I don’t think it’s especially egregious for a company to advertise it’s new hardware on it’s platform. I do think that the form of system messages is unfortunate though.

In the case of dark souls, you can quit out at any time and your progress is saved. If you’re in a boss fight, it’ll just put you in front of the boss door when you reload your save. It’s saving automatically constantly. Bonfires are more for setting your respawn point when you die, and fast travel, among other features that vary from game to game. That level of tension can absolutely be done without forcing you to lose progress if say, your power goes out or you have to go.

I get your overall point, but I do think that the issue isn’t laziness, the issue is the use of AI. I think it’s a problem when AI is used whether the result looks good or not, because of the nature of how those AI models are trained, the environmental impact of their data centers, among other issues. For example, the current ram shortage is a direct result of these data centers. Overall, we’re also talking about people’s jobs. And as much as I’m offer degrowth and reducing the amount of work that people do, I also think it’s important that artists who are typically always underpaid anyways, are able to keep their paying jobs. I’ve seen so many programming positions reduced to minimum wage AI prompt writer positions, and that same shit is happening to real artists that have rent to pay and kids to raise… We already have tools to make these jobs more efficient, but the last thing video games really need is more cost cutting measures.

I’ve been working on getting the true ending in hollow Knight, and I’m currently trying to beat some of the DLC content. I’m get to play silksong soon

You can select to run them in proton, rather than just normal wine, in lutris. I’ve been doing it to run games from gog for years with few issues, namely games that are old and have the same problems working on windows as well. So… Yes they will?

Linux compatibility is fine. You can pretty easily install gog games by logging into your gof account on lutris. It’ll let you see your whole library and install directly from it, and any games that work in proton will work just fine using proton via lutris. You can also just add your gog game as a non-steam game and run it there.

I’ve played a lot of Battle net games by installing battle net in lutris, then installing the game I want to play there. There’s a lot of scripts you can find for installing particular games. I can’t speak for whether HOTS works, but I played many many hours of WoW and Overwatch (before 2) that way. It’s annoying using a launcher to run a launcher to play your game, but it works.

What’s crazy us, there’s actually enough existing housing for everyone, at least in the US to have a home. It’s just all owned by massive real estate corporations and left empty. The state doesn’t need to build more housing, they just won’t distribute what’s there. But let’s be real, they don’t want people to stop being homeless. Our prison industry is private and for-profit, they want them to be homeless so they can criminalize and arrest them, so they can make them do cheap/free prison labor.

Yeah, but you really don’t have to engage with every oblivion gate you see. There’s a lot of really great quest lines to engage with, but the main story is one of the least interesting the game has to offer.

I’ve been using Garuda for… Two or three years? I’ve done a lot of distro-hopping looking for something that won’t just break on me. I used Ubuntu for a long time but kept running into situations where it would break, such as boot loops. Eventually I settled on Garuda because it ships with newer software and Nvidia drivers, which is helpful because I use my PC for gaming. I have stuck around because it’s garuda-update command automatically makes a backup of your system out of the box, and you can select to boot into a backup in grub then restore it really easily. There have been a couple times where something has broken on an update, but when that happens I can immediately restore the backup, and I don’t even need to remember to run a backup manually. I do feel that the default theme is a bit gaudy so I swapped it to a default KDE, but other than that I’ve had pretty much only good experiences with Garuda.

I’ve personally been using a raspberry pi with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. I just run jellyfin in Firefox and navigate with the mouse - the keyboard rarely ever being necessary. I was able to increase the icon size so it’s acceptable on a tv and bookmark any streaming websites I use. It’s certainly not as clean as using something like an apple tv, but it’s serviceable and I don’t have to fiddle with plugins like when I tried Kodi. Honestly though, apple tv probably fulfills what you’re looking for like others have said.

Are you explicitly looking for competitive multiplayer games? Single player shooters like Prey, or the BioShock games, might be able to fulfill what you’re looking for. I like Helldivers 2, as well. It’s not slow per se, but your fighting AI and not people so insane reflexes are far from important. It’s coop but very worth your time.

I’m playing through Dark Souls 2, and Horizon Zero Dawn. I’m really surprised how well horizon runs, although I’m capping the fps at 30 for a more stable experience. Balatro has also been a big one

Honestly, I mostly just play a lot of old games that still support consoles, cheat codes, or mods.

Installing Linux on top of a Windows install is a non-issue, the other way around can be a problem. I’ve been dual booting for years without problems. I keep mine on separate drives, though.

That’s very fair. I say this only because I’ve found myself going down a rabbit hole of things not working on my own before, and a reinstall is usually the faster option for me. POP was just one example, a lot of distributions come with Nvidia installed by default. Mint should work pretty much out of the box, but I remember Optimus being tricky sometimes. I do not recommend Manjaro, and not because it’s arch. The last time I used Manjaro, it’s automatic updater updated my Nvidia driver and my kernel to two separate versions that didn’t work with each other, and bricked my system on me. It’s not exceptionally stable even as far as Arch goes. Arch doesn’t have to be scary, I use Garuda and it has made it very user friendly. I run all updates with one command and that command automatically makes snapper backups that I can pick between on boot, which makes fixing anything that can go wrong pretty easy. Garuda Cinnamon edition uses the same desktop that mint uses. Anyway, I do hope you’re able to get mint working for you.

Sometimes, the simplest option is to try a different distribution instead of messing with individual things that aren’t working on one. A lot of distributions come with the Nvidia drivers set up by default, such as POP OS. You could also try a fresh install of mint and install the Nvidia drivers using the driver manager application, and see if you’re getting the same results. As far as NTFS, that does have to change. You will keep running into problems if you don’t format them into something like ext4. When I first installed Linux, I had all my games on an NTFS drive and very few of them would work at all.

The NVIDIA drivers are a constant source of problems compared to AMD. I’ve had updates completely break some games, so that if I want to play my whole library of games I have to alternate between driver versions.

Which is really less because of the consoles themselves and more because of the priorities of AAA game studios

Perhaps, we should be more concerned with maintaining and keeping relevant current hardware, over constant production of more powerful hardware just for the sake of doing it. We’ve hit a point of diminishing returns in terms of the value we’re actually being given by each new generation. Even the PS4 and Xbox One were able to produce gorgeous graphics.