But Snyder is an artiste! 🙄😒

Thanks, had no idea. I initially read it so long ago that “shadow libraries” weren’t much of a thing (if they existed at all yet?) and actually wrote my own scraper in Python to download it.

Worm is exactly the kind of chaos that would exist with supers. Attempted mitigation and control, but those with selfish interests and villains often coming out on top, much like those in power and wealth in the real world. WtC has a lighter perspective to tell its story, but Worm is straight up “what if the most horrible person you can think of could also kill with a glance/touch/etc. With no consequence?” And worse. Here there be monsters, quite literally, and humanity is losing the battle.

It’s an absolutely incredible series and I’ve read the whole thing twice at this point, but it’s often very depressing, and the bad can be really bad.

If you want to read Worm there are web scrapers online that can convert it to an ebook format for easier reading, rather than needing to browse the parahumans site.

I really like Marion G. Harmon’s Wearing the Cape series for this. Hero teams are governmentally regulated, and state or federally mandated, and have to work with local authorities whenever possible, often acting as first responders specifically regarding super villain events. They’re required to plan and mitigate collateral damage. Heroing is literally their job and they have standard and on-call hours, as well as patrols and the like.

Socially heroes and villains are treated kind of like celebrities, and there are sort of unwritten rules about no killing, and no going after civilian identities or people’s families outside of costume as that’s grounds for both villains and heroes to look the other way regarding the aforementioned “No killing” rule.

With the knowledge that villains are hard to impossible to fully stop, emphasis exists on imprisonment and rehabilitation, and over the course of the series some villains and heroes end up changing sides.

There’s one hero in the series who is a federal agent with the ability to replicate clones of himself and is embedded in most hero teams, as well as being secret service, generalized security, and informant as all clones have the knowledge of the rest. Nobody he works with outside of the President of the U.S. even knows how many of him are out there.

On top of this, besides the typical hero teams, there are more “B grade” teams that are not specifically super heroes but act as emergency responders and construction crews for both hero events and fights as well as generalized incidents, and things like heroes without borders that act as global humanitarian aid on a volunteer basis, similar to Doctors Without Borders.

Vigilantes are frowned upon, and can end up liable for crimes as they’re not sanctioned to use their powers to fight.

It’s a very interesting series, and deals with a lot of “real world” consequences of super heroics, including long term injury and death, PTSD and other trauma, and the impact of things like super powered terrorism and extremist groups, as well as anti-super sentiment.

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Besides that series, I’d also recommend the web serial “Worm” by Wildbow (John McCrae), but that one’s a doozy, both in terms of content (it only goes from bad to worse and things never really get better) and length (it’s absurdly long, maybe equivalent in length to 15-20 full length novels, broken up into fairly long chapters and sections).

How about Windows NoPrivacyOnlyAdsForYou Edition? Kinda rolls nicely off the tongue.

Generally underscore _ works best for this, and should be viable for both OSes.

Too little too late. They lost what goodwill they might have had with me. I dealt with that for months until I decided to flip it. I won’t be using Ubuntu in the future unless for some awful reason I specifically need an Ubuntu server (and in that case I’d still push for Almalinux or another alternative).

That delay happens on first launch every boot. Also the automatic updates happening basically whenever is nonsense. It should tell me an update is needed, not just kick it off whenever it feels like. That kind of crap is why I use Linux and not Windows, and now why I don’t use Ubuntu.

Well. in the modern day, there’s Ubuntu 22.04 and up with their insistence on snaps for many otherwise native apps. For example, Firefox as a snap and taking anywhere from 30 seconds to up to 2 minutes to launch when you first open it.

I used Ubuntu for years, pretty much from 16.04 all the way up to 22.04 but that was a line for me and I ditched it for Manjaro. The experience has been much better overall.

Snaps should be for applications that may not receive updates on current systems or have a hard dependency on old libraries for some reason. Things like Spek come to mind. To use if for something like Firefox, and not only use it, but insist on it to the point you can’t install the native version without ridiculous workarounds… it’s absurd. And on top of this, it’s especially dumb because flatpak already existed prior to snap, but as usual Canonical had to be special instead of working with community standards.

Amazon based search results integrated in the Unity dash beg to differ. Canonical has a history of being shitty.

These are things for any OS though. I mean, on XFCE I spend time setting up my preferred shortcuts, software, tools, etc.

On Mac, install rectangle, shortcuts, debloat. There’s no perfect default for everyone.

The Steam deck is a special case because it’s literally a gaming handheld (though the term handheld for that thing is admittedly loose).

And there’s still some things even with the deck. Did you set up emudeck? Heroic launcher? Configure it for desktop mode?

I don’t see any of that. Cortana is disabled via settings toggle, no AI stuff, start menu web search is disabled. Updates are set to automatic download only and are only run upon shutdown if I choose “update and shutdown” instead of just doing shutdown.

I dunno, there are legitimate things to complain about with Windows, but none of this really fits.

In my case I power on, Steam launches, and I run a game. When done, I press the power button and it shuts down. That’s it.

I don’t need a push, a Linux machine is my daily driver (and has been for something like 8+ years now), and I’ve worked in IT doing virtualization/automation/data management and compliance for several years. I spend a lot of time in the terminal.

To me the Windows gaming PC is essentially a console, no different than a PS5 or a Switch is to someone else. It’s been up and running as such since before Proton was fully viable and for its use case I don’t see a need to change it until it’s due for a rebuild/replacement/upgrade.

That was just one example. And I’d you review that page you linked, they don’t all disagree, there were more than a few reporting issues with it. It’s gold rated, but not platinum.

I’m glad you’re enjoying the experience, but either way the point I was making is that my gaming PC is just an appliance. It works and I have enough other things to do that I don’t feel like reinstalling the OS and a butt-ton of games.

When I need to do a rebuild/upgrade in the future I’ll likely revisit Linux with it, but until then I don’t see the point. I only turn it on a few hours a week to game and otherwise it’s off. And when it is on, I just want to game, not potentially spend time fiddling or troubleshooting if something isn’t as expected.

I have some games I play that do not play nice with Proton. In particular, my wife and I are pretty obsessed with Solasta: Crown of the Magister (over 500 hours and counting), which has poor compatibility in wine and proton to my understanding.

Besides, for now I don’t need the hassle. I boot up gaming PC, Steam launches, I play, then I shut down. I don’t need an excuse to leave the gaming rig powered on when I’m not using it. Maybe if and when I end up rebuilding it.

Same. I main a Manjaro mini-PC but have a separate Windows gaming rig. No ads. I did use a reg key to disable start menu web search a while back but otherwise haven’t made any system changes.

You’re not likely to do that for $150. You might be able to pull an old Dell Precision T5500 tower with a weak Xeon on eBay for cheap and refit it with more ram, better CPU and cheap non-redundant storage for $200 - $250.

For sake of power requirements though, seriously consider your use case and needs. You can get by pretty well with cheap mini-PCs like Intel NUCs or AMD minis like Beelink for pretty cheap and just cluster them with something like Proxmox to scale out instead of up when you need additional resources. This will be reasonably priced and keep the power bill and noise levels down.

I’m still working in tech (remotely), but otherwise living the “hermit in a cabin” lifestyle. It’s nice.

Manjaro has a pretty great out of the box experience, everything just works via the GUI, including software management (and even pulling packages from the Arch AUR repos).

I use the terminal out of preference, and because it’s where I’m comfortable, but I can’t think of any situation it’s actually needed for general desktop use.

XFCE 4 Life.