I think historically Canonical has always been a bit or a weird company. I ended up ditching Ubuntu because they seem to have this weird penchant for picking some new shiny feature (Unity, the convergent Desktop/Phone OS thing, Mir, currently Snaps) and just going all-in on it whether people want it or not, working on it until it’s almost good, then ditching it for the next shiny thing.

Also their hiring process is apparently bonkers.

Chat, please write an apology that clarifies Diversity Policy 15 and assures the reader that as a company we are not homophobic. Please use a professional, courteous tone and limit the response to 500 characters or less.

There is also a Calibre plugin that’s supposed to deal with .ascm files. I’ve never managed to get it to work personally but maybe someone else will have more luck.

I played through exactly one full game, and it just felt… pointless, I guess? Like I was just clicking through turns to get to the end and none of it mattered. Then it told me I’d lost and was like “K” and then played Civ VI for a bit.

Given that until 2024 their Executive Director was a professional shaman, I’m starting to suspect that they might not have what you’d call standard vetting practices.

This is great news for us! If you ever get pulled up for pirating things, just say you’re using them to train an LLM and it’s legal!

(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This definitely will not work unless it does. But it probably won’t.)

I’ve gotten exactly one thing to ever run properly in Bottles, and that was an accident lol. Which is weird because I can get things to run in Wine no problem, and I assumed that Bottles would be easier since it’s essentially just Wine with a GUI. But for reasons that elude me, everything I throw at Bottles just doesn’t work. I’ve even taken things that work perfectly well in Wine and setting them up in Bottles with the exact same settings (as far as I can tell) and they just don’t. work. I assume it’s something I’m doing wrong, but there’s no real reason to spend the time to figure it out when Wine is right there getting the job done.

I consider myself to be pretty okay at Linux - I’m no pro but I’ve been daily driving Linux for 10+ years, can troubleshoot most things, I’ve installed Arch from scratch without the installer script, I can setup and maintain NixOS without much trouble, I can automate stuff with Bash etc. But I still don’t understand Docker even a little bit. I don’t know why but I just can’t get my head around it. I’ve even searched for the “Explain Docker to me as if I’m five years old” type of guides and I still just bounce of it.

Also worth noting that they own Github, which puts them in a position to disrupt a huge amount of Linux infrastructure if they ever feel like it. They might also pull some weird move like trying to buy Canonical or something like that.

I actually didn’t know you could nest Virtual Desktops within activities, so that was nice. Now I can make my setup even more absurdly complicated for anyone who’s not me to use lol.

Yeah I have the Libre Colour and it’s great! The pen feels good, it lets you do what you want with it (eg. using Calibre to strip the DRM off your books and loading them via USB, installing KOReader etc.) and it works well with Libby for getting eBooks from the library (at least in Canada.)

On the plus side, I have removed myself as a problem for them. You’re welcome, Ubisoft!

I had an experience with Zomboid a while ago that I’ve never had with any other game. I’d had my character going for a while, had my base set up, all was going good and I was looting random houses. I came up to this one house that was completely ordinary but something in the back of my brain just went NOPE. There were no signs of anything sketchy from the outside but some sort of survival switch went off in my brain and was like “if you go in there you’re fucked” and I just walked away and left it.

Of course I’ll never know now if that was accurate or not, but I’ve never had that weird instinct go off from a game before lol.

Yeah that’s pretty much the vibe for Zomboid, the opening text crawl literally says “This is how you died.” It’s not a matter of whether you make it or not, just how long you last and what happens before they inevitably get you lol.

Also if you die from a zombie bite, you can respawn as a new person and track down the zombie of your previous character to loot your stuff back which is fun.

Not as far as I know. I haven’t played the latest update but I did a full playthrough on the last one and I finished it but it was such a slog. It’s like the opposite of the other Civ games, where you sit down for 5 minutes and lose an hour, with 7 you sit down and go “right, I’ll play for an hour” and then you check the time and it’s only been 10 minutes lol.

I did the same thing with Surviving Mars lol. Played it on Epic, liked it, bought the whole thing and all the DLC on Steam. Actually I did that with Dredge too now that I think about it.

I have had exactly one HP laptop in my life, which luckily was a hand-me-down so I didn’t spend any money on it, but it was enough to convince me to never get another HP product ever again.

20-odd years and the boycott is still going strong lol.

The usual tech support search:

• First hit is a thread describing your exact problem, marked as [SOLVED]. Clicking it goes to a 404.

• Second hit is a thread describing your exact problem that goes to an actual thread, but the message has been edited to just say “Solved” with no record of what was done.

• Third hit is a thread describing almost your exact problem, with the first response calling the poster a noob for asking and then 15 pages of arguments.

• Fourth hit is a thread describing something in the same general area as your problem, which you try anyway and makes the thing you’re trying to fix break in a different way, but it’s progress at least.

• Actual solution is somewhere between the 5th and 8th hit, or you give up and come back to it in about a week and solve it instantly without trying for some fucking reason.

So to answer the question, I can usually tell I’m getting close to the solution when I say “Oh for fuck’s sake” as I’m closing tabs lol.

Yeah I was gonna say, I dunno if my distro is the best (Arch BTW) but it’s the best for me. Doesn’t give me any nonsense and lets me tinker as much as I want. Other people just want their OS to get out of their way, which of course is equally valid. Whatever works for you!

As a side note, a couple of things that might be handy for you:

Bottles is a GUI for running Wine things that might make it a bit easier to navigate. It’s helped me out a few times.

Also there’s an AppDB on the Wine site where you can search for specific software to find out how well it runs/tweaks that people have used etc.

ALSO yeah games are in a pretty good place on Linux nowadays. I have a Steam Deck and it runs a surprising amount of stuff, even things that aren’t listed as being compatible. I think the main source of trouble is the online AntiCheat stuff, that’s not always compatible with Linux (although sometimes those work too, I think it just depends on the game.) There’s also protondb for checking which games work in Linux.

Hopefully some of that is helpful!