itch.io is fantastic. Mostly indie stuff with some bigger name stuff, but it’s by far the best out there for devs.

In certain parts of the world, you quite literally do not have a choice. For example: I’m in a rural community on an island. No one uses any other website to post anything, from local classified ads to events to important city/community stuff. The choice isn’t to use a better alternative but whether a person here has social contact with anyone locally at all.

No, moving is not a realistic option, especially not moving as far as we’d have to move; even the biggest city in the province doesn’t use anything else.

The article explicitly talks about that multiple times, though. Were you reading one of the articles that this one references? It mentions repeatedly how inaccessible and unaffordable healthcare is, using both of those points, and then moves on to discuss the issue as part of a broader societal trend.

No, because if every piece of your entire existence isn’t dedicated to making profit for the upper class, your life is worthless, and anything that devalues the profit they could make from you is stealing.

To be clear, I’m not saying you’re wrong, just expressing frustration at the current state of the world.

I dunno, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and using mostly flatpacks for my apps have been pretty consistent for me lately, though that’s the first rolling release distro I’ve tried.

I had about 16TB of total storage when it was using that much RAM. It still didn’t like it.

Can confirm; this is exactly why I switched to Linux. After my fifth-ish reinstallation of Windows, Microsoft pushed an update that caused the OS to use 80-90% of my CPU and I couldn’t fix it because they locked down the service that was doing it despite it being entirely unrelated to my use of the computer (it was an Edge-related service that scanned web traffic for “optimization” if I remember right - one of those where Microsoft says “it’s necessary but we won’t tell you what it is and it wasn’t in the OS before a couple months ago”).

Windows often uses 8GB at idle for me with a single browser window open due to how much background BS it runs that is entirely irrelevant to anything I use the PC for. I upgraded to 32GB, then just finally decided to switch to Linux for good because it uses around 4-5GB with 10+ programs open (and most of that is Steam and Discord being inefficient).

Vulkan is basically unsupported by nVidia on anything before the 20-series on Linux. My 1060 6GB can only manage around 4-5 FPS at 1080p in some games as a result while others work totally fine. In addition, the drivers aren’t open source, so no one can go in and fix that problem.

The Vulkan vs DirectX thing isn’t an absolute in terms of performance. In addition, it’s worth keeping in mind that Windows is horrifically bloated with unoptimized “features” and can use up to 8GB of RAM at idle plus 10-50% of your CPU at idle depending on your configuration as well as which unnecessary services are bugged in that update. That in and of itself makes a huge difference; my W10 install was using 8GB of RAM and nearly 80% of my CPU on system services for almost a month straight before they finally fixed the bug and reduced it to 2-4 GB + maybe 15-25% depending on the day, meaning I was getting huge stutter playing games as simple as Old School RuneScape. My Tumbleweed install on my much worse specs-wise laptop, on the other hand, used effectively zero CPU and less than 1GB of RAM at idle (fairly confident on the RAM thing but I’d have to check for exact numbers).

Having played Halo CE for PC recently…no, it doesn’t have split screen at all. That was only on the Xbox version (which is technically superior in quite a few ways). The only way to have split screen on Halo CE on PC is via console commands/mods. That said, I do agree with your overall point and I would love to be able to do split screen MCC on my PC without mods.

It’s pretty similar to most other roleplay in an RPG in my experience: you remember that you’re all playing characters and you respect out-of-character boundaries (including fade to black for anything too explicit or indulgent). I’ve been worried about crossing boundaries before but I don’t think I’ve ever actually crossed a line over the course of quite a few campaigns, even with the couple of times I’ve had to fade to black. You just have to know your players and be explicit about boundaries; I’ve had players request that no romance be present in a game before and I’ve accommodated that as well as players who’ve explicitly stated that they want to play flirtatious characters (though not in the same game, obviously).

And of course just be cognizant of how much detail you’re going into; you don’t want to be describing the details of a makeout scene, but “Jessica presses in for a long kiss” does the job and doesn’t violate most people’s boundaries in my experiences as long as they’re okay with the general themes.

Never really had it go “weird”, and honestly, though I’ve ended up in an IRL relationship with a player in one of my games on two separate occasions, the in-game romance doesn’t seem to be related (neither of the people I ended up dating stood out in that regard).