Loverslab exists, they probably have what you’re looking for

There is, yes, but it’s pointless. I think some people are missing the point of Alyx being a VR game, the game would suck pretty bad in pancake mode. It’s the intricate interactions with the world you simply can’t get with a mouse and keyboard that make it special compared to other Half Life games. They didn’t just make a regular Half Life game and said “well we’re just gonna force this to be in VR now”, they made a VR game and set it in the Half Life universe.

Somewhat hot take… I’d argue Boneworks (not Bonelab) was “better”, at least if you’re used to VR and if you judge by freedom and replay value. Don’t get me wrong, playing through Half Life Alyx was fun and engaging, but to me it had little to no replay value, since for all it did great in visuals, audio, accessibility, and especially story, it failed dramatically in physics. Since I played Alyx right after Boneworks, I kept trying to pick stuff up which I ended up not being able to for larger objects, and the first time I tried to knock a Combine over the head with a pipe I was so sorely disappointed. Alyx has absolutely everything Boneworks is missing, yet that physics core is what kept me coming back to the latter. It really clicked for me when I noticed how many things in Boneworks one can solve in alternate ways by “abusing” physics. Climbing is a learned skill and combat can be as much shooting as it can be using knives, fists, shoving someone off a ledge, or grabbing an enemy and throwing it at others. It’s what truly made me realize how much potential VR had, being able to interact with a full physics simulation, where even your own body is a physics object, with your physical hands is amazing.

Proton is based on Wine, when people say Wine in a gaming context, there’s a decent chance they just mean Proton. Also there’s absolutely no need for gaming distros in this situation, gaming works out of the box on any (semi-normal) distro, the most you’ll have to do is flick a switch in Steam.

Edit: Or in this case with the Sims install Lutris I guess, since it’s an EA game, but that also isn’t much more difficult

That’s a simple enough message to even get it from Warhammer 40k - Gender? Skin colour? Disabilities? Doesn’t matter, pick up a Lasrifle and start shooting xenos

In my experience not just sometimes, but rather commonly. It often feels like the native Linux version, if it is even available, gets far fewer bug fixes - not like I can blame them, considering the far lower amount of Linux players, but sometimes I wonder why they even bother with it in the first place if they don’t want to bother with focusing on it, with how good Proton is.

Note that it doesn’t mean metadata is encrypted. They may not know what you sent, but they may very well know you message your mum twice a day and who your close friends are that you message often, that kinda stuff. There’s a good bit you can do with metadata about messages combined with the data they gather through other services.

I bet Nintendo has a lot of patent violations to choose from. They have a patent on such bangers as, rephrased from legal speech to human speech: “An air mount automatically turning into a ground mount upon landing” Source

According to Nintendo, if I understand this correctly, they have the sole legal right to make a bird mount that can also sprint on the ground if needed, because that sure was a special idea.

There are feet in the camera’s face within… eight seconds. I’m surprised, but I can’t say I’m shocked.

Aside from that, it is a curious decision to make the first person camera a woman. I thought their target audience would be young men? It’s certainly a larger potential audience than lesbians, although hey, not like I mind that choice ;3

The same Pinkertons that were sent after some guy who grabbed a few Magic the Gathering cards?

I did not use Photoshop particularly long, but I have been using the Affinity Suite both on a pc and a tablet for over a year now and can say it’s definitely quite good. Everything is where you think it should be, the workflow feels very usable with no major learning curve (looking at you, GIMP), and overall the only thing I don’t like about it is its lack of Linux support. I would assume that absolute professionals won’t be able to find everything they like/want, but if you’re reading this, chances are you’re gonna be more than satisfied, if FOSS options don’t quite work for you.

Thigh highs are where it’s at nowadays :3

That site is lovely, thank you!

As I mentioned in the post, my money budget is around 1000€ as a target, but it extends both up and down. I can stretch if needed, but if that’s comically overkill then I’d be happy to go lower. Time budget… not too high, but also not super low. I can certainly spend a day or two setting everything up. Electricity costs are certainly a factor, power prices here were some of the highest globally, even before the extreme increases lately.

Also thanks for the tip of the S3 backup, it’s probably a good idea to have an extra copy of important data off-site, yeah.

Really, I’d just recommend using nano then. It’s installed basically anywhere you can find vim and works perfectly fine as a text editor! To use vim effectively it has a learning curve no matter what, so it’s not necessarily meant for everyone.

Hm, the Shorts algorithm should be generally based on your normal recommendations until you start watching them.

You know, potentially controversial opinion, but I kinda like shorts, since by now the algo has figured out that I like longer documentary-style videos on normal videos, but still get vtuber clips and cute animal videos as shorts.

I still have my HP laptop from a few years ago, and despite running like crap nowadays, it still manages to warm my legs through my desk

If you’re an expert tightrope walker, you’re likely not gonna fall off. You can just do it without too much issue. When you’re doing it over a chasm, and you don’t plan on dying, you’d still probably prefer a harness though, wouldn’t you?

Edit: I’m not saying C is a bad language or anything, but for important applications the safety of actually memory safe languages is vital for lower-skilled programmers and still a good assistance for higher-skilled programmers, as we’re all humans and it doesn’t hurt to try and avoid the mistakes we will eventually make.

I was considering the VPN option, but as you mentioned for game servers that’s not reasonable, and for some of the collaborative tools I’d prefer being able to give people I don’t trust that much access, for instance people at work/university, to work together with them on whatever would be needed.

If I just decided to make the home server a home-only server, that would ease a lot of my worries. I guess I could get a personal one, with sensitive info but only home network access, and just rent a second one? It’s not like they’re that expensive if you’re just doing small-scale things and find a decent provider

It depends on what you’re used to and the programming languages you use. I learned typing on a German QWERTZ keyboard and while that works for languages like Python and Haskell, which are indentation-based, but for languages which use braces like Java, C, Rust, or similar, it can be annoying to have to use altgr+7 or altgr+0 for { and }. Thus I switched to a US ANSI layout, which was nicer for those specific characters, but caused problems when typing local characters like öäüß. After switching to Linux I set up a compose key, letting me press compose + a + " for ä for example, and while that’s a decent patch, that still breaks the typing flow. So now I’m in my ergo keyboard phase and trying to get my own personal layout going, which meets my own needs for needed characters, based on a colemak-dh design.