Yep, plenty of girls/women out there who don’t really consider themselves “gamers” who will put multiple-digit hours into those management types of games. I personally know several like that. I would imagine a lot of women don’t really get into direct PVP online gaming due to the online environment and lack of attempts to appeal to female gamers with the designs of such games, but would probably play a lot of single-player in a bunch of different genres and series. As the article implies, Nintendo IPs in particular would be appealing due to lack of pandering to either the common “gamer” demographic or to what many other publishers think women want in games (overly stereotypical “girl stuff”).

Which makes it even more strange considering Ubisoft is based in the EU.

Both Flatpak and Snap are preinstalled but it defaults to debs/apt. Though through the command line they strongly recommend the pkcon command over apt itself.

Yep. I’m running Neon instead of Kubuntu for this reason. I didn’t want the hassle of dealing with snap, and I wanted the latest KDE stuff, so it’s perfect for me and I’m enjoying the experience. May not be for everyone, though.

So… it sounds like you’re struggling with Snap. In addition to others’ suggestion (try a different distro without Snap, perhaps one of those distros made by a different company such as Fedora (Red Hat), an OpenSUSE variety (SUSE), or even a corporate, less Snap-reliant Ubuntu-based distro like Pop_OS (System 76)), you could also try uninstalling Snap from Ubuntu or installing another binary option like Flatpak/Flathub and installing your software that way. Frankly, the amount of money these companies make working on Linux or Linux-based products has nothing to do with your struggles. Plus, the companies you mention do, in fact, make money working on the kernel itself because they contribute to the kernel as a project. Even Microsoft and Google do the same, though Microsoft does so for the sake of WSL and Google does for Chrome OS and Android. So plenty of people make money if the Linux kernel keeps having work done on it and keeps improving. I don’t see what the problem is with the kernel itself. The lack of polish, as you call it, in Linux-based OSes is not a fault at all of the kernel but in all the various other parts that go into the OS. And that level of polish can vary quite widely. As you note, Snap has been holding Ubuntu back quite a bit due to lack and reluctance of community adoption. Even just trying a different Ubuntu-based OS such as Pop_OS, Linux Mint or Neon may change your view.

Flathub is likely safer than most other places to get flatpaks from, certainly safer than just some random repo you find on some guy’s website somewhere, but no software source is guaranteed to be 100% safe.

OSMAnd is how I use OpenStreetMap too. It’s quite good for road routes even in rural areas, but especially in those rural areas finding specific locations can be spotty or outdated. Even in my town of over 100,000, I still have trouble finding some local places like restaurants and businesses. I always try searching for what I’m looking for before I leave home, so I have access to my computer to pull up a map and address to pin onto OSMAnd if I need to. (I’m someone who de-Googles as much as humanly possible so I don’t use Google Maps.) With more up-to-date data it can be a great alternative to Google or Apple Maps, but that’s the nature of crowd built data: it’s only as up-to-date as the data contributors provide, and that’s both a strength and a weakness of OSM.

Windows Vista completely died on my laptop back in 2009. I’d vaguely heard about this other OS called “Ubuntu” shortly before that seemed neat and was especially cool because it was free, but was too nervous about breaking my machine to try it before, but because it was already broken at that point, I had a friend burn me an ISO and installed it. I learned Ubuntu was actually Linux when I was configuring and learning how to use it, and that’s when I learned about concepts like FOSS, Linux just being a kernel and not the whole OS, and the idea of Linux distros. The only time I looked back was dual booting a gaming PC with Windows 10 for a while just before Proton came on the scene. Even then, booting into Windows was rare, only for games that did not work on Linux at the time, which with Proton releasing and constantly improving, became even rarer as time went on. A failed distro upgrade last year (likely due to me messing around with Mesa driver versions) finally had me wipe the Windows side from that PC altogether and go back to only running Linux when I clean installed over both Windows and the other broken Linux install. Truly haven’t looked back since.

It’s not a super-hot take, but art style >>>>> graphics when it comes to “beautiful” looking games. There are games coming out today that can run on a toaster that look far better than many AAA titles with all the fancy lighting effects and ray tracing that require you to dump 4-digit sums into a monster gaming PC to fully enjoy, all due to how the smaller games masterfully handle their art design.

