Did anybody else here make the grave mistake of doing this in Oblivion, the game notorious for enemy auto-leveling?

I went off doing random shit the moment that Captain Picard let me out of that sewer, and by the time I showed up to be the Hero of Kvatch I was this crazy invisible assassin of doom, and probably at the top of the thieves guild or the dark brotherhood or both.

So then if memory serves, the town is under attack from monsters and is on fire. The game drops me into a small walled-in arena and instead of whatever lv 1 imps and cockroaches are normally there, I’m holding my bow and arrow and looking up the fiery eyes of half a dozen 12-foot-tall giga-chad linebacker demons from hell. Oh and look they are already sprinting in my direc-- DEAD!

I probably took some creative liberties there but you get the idea.

I think I had to lower the difficulty slider to get through that room. Then I put it back to normal assuming the worst was over, only to have the game put me through a CORRIDOR of hyper-strong enemies next! So twice I had to lower the difficulty.

On one hand, this happened because my character was a min-maxed glass cannon, and a stereotypical one at that (stealth archer, how original! /s). But that same character had no problem with the entire game before or after that town because the whole point of the game is to have the freedom to approach encounters as you wish.

So in many ways that situation was less about auto-leveling, and more about the meme-worthy situations where a boss late in the game requires completely new mechanics the player has never seen. Or even better, it was the anti-forced-stealth-mission!

I’ve been a fan of the easy to install all-in-one Linux experience of modern distros, being an old guy with a family and a keen awareness of how much I need to maintain some of the non-computer hobbies in my life. Mint has been my jam for a long time.

But just recently I had reason to try out regular old Debian with KDE Plasma, and I think I have found my happy place. I just moved around my hard drives and set up my handful of self-hosted things on this fresh system. It’s so nice to occasionally use as a desktop while it is also a rock solid server.

The funny thing is that the biggest practical benefit to most Linux users is not the access to do these things.

It is the secondary effects of not needing to restrict access in order to preserve lock-in and enshittification. It makes the whole user experience better because it is only doing wider you’ve asked it to do. For example, I apply updates more quickly on Linux than I ever did on Windows, even though my Linux DEs are way less pushy about it, because the process is an absolute breeze!

Look at each OS option like you were a product development team, and think “who are my stakeholders?”

The commercial products have long lists of what’s driving the product features and anti-features. Linux has the developers who want the code to be helpful and stay free, and the users who want it to do what it says on the tin, with the option to audit or modify the system’s code. But of course it’s still run by humans, so big personalities and bad actors and whatnot do affect things.

I’m another data point where displays work under Linux better than Windows, making this particular example amusingly wrong.

This is a Dell precision laptop with a dual usb-c connected docking station. Intel cpu plus a discrete nvidia gpu.

Using Cinnamon in X11 on Linux Mint or LMDE, works great.

Using KDE Plasma in Wayland on Debian? Works great!

Using Windows 10? Bzzzt.

I think I’ve had Linux DEs occasionally forget my monitor order & rotation just like Windows would, but out of the box Windows wouldn’t even use all my monitors.

I leave ls alone and instead do

alias l='ls -latrF'

I do sometimes just want to use the plain version, especially if I’m in a small terminal window for some reason. But I think my brain likes scanning 1D lists more than 2D grids, no matter whether I’m in a terminal or using a graphical file manager.

The head-to-head comparison between the update user experience is so incredibly lopsided against Windows, that it kind of seems silly.

I bet if both have a big yearly update, I could format and install an entire fresh copy of the linux distro before the windows machine would be usable.

Fuckin’ hell, I feel like a kid in 2226 reading this on some kind of wall plaque after it was discovered in the cautionary history archives that survived the great fires. I think it struck me when I read this line:

the rot is far too deep, and the purification of chaos is, unfortunately, the only remedy

It’s just a very elegant way to describe the btshit craziness of living in “interesting times.”

Oh and hey future people who have presumably learned to be excellent to one another: put me in the plaque! It’s a thing we used to do on this old internet here with screenshots, you see.

I don’t have any issues with KDE, and I admire their work beyond the DE/UI. Kdenlive is my chosen video editor, for instance. I believe it’s the flatpak version too, so it no doubt loads a bunch of stuff into ram.

I’m not sure what you mean by “restricting” with the DE since I have a terminal at my fingertips at all times. I assume you mean some design decisions or lack of some customization options that KDE has?

