This was never about security. That’s just the excuse.

This is about removing user freedom, and consolidating corporate control. This is about ensuring that every app and service you use is approved by the big G, and consumed in the way they want - with ads, with tracking, and with nothing you can do about it.

For anyone looking for a cheap but decent air filter which DOES do this, IKEA’s UPPÅTVIND remembers its last setting when turned off and back on at the plug.

Watch out though, because while the TV anime ends on a sweet note, and you should probably stop there, the manga ends with time-skipping forwards 10 years to when they start a romantic relationship together.

Kakushigoto is really good.

It is the story of a single-parent manga artist who is ashamed of his work and goes to great lengths to keep it from his young daughter.

The story begins when the girl, now older, discovers her Father’s job, and is told through flashbacks to her growing up and life with her father who was always trying his best for her.

I can’t find the official trailer with subtitles but it gives you the idea. Trailer.

Really heartwarming, and bittersweet at times, and other things I won’t spoil.

Yes, that’s right. Steam can play windows-only games via Proton, which is the exact same thing they are doing on Steam Deck. Steam Deck is what really motivated a lot of work in this area, and why the situation is so good these days.

It sounds like you’ve already got plenty of Linux machines, so perhaps try it for yourself and see.

Steam is absolutely the EASIEST way to run games on Linux.

It abstracts Wine, Proton and all the other dependencies so you don’t have to think about it much.

You just install it, download and play exactly the same as you would on Windows.

There is also Heroic launcher, which is a similarly streamlined experience for Gog. (And Epic and Prime Games, if you’re into those)

Family member not giving a fuck what an ‘AWS’ is, more like.

This is the cooking equivalent of the chair of clothes you can still get one more wear out of

5. They know people use the desktop app in order to not use the phone app, and they want those people on the phone instead because the phone is even more data-valuable and ad-valuable

Facebook web on mobile browser already doesn’t allow messenger, and tells you to get the app. Pulling messenger from the desktop web browser will be the next move, forcing people to app completely.

Glad I don’t use it.

The thing about growing up with a meat-based diet, as most of us did, is that meat is always the focal point. Meals are basically cooking some meat, and then adding a couple of sides.

And so when people try to go vegetarian or vegan they are stuck in a way of thinking that is like “what do I substitute the meat with? What’s the vegetarian alternative to chicken??” - and without meat the style of cooking they are accustomed to falls apart, their meals are pathetic, and they don’t know what to do. And so people think “I can never give up meat!”

Vegan cooking that just tries to “replace” meat will never be as successful or delicious as vegan cooking that has it’s own identity. To cook well in a vegetarian or vegan way you need to re-evaluate what kind of dishes work, and how you cook. Roasting and searing brings out sweetness and creates texture. Spices kick up the flavour. Sauces bring it together.

I am not actually vegan myself, though I try to eat meat-free a lot of the time. I am fortunate to live in a city that has a lot of vegetarian and vegan food. This is some of the menu from a vegetarian restaurant I like:

Ravioli - Spiced celeriac filled ravioli, sage brown butter, apple & chilli salsa, parmesan cheese & walnut crumb (contains nuts)

Crown Prince Squash - Roasted crown prince, seared oyster mushroom, pear ketchup, Wensleydale blue cheese & walnut crunch (ve option available)(gf)

Fennel - Confit fennel, spiced red wine poached quince, labneh & mint & walnut dukkah (ve option available) (nuts)(gf)

Romanesco Cauliflower - Roasted cauliflower, soy & cauliflower purée, walnut & red pepper dressing & crispy chilli oil (ve) (nuts)

All utterly delicious! :)

And I have to ask - what is it about vegetables that makes you need to throw up? Is that a medical issue or did you just grow up in a house where vegetables didn’t exist?

Looks interesting in other respects too, thanks for the suggestion

Haha, amazing. I hope they called it “Giraffe Liquor” or something

It wasn’t because of the apps.

It was because closing down the APIs - despite the widespread protests and subreddit blackouts - was the final nail in the coffin for many. It proved reddit was no longer a place where community opinion mattered at all, or had any sway in how the site might operate.

It was proof that things were firmly entering the enshittification phase of milking the reddit userbase and their content for profit, pushing a first-party app full of ads, and fattening up the balance sheet for investors.

I left at that time because I didn’t want to subject myself to that, and no number of “still working” apps would change my opinion.

I could :)

But these days I have actual servers to do server things (2x HP Gen 8 Microservers which I saved from e-waste) so my little eee is kept only for love and nostalgia.

I had to accept a few years back that my venerable eeePC 1000 netbook with it’s single core (2 threads!) Atom CPU is just not useful any longer, even with the most lightweight distro.

I’ll never let that particular machine go though, because it means a lot to me. I bought it with my first paycheck from my first job after university, and the year after (as the only portable machine I owned) it saw me through a whole year working abroad. Managed everything from Skype calls with my parents to browsing the Internet and watching YouTube, and that was running Windows!

Trying to do something with it now is just a reminder of how outrageously bloated and resource-heavy modern apps have become, especially those that are just electron web wrappers. And the web itself is exponentially more demanding to render.

It’s not your fault little eee, you’re just the same as ever. It’s the world that changed.

I suppose I could use it as an IRC terminal or something, that would be pretty hipster. But I’d just be wasting electricity.

I could.

Though I suppose it may be semantically more appropriate to say that Ubuntu is Debian with snaps (and with a bunch of other stuff too)

I’ve been specifically avoiding Ubuntu because of snaps, instead preferring Ubuntu derivatives that don’t use it, like Mint and Pop.

And more recently, trying an entirely different approach with Arch.

And yes - I could get rid of snaps in Ubuntu if I wanted. But everything is just a little more annoying when you are going against the conventions of your distro.

Dock to Dash singlehandedly saves Gnome for me.

Turns it from something I couldn’t even tolerate using, into probably my favourite desktop.

Thank you for all the suggestions!

Buddy Simulator 1984 looks great because it (seems to?) combine text chat with other gameplay.

I honestly did a bad job with the title of the post (entirely my fault!) because most people have been going straight to the text adventure genre for recommendations, and that wasn’t what I had hoped for.

Text adventure games are easy to find. So are games that simply involve a lot of typing of any kind.

What’s not easy to find are games which aren’t necessarily entirely text-based or text parsing in their interactions, but have natural language chat as part of their gameplay loop.

So they could be absolutely any genre - walking sim, puzzle, horror - anything! Even an FPS or an RTS! Of course, I struggle to imagine how a game could fit natural language chat as part of a single player FPS, but if someone did it, I’d be interested!

In all, what im trying to find is a pretty specific, weird and rare non-genre that doesn’t fit established categorisation, and that’s why I needed Fellow Humans to help.

So, thank you for the Buddy Simulator recommendation. I’ll certainly be playing that :)

Definitely a left-field suggestion but could be interesting, thanks!