I only had access to dial-up internet until I moved away to college in 2009, so while I was vaguely aware of a thing called Steam it was laughably out of the picture for me and I didn't really pay any attention to it. My first purchase was Portal 2 in March 2011, though as that was a pre-order my actual first game I received was Portal, as a pre-order bonus. :smile:

I guess I'm fortunate to have skipped the "teething years", since once I really got familiar with the idea of online purchasing and downloading games I couldn't wait to get away from physical CDs that needed to be moved around and could be lost or broken. And ultimately, just three years later, Steam's ability to auto-update games would help push me towards Linux's package managers. :grin:

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Yeah, now that the jump to selectable traditions has been made we'll probably see a bit of balancing and reshuffling the next few patches, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see more trees down the line. (A mobility and logistics one sounds cool!) And yes, more specialization now that traditions are freed from having to be all things to all empires is a distinct and highly desirable possibility.

While I enjoy a good ol' galaxy-spanning conquest as much as the next person, I really like how with Federations and now espionage there's a lot more emphasis on soft power in the game, as playing a galactic web-weaver and behind-the-scenes kingmaker appeals to me. But it's good that everyone can choose their own specialization now. :grin:

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I'm sure that can be balanced with feedback in the future if they're not amazing at launch. I'm just looking forward to no longer being forced to take Subjugation and Domination for my Fanatic Xenophile Pacifist species. :grin:

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Hmm, I wonder if ProtonDB will add some sort of "tested on Steam Deck" option to reports. That could be a fantastic extra bit of information for gauging compatibility. (Sure, you could guess from the hardware, but it might be useful to highlight that in some way.)

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I interpreted that initial comment as saying 100% of games would work with Proton, and I was definitely skeptical of Valve pulling that off before December, unless they're sitting on a ton of improvements they haven't released yet. This interpretation makes a lot more sense. Thankfully it doesn't make a difference to me, but I can see this being a turn-off for Windows gamers. Hopefully Valves pulls off enough Proton improvements by December to get enough of the popular games working that Windows gamers are willing to wait for further improvements.

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Yeah, I'm looking forward to this—curious to see how these different "layers" interact with the main planet layer (and Green Planet).

Quoting: UnixOutlawLoved this game - except for the "let's get some humans here..." bit... I could colony build forever...

That bit bores me, and I don't care what happens to the humans, I don't care if they're bored - I wish the game had "evil genius" mode where I get to gas or space them all for being disobedient :D ... don't preach at me, they're not people... it's a game...

I might have to check out some of the DLC...

Just disable oxygen generation. :whistle:

Or if you're interested in mods, there's a cool one that adds a starting profile that lets you build bio-robots from the beginning of the game without needing humans. I played a game where every colonist was an immortal bio-robot and the only humans on Mars were tourists coming to the tourism resort I set up. :smile:

Quoting: NezchanPity getting the vegetation in place is such a grind though. Hopefully they'll overhaul that at some point.

Yeah, the other three parameters work out pretty well, but despite being the first thing I start vegetation is always the last I finish, by, like, at least twice as long as any of the others. It's just bizarre how badly balanced it is. I use a few mods to speed it up, because the default is just ridiculous.

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This is one of those games I helped Kickstart, then discovered I'd lost interest in by the time it arrived*. I think I've loaded it up once and being confused how it worked (though I vaguely remember that being quite soon after getting the key, so it might've not had full tutorials implemented yet). :unsure: Maybe I should give it another go.

*Which has happened enough times now that I've noticed a pattern. Not sure if it's just my tastes changing in the interval between backing and release, or the inevitable slight letdown from my imagined perceptions to the real product, but it's kinda put me off backing games (when they even come out, video game are generally one of the riskier things to back).

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Quoting: EikeThanks for sharing! Did you ever write up what made you change your mind this much? :)

Not sure I ever have, really (might make a good post topic!). :smile: It was more of a gradual change than any particular bolt-from-the-blue moment. Funnily enough I've come completely around on using the command line, vastly preferring to enter a few commands (now that I have the context to recognize them generally, if not the specifics) to having to solve something via GUI. The native package manager is another huge one, I love being able to check for, download, and install available updates for my entire system with a single command instead of tediously checking websites for all the programs I want to update and manually downloading and installing them. (I think my initial thoughts were along the lines of "It's like Steam* auto-updates, but for the entire computer!" :shock:) Installing things with a single command is also awesome. Also, it's a little thing, but I hate being without that middle-click second copy buffer. I don't know why, it's not like I even use it all that often, but I find myself incredibly annoyed when I don't have it (macOS is almost worse than Windows in this regard because it does have it, but ONLY in the terminal, nowhere else.)

Quoting: scaineWell, that first blog post didn't age well! But back in 2010, Linux was a very different beast.

Ha, agreed. I'd forgotten about that post until I went looking yesterday; just a few short years later and I'd be a complete convert. (To be somewhat charitable to my past self, I was a complete newbie to the command line and I was trying to install a specialized astronomical software package that I'm certain was a lot more complicated than "apt-get install iraf"†, so it was the kind of situation pretty much guaranteed to cause frustration.)

* Which I'd just discovered earlier that year (2010), due to not having internet faster than dial-up till mid-2009.

† I don't remember the specifics now, but I wouldn't be surprised if it involved compiling stuff, which I'd also never done and even now would prefer to avoid.

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After growing up exclusively with Windows (never even used a Mac), I discovered when I started my astronomy degree that no one in astronomy uses Windows (it's all Linux or macOS). I remember being a bit weirded out and repulsed when I first installed Ubuntu and tried to use it back in 2010 (I've just discovered I even wrote a very angry blog post [External Link] about it :whistle:). However, through exposure to it at work and the help of a very knowledgeable good friend, by 2014 when I built my first gaming desktop I put Linux Mint Debian Edition on it and haven't looked back since. Other than a switch to Debian and a graphics card upgrade from my brother I'm still typing on that very desktop (ok, I also had to replace a RAM module that failed), though I'm hoping to finally do some major upgrades next year. I also just discovered that I wrote a blog post [External Link] five years ago for Linux's 25th birthday complaining about using Windows 8 at work (which I genuinely do not remember using at this point), so how the tables have turned!

(Look forward to my upcoming blog post, "MacOS, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways…" :grin:)

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I'll have moved before the next survey and my computer will probably be stuck on a boat for at least 2–3 months (:sad:), but I'm looking forward to having to update my monitor details when I get it back. :smile: (Taking the opportunity to make a long-awaited upgrade! :grin:)

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