“Some say he’s still there picking up bread to this day…”

Education really is a panacea to many of our ills with technology.

Unfortunately we gutted computer classes just as they became ubiquitous and handed the educational reins to billion dollar megacorpos who only care about harvesting dollars and attention.

AI really is the haymaker on that huge mistake, but we can still educate everyone as best we can and hope some take it to heart!

This is a big reason I only remotely access my services via TailScale / Wireguard.

Even if my highly restricted ISP let me open anything, I wouldn’t dare. I know for certain I don’t know as much as who/whatever is hunting for open ports out there. I have zero interest in instantly being assimilated into some botnet lol.

Oh boy I would not be surprised if there was some kinda ARG buried in all this lol.

That actually seems like a really cool application for it.

My first thought, rather cynical, was “I kinda hope this doesn’t just become a way to serve a mirror of stolen games at scale.” That would be sad.

But also I’m sure the bandwidth that’d take would be quite prohibitive anyway.

Serving LAN / multiplayer games to friends and family, with the right patches and stuff applied, sounds excellent.

UT2k4, War/StarCraft, Mobile Forces, Metal Fatigue, Warsow, Battlefield, Nerf Arena Blast…

Could even do some real vintage stuff like Rainbow Six or Deus Ex’s multiplayer mode LOL.

I tried to think of niche things you probably wouldn’t find on GameRanger haha. (Geeze I haven’t used that in ages…wonder if it’s Linux friendly?)

This in particular sounds like inviting heaps of trouble. Unless it was rigged to only connect to emulated servers buuuuut still…

The answer was probably something like:

“…Yes! You do need eggs to make an omelet!”

LOL it did take me a sec, like “You WERE smart but AI lobotomizes you.” 😂

…AND MY A—

JK, who’s a good kitty kitty? 😸

Dunno why I was being downvoted for self deprication.

If it helps, not saying anything about you in particular but:

I think because communities like this hear a lot of this kinda pre-emptive defeatism speak. Like “I’m tired and so I don’t wanna do something that might make me learn.”

It makes them/us sad because we’re like “Uh, we’d be happy to help, it’s not actually that scary?”

With Linux or PCs in general, people will often show up to the community just to say “Thinky thing is too hard”, and declare they’ve already opened their wallets and run to some highly exploitative and expensive corporate “turnkey product” instead.

It’s also “console propaganda” by corporations to spread FUD about PC and now Linux gaming being some alleged huge headache unless you’re a professional computer engineer…And that’s simply not true. They’d just rather you buy a new console every 3 years. :p

But also, downvotes don’t super matter here, so all I can say is carry on with an open mind and don’t be afraid to ask questions, and you never know what you might learn!

Don’t sell yourself short. Try things!

As Bruce Lee once said: “In great attempts, it is glorious even to fail.”

Cool! Yeah, they don’t seem to be referenced as much anymore, but they were seriously impressive and had their use cases. :D

that “long as you like” is still going (jeez 8y at this point lol).

Yeah, Mint is often referred to by folks as a “beginner distro” implying you’ll somehow inevitably skill up and distro hop, and sure, plenty do, but it really doesn’t have to be that way!

(Heck, Eliot the super hacker in Mr. Robot used it as his home distro! Lol 😉)

I mean, it’s stable, you can still get newer stuff and gaming via FlatPak, and it’s just overall friendlier. The community is super helpful and nice too!

I personally jumped to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because I like having new features sooner. (I blame Blender haha!), and honestly, I didn’t expect to fall in love with KDE as much as I did. I really like KDE. :p

I’d always encourage people to try other distros just to see if they do something that fits them better or something, but yeah, you shouldn’t feel any pressure to “graduate” from Mint. It’s lovely. :D

I’ve been contemplating… trying to start some kind of “PC Computing Club” or something. With the goal being to outreach and educate people toward computer literacy.

It would have to be something that’s “cool” to be a part of, because nobody actually seems to show up to “computer classes” even though they all clamor for them. Especially old people. They think they want to “learn computers” and then just drop out if they show up at all.

There’s gotta be a way around that. 90’s computer users were passionate and would be staging riots at what’s been done to the Internet, privacy laws, and on and on…

This “deliteracy” campaign is entirely intentional. They want to create an idiot cow-sumer class, which only exists to labor and pay subscriptions, without understanding anything.

Favorite is OpenSuse Tumbleweed. It’s stable mostly, and quite fixable when it isn’t. Just a great overall balance.

My first was actually DSL: “Damn Small Linux”, contained entirely on a CD to remove a TERRIBLY resistant malware from my Windows XP machine. (It was awesome for that! Had no idea what I was doing lol.)

Tried Ubuntu, then Ubuntu Studio, but they didn’t like my Wi-Fi devices back in those days, so I didn’t get to do much with them!

Used Mint seriously on my aging laptop and loved it. It’s such an excellent on-ramp and you can hang out with it as long as you like.

Later tried Manjaro for a while but…it started having some controversial project decisions and just didn’t feel like home.

Using EndeavourOS on my gaming laptop and it works great! Considering migrating though: Arch is an excellent teacher, but I’ve had to spend unexpected weekends fixing weird hitches after updates.

Honorable Mention: Puppy Linux! I used to be able to boot it to any laptop from my Android phone, and that was a really neat trick for public computers and stuff.

I feel it. As a distro itself I’m not a huge fan of how it does things, but I really do like their theming, colors, font, aesthetic, logo, all that.

Thankfully easy enough to make any distro look like anything, with a little effort. :)

They go straight to ebay.

This annoys me so much. Our culture became a weird mix of nostalgia-hoardy and desperation to make a quick buck because most jobs are next to worthless anymore.

Everything became a speculative scarcity-obsessed stock market good, and it sucks.

That’s one thing I enjoy about digital stuff: All you need is one good hard copy in existence, and somebody can replicate and archive it for generations to come. “Piracy” really is preservation in this case.

I remember begging my mom for this game when it was in a large box at Costco when I was a kid. That giant stompy robot was just too cool.

I remember it being right next to Wheel of Time. Didn’t get to play that one though. :)

This game along with StarSiege was a huge part of my childhood.

Gotta say though, once you’ve felt the sheer ridiculous power of an OmniMech, playing Succession Wars era games took a bit of getting used to.

MechWarrior 2 and 3 allowed for some ridiculous cheese builds that were so fun(ny). :)

In KDE, YES!

Crap, I can’t remember 100% how I did it but they support sound themes now.

But my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed system running KDE6 starts up with this startup sound, I think I pulled the MechWarrior Online startup sound off YouTube or something. :)

…Now if only I could make my car do this… 😂

I miss “We can remain stupid longer than you can remain solvent.” and “Ape together strong.”

Either that, or by “unhealthily”, maybe he was obsessed with this kid’s channel so much he went out and seduced the kid’s mom as some kind of display of ultimate dominance, maybe using “I just got my pilot’s license” as an opener.

…Or yeah his kid who he conceived when he got his pilot’s license is now half his age and runs a YouTube channel, and excessive YouTube is unhealthy by default. . .maybe that one’s more likely. 😂

“SHOW ME YOUR WAR FACE!”

“AGGGGGGH!”