If you use proprietary software from big tech (doesn’t even matter which country) you lose control over your computing, it’s highly likely that you get screwed over in various ways (with much more to come in the future) and you’re also trusting those companies by running their software and they’re not even showing the world what they put in their software.
code: camel or snake, depending on language
files/dirs: snake + kebab + dot mixture (trying to avoid caps and special chars here)
MI is great, I played 1+2 when they were new (in the 90s), they were brilliant back then. These days, they’re probably still good point&click adventure games. There were some special editions or remasters which probably make them play well on modern machines. They belong to a long list of awesome LucasArts point&click adventures during the 90s and early 2000s. Most of these games are great. You should definitely try them out, especially if there are remasters available. But you can also play the originals using ScummVM most likely. Ron Gilbert is like the mastermind behind the series. He still creates adventure games to this day. And they’re all pretty good, but the genre is kind of niche these days. It wasn’t niche back then. It was just as big as action or soulslike games are today. The Monkey Island titles were probably the most successful or popular ones of the bunch. But there are some others which are equally good. Adventure games are rare these days but basically they are like puzzle games where you have to solve certain situations by combining items, finding items in the first place, trying different approaches, and so on. You kind of know once you’ve overcome a challenge when you were able to progress further in the game. There’s little to no handholding, but also little to no handholding needed. There’s one timing-based riddle in the original Monkey Island which I never liked that much, but it’s still a funny one. It’s not hard but it doesn’t really fit the genre well because nothing else is timing-based. It does fit the game’s art, setting and humor well though. The soundtrack is nice indeed. This is probably the most well-known track: https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=FoT5qK6hpbw
4·3 months agoYes, but my post is for the people who DO care about privacy issues. I also don’t like the defeatist’s attitude. You can always start making things better. My post is for those who want to make a better informed decision, that’s all.
45·3 months agoYeah, you should use Linux regardless. ;-)
Reasons are the data transmissions happening by default and Mozilla’s questionable inclusion of add-on things like Pocket. See for example:
https://www.kuketz-blog.de/mozilla-firefox-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil20/
vs.
https://www.kuketz-blog.de/librewolf-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil8/ and https://www.kuketz-blog.de/mullvad-browser-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil22/
You might need to translate the site to English. If you compare that, you can see why it’s easy to recommend the forks over the original. That said, you CAN configure Firefox to also behave well, but that takes an extra effort. It is far from there by default.
Well, they’re only doing what they announced already like 1-2 years ago. So we knew it was coming. This is also accompanied by Google making YouTube more restrictive when viewed with adblockers. Google is (somewhat late, to be honest) showing its teeth against users who block ads. I always expected it to happen but it took them quite some time. Probably they wanted to play the good guys for long enough until most users are dependent on their services, and now their proprietary trap is very effective.
On the desktop, you should switch to a good Firefox fork right now. Firefox can also be used but needs configuring before it’s good. The forks LibreWolf or Mullvad Browser are already very good out of the box. There’s the potential issue of the forks not being updated fast enough, but so far these two have been fast. Mullvad shares a lot of configuration with the Tor Browser, so using it may break some sites. LibreWolf might be “better” for the average user because of that, but otherwise I think Mullvad is the best Firefox fork overall.
On mobile, Firefox-based browsers aren’t recommended, because on Android, the sandboxing mechanism of Firefox is inferior to that of the Chromium-based browsers. And on iOS, all browsers (have to) run on Apple’s proprietary Webkit engine anyway, but well this is Apple we’re talking about so of course it’s all locked-down and restricted. It’s one of the reasons I don’t even like talking about Apple that much, just be aware that as an iOS user, your choice doesn’t mean as much when it comes to browsers, and your browser might not behave like you think it does on other platforms.
So on mobile, I’d suggest things like Brave, Cromite or Mull. Or Vanadium (GrapheneOS). If the browser doesn’t have built-in adblocking capability which sidesteps the MV3 restrictions, make sure to use an ad-blocking DNS server, so your browser doesn’t have to do it. But you still need it. Adblocking not only helps you retain your sanity when browsing the web in 2024, but it also proactively secures you against known and unknown security threats coming from ads. So adblocking is a security plus, a privacy plus, and a sanity plus. It’s absolutely mandatory. As long as the ad industry is as terrible as it is, you should continue using adblocks. All the time. On every device and on every browser.
The ad industry is itself to blame for this. There could in theory be such a thing like acceptable ads, but that would require ads to be static images/text, not fed by personal data, and not dynamically generated by random scripts which could compromise your security, and not overly annoying. Since that is probably never going to happen, you should never give up using adblockers. Since they basically fight you by reducing your security and privacy, you have a right to defend yourself via technical means.
While this does seem overly restrictive and out of place there, the result of this isn’t bad, because everyone should be at the most recent vesion at all times, period. If you aren’t, you’re exposed to more security holes and bugs. So it’s weird that that program forces you to do that, but it’s still not bad that you’re forced to do it. If you get what I mean. For some less-caring users who’d otherwise never install updates, forced updates are actually a net positive.
