@Pyrate

But I don't believe the governments will manage to find a way to take control of some of the actually useful cryptocurrencies.

No? You might want to take a closer look at the actions of the Canadian government and the RCMP during the Freedom Convoy protest. That might give you an idea of where things could go ...

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Have you ever noticed how any new solutions/alternatives just seem to add more middlemen? That is what is racking up the cost of everything ...

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I don't see cryptocurrencies as the solution. They're too unstable, for one thing. If they ever become big enough to be a serious concern, the governments will find a way to take control of them.

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So soon ...

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Linux Mint :wub:

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I have been a Linux Mint user since 2014 (ah, I remember Mint 13 Maya so fondly...). I use Mint for my daily driver to this day, although I am often a version or two behind the latest.

For gaming, I tested out a number of distros (Debian, Manjaro, Kubuntu, Pop!_OS) before finally coming back to Mint. I game on the XFCE edition while my daily driver is the Cinnamon edition. Pop!_OS remains my backup choice for gaming.

Like @Kimyrielle, I've found that I don't care for a rolling or even a semi-rolling release distro. I prefer the stability and control over updates that I get from Linux Mint.

I've never experienced the problems described by @Stella, in either the Cinnamon or XFCE editions. That being said, I would have recommended starting with the MATE edition until you were comfortable with Linux and all its quirks. It is the most stable of all of Mint's editions. Based on copious research and LM community advice, that was the edition I chose when I switched from Windows cold turkey. I moved to Cinnamon after I became comfortable with the Linux ecosystem.

Kubuntu is okay but, as much as I love the KDE Plasma desktop, it was just too unstable on an Optimus (dual GPU) based system. Manjaro KDE was the same.

I am still running XFCE 21.3 at the moment but I am looking forward to being able to move to Mint 22. I tried with the 22.0 point release but there were issues with the newer XFCE desktop and I couldn't get OpenMW to run, so I rolled back (quite smoothly) to 21.3. One of the flaws in the Mint upgrade process is that it doesn't update the PPA links to the ones compatible with the new version of the OS. At least, it didn't for me.

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This one caught my interest. I'm gonna have to try the demo!

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Hard to say. Thus far, Steam has not indicated that they will be offering a prepackaged total conversion like they did with Enderal. The additional check for Oblivion 2006 might complicate things.

GOG does not indicate Oblivion 2006 as a requirement for their Skyblivion package (just Skyrim SE) but I am willing to bet that it will check for an Oblivion installation on first start-up. The question is, will it accept installations from other platforms (digital or DVD)? If it does, that would be absolutely cool.

Unfortunately, I have the Steam edition of Skyrim SE and the GOG edition of Oblivion 2006. We'll see how that goes ...

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@SkullVonBones

They wanna be our friend, yet their drivers are still closed-source.....

That's a very good point. Making the source code open for public scrutiny would go a long way for building trust regarding these backdoors and other spying issues.

I see no justification for governments spying on their own citizens to that degree. It's reprehensible.

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@Pyrate

It's a long shot but I can see this becoming a reality, where the single build devs would support would in fact be a "Proton" build, that works on Windows of course, but also Linux, MacOS and even different computers archetictures like how we've been seeing Valve working on ARM translation stuff behind the scenes.

I could see this happening, whether or not it has M$'s support: Proton becoming a "universal" container/environment for software that allows developers to focus on one build that will run on multiple operating systems and/or hardware. If software developers want this as a standard, M$ might try to undermine it but the only impact would be that the games and other applications would not run in M$'s proprietary environment, leaving M$ out of the loop and looking bad.

Some developers might still choose to produce software native to the host environment (maybe for speed, security, or other reasons) but it leaves room for interesting possibilities that we didn't have before...

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Frankly, I think that recommending that users avoid Proton Experimental might be a good idea. The Steam client defaulted to it for me when I first set things up. Not knowing any better, I left it as it was. When Experimental shifted from the 9 base to the 10 base, nearly all my games stopped launching. When I reset their prefixes to the last stable Proton based on 9, they all started working again.

This is the same reason I stopped using the system Wine via the launchpad PPA. When it shifted to the next major version, it tended to break a number of my game prefixes. It's better to have a Wine/Proton version that does not change automatically.

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