But the weird selection of apps has me lost. It comes with stuff installed that you might expect, like firefox and libre office. It uses mostly the Ubuntu repositories so you can apt or apt-get install most things you’re looking for. And since it’s linux you can add repositories and all that fun stuff.

I also don’t know what you mean by filtering flathub.

I’d expect that most brand new users install Ubuntu or Linux Mint because of how often they are recommended.

Linux Mint is basically Ubuntu with Canonical/Snaps removed and some added polish. The default DE is laid out like windows before 11 (“start” button in lower left) which seems to make sense for new users.

I’m a knowledgable enough user, being a developer on embedded linux products, and I also stuck with Mint long term. It’s still a Linux system that I actually control. The fact that it was very user friendly and full featured it off the box doesn’t take away from that. It just meant that it wasn’t the learning experience you’d get with something like Arch.

I completely understand the sentiment!

I am still into some tech and “new computer” type stuff. I am about to install a bigger/faster drive in my PC and set up my Home Assistant server. That PC is already my Jellyfin server. I am also in the middle of building a brand new PC for my kid, which will also run Mint, lol.

But I spend time only on the things that I’ve learned really matter to me, and not on all the things you’re “supposed to” mess with in your home lab that you obviously have.

You know the meme (or meme category) where it’s a resume or linkedin profile where the recent work history goes something like Senior Network Architect, then Goose Farmer?

I may literally have a 3D printer still in the box, and PC & networking parts all over the house, but my daily routine is embedded linux C/C++ sr developer by day and animal tender on the evenings and weekends, lol.

I never left!

I think I’m just old enough, have fiddled with my PC enough times in the past, have enough other shit to do, and get enough coding and troubleshooting experience at work that I look at the quest to find my spirit distro and think “that’s a youngster’s game.”

Or, you know, maybe Mint is already my spirit distro and I am experienced enough to not fix what isn’t broken!

Nope I don’t have experience installing older distros. I used some Unix systems in the late 90s (Sun Solaris) and really liked them even though I wasn’t yet the Linux/FOSS enthusiast I am now.

Your comment does not surprise me at all, though. For any rough edges Linux has had over the years, at least the motivations of the developers creating it have been in the right place all along. That is, making software for themselves and users, as opposed to the innumerable forces of enshittification within tech giants like Microsoft.

I don’t think I ever messed with the Windows 3.1 OS on my family’s 486, but from Windows 95 and onwards I’ve done multiple installs of all the consumer versions of windows and was an avid user of win2k at the time. And for Windows 11 I have only ever installed it in a VM on a Linux machine to test Windows tools that are part of our builds at work.

I’ve also installed the last couple versions of Linux Mint a few times on some newer and older PCs. And some other distros in VMs for various reasons.

ALL of my recent Linux installs have gone far more smoothly and quickly than ANY Windows installs I remember.

Old windows? Better.

New Linux? Best!

g’news and g’day to you as well, g’lady!

you’re not gonna believe this…

I think that when we are attacking mental health issues, we need to think of it like the swiss cheese model of security in IT, except that we are on offense instead of defense.

Everything needs to be on the table. Mental health affects how it feels to exist, which is pretty damn important when it comes to quality of life and finding some fulfillment, comfort, happiness, etc.

There is usually not a single thing that “cures” somebody. And if there is such a single thing that works so wonderfully, it certainly does not work that well for the vast majority of people.

I dont care if the person field strips it in front of me, the first thing im doing after they hand it to me is clearing it myself.

This kind of attitude is the exact right way to do it when safety is involved. You make it automatic, not a decision. It’s like wearing your seatbelt. It saves you time and energy while producing the best results.

Put another way: Crazy shit happens every day. You make it automatic not because you distrust the person unloading it in front of you. You do it because you shouldn’t trust yourself to be perfectly flawless in life and death situations. You do it 100% of the times that you rationally know for certain that it’s empty, so that you skip the check 0.00000% of the time that some crazy sequence of events quietly creates a dangerous situation.

Well, the Snaps are one of the things they took out. Flatpaks are enabled in the software manager by default though.

I believe everything that comes preinstalled, including Firefox and LibreOffice and such, is installed the traditional way as if you did “apt install firefox.”

I installed LibreWolf and like it. It’s just firefox with telemetry removed and some privacy hardening out of the box.

Check out Mint. It’s based on Ubuntu but has Canonical’s controversial stuff removed, plus an added layer of polish.

I didn’t exactly say I was innocent. 👌😎 👍

I do read what they say though.