Generally I agree. Many of the largest and most popular distros are run by corporate entities: Canonical (Ubuntu and its various flavors), Red Hat (RHEL, Fedora), SUSE (SLE, OpenSUSE), and so on. Many more of the popular distros are community developed but are based on, or draw heavily from, corporate distros. Most of the more “beginner friendly” distros just so happen to be these corporate distros or ones based on them. It would be foolish to think Linux would be where it’s at today without the contributions of these companies and others such as Valve, who has almost singlehandedly made Linux gaming commercially viable. It’s still up to the community, however, to keep these companies honest when it comes to staying true to FOSS principles and compliance with the FOSS licenses they work under. That includes things like telemetry and a respect for privacy and security, allowing for freedom as to when an end user wishes to update their software, and retaining the open source nature of code and companies’ contributions to it. Corporations have the freedom to use and contribute to open source software, and they even have the freedom to make profit from it. But they have no more or less freedom than anyone else has to do so as well, and that’s where we have to keep an eye on them.

The only times I allow it myself are in this case (zero legal availability) and for unofficial/fan translations of games not available in your home region/language. Nobody would be getting your money anyway, no theft of compensation/profits there. If any games do become available, though, then we should support them. The more we put our money where our mouth is for a return to market for these games, the more incentive there is for companies to bring more of them back.

As laughable as it sounds, the Sega 32X. I was a Genesis kid and one birthday my parents bought me Star Wars Arcade not understanding that it required the 32X to play. I kept telling them that the game wouldn’t work without it (even showing them that it wouldn’t fit in the regular Genesis slot) and they kept insisting that I must be doing something wrong or that I could just cut the corners off the cartridge to make it fit. So I wanted the 32X to play Star Wars, as well as this strange Knuckles game I kept hearing about (which I know is Knuckles’ Chaotix). Never ended up getting one. Got an N64 soon after, much better decision.

You could say… That’s no good?

You mean I can’t get the dust out of the Wii U disk drive that way?

It’s a start, but hopefully they drop the idea altogether It’s bad enough as it is, we don’t need more.

Wouldn’t the Japanese model also have a much larger library of games available and be able to use the RAM carts to boost performance?

Game Sack is a long-running channel that’s one of the best retro game channels IMO. They release a video every week or two. MetalJesusRocks and his endless quest for Hidden Gems is also very good.

Catholic here. Despite God’s forgiveness, Jesus never said salvation is guaranteed. As he said, “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven”. And that’s just for the rich. There are other passages that emphasize the difficulty of gaining eternal life in Heaven, " the way is narrow", “you must take up your cross”, and so on. Christ’s death and resurrection made salvation possible in the first place. We couldn’t even have a hope of it without His help. He also gave us the way that we must follow to gain salvation now that it’s possible: belief in God and Christ, and following His commandments, given through the Church.

To put it in another way, we all have a relationship with God. That relationship was damaged through original sin in a way we could not repair on our own. God still has always loved us, but without Christ’s sacrifice, He could not forgive our betrayal through sin and therefore we remained separated from Him. Once Christ bore the burden of our sin and overcame it, that repaired humanity’s relationship with God overall and God is willing to forgive any sin, past or present, that we commit against Him. As long as we do not commit a serious sin, that relationship will stay intact. Two people in a relationship may do little things that annoy or lightly anger the other person, but we’ve all got stuff that aren’t “deal-breakers” with each other. But a serious sin done with full knowledge and of one’s own free will, which in the Catholic Church we call a mortal sin, is a “deal-breaker” that once again severs our own personal relationship with God and threatens our salvation. It’s basically a betrayal of God’s love. God has these rules and morality and such because He loves us so much He wants the absolute best for humanity and the world. Sin does damage to that, and mortal sin does damage to that in a big way. God is always willing to forgive, but in order for that to happen we have to show that we are sorry for breaking that relationship and promise/resolve that we will do our best to try not to do it again. We have to reconcile with God just as two people in a strained or broken relationship have to reconcile with each other. In the Catholic Church, we believe that reconciliation happens in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where we confess what we did to a priest, who is in the person of Jesus at that time, and make that resolution to not sin again. The priest then offers a penance as a way to basically “make it up” to God, or as a theologian I heard once say, “clean up the glass and repair the window we broke”, and the good relationship with God is restored. Basically, yeah, God is always willing to forgive if we ask for it… But that doesn’t mean we still can’t break that relationship. I’d always be willing to forgive a best friend if they were to betray me, but if they actually did that, I’d still be mad, and if they don’t respond to my calls offering that forgiveness, well, there’s not much more I can do to fix the relationship with my friend at that point if they don’t want to be forgiven.