“We”, no. “Too many”, yes. In general, hard dependencies on proprietary software or services are often overlooked or ignored as potential future problems. Recent examples of this are Microsoft and VMware. Once the vendor changes things so that you don’t like anymore, or drives up prices like crazy, you’ll quickly realize that you have a problem you can’t solve other than switching, which you might not even be prepared to do short-term.
The Windows world now experiences this because Microsoft is no longer interested in maintaining a somewhat quality operating system, they are mostly interested in milking their user base for data, and don’t hesitate to annoy or even disrupt their user base’s workflows in a try to achieve that goal.
Many Windows users are currently looking at Linux because of this, but the more your whole workflow is based on dependencies to proprietary Windows-only software, the harder your time to switch will be. If you still use Windows today, you should at least start using more open source or cross platform software, which also will work on Linux, because you are on a sinking ship and there will probably be a time when you can’t take MS’ BS anymore and want to switch. Make it easier for you in the future by regarding Linux compatibility in the hard- and software you use today.
8·3 months agoI hope that our courts in western democracies are strong enough to stop these developments, but I fear they ara not. Once this kind of stuff is being attributed to (even completely unproven) “higher security” or “national security”, and once secret services run the software and identification routines, it will land in the same extra-legal space as internet mass surveillance already lives in: “No no, we’re not doing that. Okay, you got us, we’re doing it, but only in limited scope. Okay, you got us, we’re doing it on everyone, but it’s important for national security and we can’t disclose anything else”. And that’s usually when nothing can be done anymore about this, and laws and ethics will be outmaneuvered.
Well, Linux is like a juggernaut that’s inching ever closer in all sorts of areas (while already dominating in some areas). The time frame where it makes sense for Microsoft to spend increasing amounts of resources to maintain and further develop Windows is closing, and if you look closely, they’ve pretty much shown that Windows is not at all priority #1 anymore since at least Nadella became CEO. We also live in a world which is increasingly becoming OS agnostic, which is bad for Windows’ dominance and great for Linux, MacOS, and others (because there’s less and less relevant applications specifically requiring Windows). Of course, Linux on the desktop also grows stronger and more mature year after year, which further accelerates the change.
There will also be some points in time which hugely accelerate things, like Valve going all-in on Steam Deck and Proton and to make Steam a more independent store/community platform, and also Microsoft making Windows worse and more user-hostile over time. From a business perspective, it makes sense for MS - they want to go full cloud (= full control), almost full removal of control for the user, and full ingestion of as much data from the user as they can - to sell it, utilize it for own purposes, and train AIs with it. It’s what increases profits in the short-term. A lot of companies are doing that kind of stuff. MS is just one of the more ruthless ones, which, again, makes sense, because they still have a big userbase to exploit. In the long-term, they’re damaging, no, DESTROYING Windows’ reputation as a half-decent OS (even among Windows fans) and driving more and more users to the alternatives. It’s kind of inevitable. MS’ striving for profit has doomed Windows, and soon, when no single company will be able to compete with the ever evolving Linux ecosystem anymore, Windows is also doomed. It’s kind of a law of nature now. It’s not a question of if, just when.
(I’ve used both Windows and Linux extensively, Windows since MSDOS/Win3.x, Linux since 1998. About 10 years ago, I’ve switched exclusively to Linux and banned Windows into a VM only that gets booted less and less [I think it’s been off for 2 years already]). I, for one, welcome our new old Linux overlords.
Now that you know better, make sure to keep an eye on Windows or MacOS only dependencies in the future, and avoid those.
- Closed source (has always been bad for an OS, a 1-US-company controlled blackbox at the heart of your “personal” computer)
- Privacy nightmares (and getting worse)
- Forced cloud integrations (and getting worse)
- Forced AI integrations (and getting worse)
- More bloat and ads (and getting worse)
- More restrictions (e.g. local user accounts) (and getting worse)
- More dark patterns to try to annoy the user and get him/her to accept something that MS wants (and getting worse)
- More opt-out, on-by-default bad stuff being added (and getting worse)
- There’s probably more…
The question is wrong: it’s not why do you “still” hate Windows. I did like Windows 7. It was the last Windows I liked. After that, it’s just a downhill enshittification spiral. The only real question is: at which point will it be too oppressive for the common user that even the most common user will try to avoid it entirely. And I fear that there’s still more than enough room for MS to make Windows worse before enough people migrate away from it.
1·4 months agoThe “opposite” was just referring to those 2 aspects - Mullvad has stronger anti-fingerprinting which leads to more breakage. Librewolf has that aspect reversed. Of course, both browsers are similar overall. That’s just one detail where they prioritize differently.
Don’t use Onedrive, Dropbox or Google Drive (all privacy nightmares). Instead:
Furthermore, accessing Onedrive from Linux might be painfully inconvenient because there’s no official proprietary client for it by MS. There are 3rd party clients but I’m not sure how good they are, also MS could at any point change their API or even block unofficial clients, rendering your unofficial client useless at least for a time period.