The older Tribes titles if you’re into classic arena shooters. Tribes 2 had some maps and modes that were more Battlefield-esque too. The old Age of series were excellent LAN games as well (empires/mythology). These are PC titles and I’m not sure of your target platform.

Epic generally works fine through Heroic launcher. Though I’ve had some occasional problems with Heroic and in those cases Lutris running the Windows Epic Game Store Launcher solved every time. Steam and Proton are still the easiest plug n play though.

Smart home stuff can be incredibly fun and handy, but you have to go into it with a tinkering and very IT-centric mindset. If you’ve already got a homelab set up then running a home assistant VM/container is pretty dead simple. Beyond that, keep as local an ecosystem as you can to reduce friction and improve security. Set up proper vlans, etc. and most importantly, only make smart what you can either live without or effortlessly control WITHOUT the “smart features”. My lights automatically turn on when I get home from work if it’s dark- but if my server is down, I can still just hit a light switch. My camera doorbell still rings as long as the power isn’t out, etc. Yeah it’s work, to set up right, but well worth it if you enjoy tinkering.

I can vouch for Bazzite and always will as long as they keep up the solid work. Running on a laptop (gnome variant for easier fingerprint login) and desktop (KDE, cuz I just prefer KDE day to day). It just works™️.

Just rock an atomic distro. You choices then become: it boots, OR: the OS is no longer present so I guess it’s not my problem anymore.

In my experience, the crashing is usually from some directX rendering compatibility issues with the windows 11 driver and display stack. Try using DXVK (which is what steam proton uses on Linux) to convert the driver stack into something vulkan compliant. For me, personally, it SIGNIFICANTLY reduced crashes even in windows 10. I’m rocking an AMD GPU though so my vulkan performance is notably more stable than many Nvidia equivalents. To use DXVK you just download the zip file from the GitHub releases page and drop it (extracted, 32 bit dll’s specifically) into the folder with the game binaries (similar to old dinput override mods). Then launch the game like normal and it SHOULD “just work”.

Literally just started doing this last week. I did NOT expect it to work so much better than the name-brand app for such a “closed system” as Sonos.

Rehabilitated HP z440 workstation, checking in! Popped in a used $20 e5-2620v4 xeon CPU and 64gb of RAM and it sails for my use cases. TrueNAS as the base OS and a TalOS k8’s cluster in a VM to handle apps. Old but gold.

Oftentimes it’s someone creating and maintaining a piece of software or tooling for themselves and their own benefit. They just happen to be nice and forward thinking enough to share it.

In my experience, Seagate exos are only “loud/clicky” when under HEAVY write loads. Mostly they’re pretty quiet with a very low drone at worst. In any decent case it’ll be pretty negligible. With headphones on doubly so.

Yeah, logging in pulled across everything, as far as I can tell. Subscriptions included!

Grayjay on Android has been working damn near flawlessly for me. No clue if the parent company is to be trusted at this point or not- but I cannot argue with the results.

Sure, but we’re talking about a handheld. Yes, performance is improving generation over generation, but in the handheld space power usage and heat dissipation are equally important. If you’ve been keeping up with recent innovations, you’ll see that generally we are making more powerful parts, but they’re getting much more power hungry for every little percent of improvement they bring in raw horsepower. So far it doesn’t look like you could even get Xbox series S performance in a handheld yet. At least not at a reasonably portable size, cost, or battery life. You could get a little better than PS4 pro performance in a handheld at present, based on what I’ve seen. Which is not a full generational leap over what’s out there.

If they released one NOW they’d probably be shooting themselves in the foot. At best they’d get mid-generational performance improvements whereas likely in the next year or two Valve is probably going to drop a true SteamDeck 2 with significant improvements. All speculation at this point, but if you’re a bean counter at Microsoft, speculation is like 90% of your job. Unless they abandon the standard console release cycle and shoot for faster iteration, they’ll want to come out absolutely swinging to compete.

Absolutely this. Relatively quick and clean, no messing with installation or reconfiguration. That is, assuming your data isn’t completely corrupted and the old drive doesn’t just outright fail during transfer… But if that happens you were screwed to begin with.

Dark thick beer can also work in place of cocoa, in my experience.

Compatibility is unlikely to be very different. The key is immutability (easy to update, hard to brick your system) and some baked in nice to haves for gaming like some specific drivers/patches and controller support out of the box.

Cheaper than Spotify for the number of users it gives you (at least where I live) and the app itself has functioned significantly better than Spotify’s has in my experience so far while not depriving me of any of the artists and albums I listen to regularly. Early on in its life it was big time selling snake oil, but at this point it’s just a solid alternative to Spotify and YouTube music which have both, frankly, gotten “too big to fail” and have begun enshittification because of it. Man we need more competition…

Just tracking trended data in general would be sufficient to defeat a LARGE number of common cheats. One of the very few use cases “AI” might actually work for in a positive way. But that puts the burden on the developers and server hosters, and it’s much easier to just burden the players directly instead.

My old Nexus 5 was my first smartphone and probably still holds the top spot for price, performance and usability (at the time) of any phone I’ve owned. My current Pixel 6 is somewhat close- but there was just something SO solid and magical about the old Nexus 5.