Wasn’t this the game that had an RCE exploit in the chat system? Like you could just type JavaScript in general chat and the game client would run it for anyone who saw it. That’s about as enshittified as it gets (see also: smart appliances)

The difference between awards chosen purely by people who play video games and awards chosen primarily by people who make their pay cheques in the industry

Saints Row 2-3-4 are great for this. 2 is the GOAT, but 3 and 4 are arguably better at providing the “screwing around” experience.

Sleeping Dogs is underrated and regularly goes on sale for like $5. There is not as much sandbox-ey stuff to do compared to GTA/Just Cause/Saints Row, but I loved jacking a nice car and cruising the freeway at night, or going on a murder spree and playing survival against waves of cops.

Elder Scrolls isn’t necessarily as wacky of an experience out of the box, but between mods and the sheer amount of freedom you have in the game, there is plenty of dumb random stuff you can get up to.

If you have Elden Ring on PS4/5 and know your way around the game, invasions have a ton of potential for shenanigans. Probably not what you’re after, and I imagine multiplayer activity is down since Nightreign came out, but it’s worth mentioning as such a unique experience.

Honourable indie mention: Mars First Logistics is a game where you build vehicles and use them to transport objects from point A to point B. The challenges are largely physics-based, with the objects often having unusual shapes or odd properties, and your vehicle needs to be able to self-load them in addition to bearing them across varying distances and terrains. It’s not really what you’re asking for, but I feel like it scratched the same sort of itch for me in terms of open-ended low-stakes gameplay.

I’ve seen some devices call it “night mode” as well

This looks pretty slick. I need to find a way to have it slide down from the top of the screen guake-style

Maybe we could turn it around: adblockers are tools that block ads and other kinds of dark traffic such as trackers and malicious scripts.

I thlammed my penith in the thower door

No webRTC apps work for me at all in Firefox. Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, whatever. I can connect but there is no video or audio in either direction.

RIP Presto :( I wish they had open-sourced it when they abandoned it

This also refills your fuel and extracts toxic pollutants from the air!

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Thanks for the heads up. I’m fine with X11 for general usage, but I’ve read that games tend to perform better under Wayland, so that’s probably going to be an important factor.

Imagine the answer to the Fermi paradox being that the aliens found us and immediately quarantined our entire planetary system.

This is my first time hearing of Bottles. It looks like it serves a similar purpose to Lutris? Have you used both, and if so, how do they compare?

Thanks for sharing your experience! It sounds like Mint is mostly pretty manageable for a casual user, which is good news for me.

I think a lot of Linux programs have moved to a distribution format called “flatpak” which I am not super familiar with, but I believe behaves the way you prefer (just download the app file and run it). Though fwiw, the command-line script installers are generally not actually doing much different from installers on Windows or Mac - they’re just not hidden behind a progress bar.

The person in question loves their Steam Deck, but occasionally wants to play a game that requires a little more processing power. My first thought when I started researching was to check whether SteamOS was generally available for PCs (sadly, it’s not).

Have you used Bazzite for long?

I appreciate the concern, friend. They are absolutely getting a debloated Windows install if Linux doesn’t work out for any reason. And I’ll probably be avoiding Gentoo for this particular use case, which should hopefully minimise the issues with drivers and compatibility software. ;)

Who said they were looking for suspects?

I’m definitely aiming to keep the hoop-jumping to the minimum. Ideally, I’m just going to set up their user account, log them into Google and Steam, pin some stuff to the taskbar and everything will “just work” from there.

if this means anything, I’d switch my 85-year-old father with dementia to Linux Mint without worrying that he wouldn’t know his way around.

This means a lot, as it’s actually not too far off from what I’m trying to do. Thanks!