I’m interested to read your interview, I’ve often wondered what motivations are present for the minds behind services like that. I wonder how many are from a benevolent will to share entertainment & preserve games, and how many are simply just financial

In my opinion Gajim for desktop looks pretty sleek. Cheogram has a 2020 look to it, but it’s still great looking imo. Not everything has to have sleek gradients and overly rounded borders. I actually prefer 2015 UI where things were more boxy and very slightly rounded e.g. the old instagram app logo.

I’ve also gotten my friend to use Cheogram, and her #1 complaint is not having chat effects from imessage. I feel like if you just slap on integrated gifs and add a couple of UI animations, non-techies would be all over it. Maybe XMPP just needs some frontend UI pazazz for people to take notice

And of course! Thank you for quality news and tips

Nightfire is such a great game, you’ll have a lot of fun with it. All the James Bond games are pretty slept on imo (except goldeneye, which everyone knows already).

I know Sonic Unleashed had an unofficial PC port, but I didn’t know Midnight Club 3 had one, is there a PC version or are you talking about emulation on pc?

PS2/Xbox/Gamecube is my favorite era of gaming; there were so many good titles released. Here are some hidden gems some might like:

007 Nightfire: best Bond game imo aside from Goldeneye, spy themed fps, great splitscreen multiplayer

Marvel Ultimate Alliance: beat em up featuring a sizeable amount of marvel heroes (deadpool!)

Midnight Club 3: way ahead of its time; open world racing develeoped by rockstar. Basically GTA but just the car part

Sonic Unleashed: very slept-on sonic title, has the usual fast paced running but you can also become a werewolf sonic and it becomes more hack n slash / 3d platformer

SoulCalibur 2&3: SoulCalibur is my favorite fighting franchise, and SC2 is the best in that series. I like SC2 better on Gamecube because of Link, but SC3 was only released on Playstation 2

Star Trek Conquest: an RTS but for console? A decent Star Trek game? It’s actually a lot of fun and challenging with certain civilizations. Winning as the Federation is HARD

Test Drive Off Road Wide Open: a racing game I used to play all the time, had an open world setting that I would just drive around in for hours. Fun, fast paced, and features Metallica!

Star Wars the Clone Wars: vehicular combat game with a surprisingly fun campaign. Flying around in a clone dropship is so much fun and the splitscreen multiplayer is a lot of fun too

I feel like so many people will continue using 10 it might not bee a problem. If browsers and antiviruses continue to update W10 versions even past eol, you would be fine if you practiced strict computer hygene and refused to install any new/untrusted programs and never visited unknown websites. Still walking a fine line though

Also make sure your games drive is not formated exfat. I tried this process with my steam library switching from windows to lmde, but Steam on linux needs access to a file sysyem with symlink support (e.g. ext4) to work properly.

I started to dual boot LMDE about a year ago, and realized how janky Windows is. So many tweaks and little things that I just “put up with” that I never really paid attention to like when 12 programs all fight to steal focus on startup.

I run hardened windows 10 but now for no reason it’s displaying the “Activate Windows” watermark whenever I deny internet access to the system host, which I have done for years without issue. This is the nail in the coffin for me. My system is gonna be pure linux soon, bye bye windows

You also might try changing VPN protocols. OpenVPN and Wireguard are the 2 most popular, and there’s also L2TP on certain providers. For me OpenVPN drains faster than Wireguard. And if I remember correctly, using L2TP on Mozilla vpn drained like 0 battery when I tried it, although L2TP is developed by Microsoft so take that into consideration

Pretty much any VPN will drain your battety due to constant connection checks, but some are better than others. I’m on CalyxOS (custom android) so I can’t speak to IOS, but I juat tried out various VPN services until I found one that worked. Ironically Mullvad was the one that drained the battery the least for me. Nord, Proton, and Air drained it the most. You could also try Mozilla, Proton, Riseup, or Xeovo VPNs which all have respectable terms of service and are trustworthy imo

Steam Deck adhesive is unironically one of my favorite smells ngl. Guilty as charged

In my opinion, the privacy violation would be taking my biometric data without my consent (e.g. facial geometry, fingerprint, blood, dna/genetics, etc.) While yes my face is public, I’d rather not give them a high-res facial geometry map that gets fast-tracked directly to a database.

Making it harder for them makes them put in the effort to track or profile people which does not eliminate the problem, but does make it more difficult and thus more resource consuming for them, especially if many people do the same

I did a deep dive into frontends because I love organizing stuff in general. I use different frontends for each device I have because they all have different pros, but overall my favorite is Playnite because of its metadata and sorting features. For Windows I use Playnite, on Linux I use Pegasus, on Steam Deck I use RetroDeck/EmulationStation, and on handhelds I use Knulli Firefly.

Playnite is imo the king, because it has really beautiful themes with custom cover art and can sort games in basically any way possible: by system, rating, genre, name, release date, you name it. The only con is that it’s Windows exclusive (for the near future) and is janky in Wine/Lutris.

Pegasus is spectacular for its fine grained control, and can be configured to do basically anything. Its like the Arch Linux of the frontend world; start with the basics and build from the ground up. With tinkering, it works great on almost any platform.

RetroDeck is great because it’s plug n play. I love to tinker, but I also wanted a platform to just play my games without hastle or messing around. I find myself actually playing my games on the deck instead of tinkering with the frontend.

Knulli Firefly is great for smaller screen handhelds for a similar reason. It’s very customizable, but also works straight away with little to no hastle. It’s also better than most stock OSes that ship with emulation devices