I’m a noob when it comes to gaming on Linux, having to rely on WINE just working without any changes or Proton on Steam if there’s no Linux port. Still learning how to do more advanced things with WINE rather than just run and hope the program works.

So far I haven’t had any major issues with getting games to play, except for a couple old PC games I found on MyAbandonware that probably need some extra work to work properly. Doesn’t display correctly or play the music for either. Otherwise, my experience has been pretty good.

As for distro side of things, I don’t know, outside of SteamOS on my Steam Deck, I have no clue on what’s happening in the games sphere. I just have Steam downloaded from either my package manager or flathub and call it good there.

Oh, and I also have the native Itchio storefront program and it works just fine as long as I don’t change the language to a certain language because it’ll just cause sorts of problems ( probably due to me not having a language pack for it installed ). The one visual novel I’ve played on Itchio on my laptop worked just fine out of the box, but I assume that’s more or less thanks to the devs.

Imagine you’re a teen dealing with a serious parental abuse issue. You don’t wanna give that info up to just anyone, so you rely on forums for people that are having or have had the same type of problem. Suddenly, under the new law, you are either geoblocked from the site entirely or you must provide some form of age verification.

Your options are either get a VPN ( which could very well be being blocked soon enough ) or you could find a free speech forum on the edge of the web that doesn’t require any of that. For people with even just slightly above average tech skills, a VPN wouldn’t be that hard to get.

For the forum, I can guarantee there are gonna be people looking to make you feel welcome, only to suddenly change once you’re comfortable and start demanding illicit content. Although this probably happens a lot on big platforms like ex-twitter, you have more options to deal with the people on there. The admins/mods of free speech sites probably aren’t gonna care as much if you’re getting abused on their free speech for all forums, so long as you don’t report their site to the government.

If neither of those are a good enough answer, imagine any company responsible for all the age verification stuff. Imagine they keep all the info they collect, whether that’s the verification for adults or minors. You know they aren’t getting rid of that data because it’s worth more kept and constantly being sold than if it was being deleted. What would happen if their repository of age verification data got hacked? A matter of when, not if, they get hacked, and suddenly every single person who submitted an ID, including the IDs of minors, gets stolen and suddenly any minor in their database is now a very likely victim of ID theft and fraud before they’re even considered a legal adult.

Anubis is a godsend, so long as A"I" companies cannot break it… and so long as we get people to switch to browsers like Mull and Ironfox.

For older titles, depends on if I can find them at a good price. At one point I got a bundle of old Popcap titles for a lot cheaper on Steam than if I bought each individual game on physical disk.

Though, if it’s not being sold on any digital stores, I’ll see what the price might be like on eBay and if I deem it too expensive ( varies depending on how I feel about the franchise and a few other factors ), I’ll just not both getting a physical copy, if you catch my drift.

I don’t mind physical copies of games at all, for a good price. Especially for older titles. It’s why I bought Morrowind and Oblivion GOTY edition at a thrift shop. Prices were low and they’re games that are high enough quality for me to consider playing.

No comment on newer titles because this is the patient gamer community.

I had an amazing run going earlier on Dungeon Clawler using Toxicarl and the kiddo pets. I could stack millions of stacks of poison on the enemies. Got to somewhere like floor 70 or so before dying.

Other than that, I have been on and off with most every other game I’ve attempted to play due to me finding them more boring nowadays.

The exception being a pokemon fangame: Pokemon Decay, which is kinda cool. Whole thing of the region you are in is the result of the first 4 regions being smashed together due to a decade prior the 3 legendary Hoenn creatures causing things to go chaotic and causing lots of chaos. Has new forms of pokemon, new evolutions for some, and for the most part they all look like well designed sprites.

All these types of rules dlnis push kids away from safer sites and towards the fringes of the internet that fly under the radar, like CP sites that don’t have age verification.

It’s never about the kids. Only a pedo, child haterz or both would ever try to convince you it’s about the kids.

… I’m starting to think I need to take up freelance pentesting

Is this before or after they hand that job off to AI? You know they’re gonna and then just complain when an actual expert finds 3000 holes per line of AI gen code.

Probably. I’m not an expert in this type of stuff, but I’ll definitely look into that.

Out of the options they provided, I haven’t used packet or gsconnect, but the others I have had many problems with. I’m convinced my ISP absolutely hates these programs because I’ve pretty much never had any luck with using them to send stuff to and from my phone.

Hell, I consider it a miracle that I can even connect my laptop and desktop using Synchthing. Though that’s the one I have had the most success with in the past, so I’m not that surprised.

I don’t have many disc based PC games anymore. Last I played one was less than a month ago ( don’t know exactly how long ago ) and it was Luxor. I have a few others on disc, but I either don’t have them installed or haven’t played them in a while.

Not including Luxor because I already listed it, I also currently have Super Collapse, Morrowind and Oblivion ( both with expansions ), Brok The Investigator ( have it on Steam so I don’t play the disk version or use the official collectors edition USB containing an installer either ), Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 and one of the expansions, some Dosney rollercoaster builder game that is pretty bad, and a normal blackjack game.

As for my absolute favorite, that’s the easiest question ever: Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 Platinum.

I also have another one that I loved that I cannot remember or find basically anything about it anywhere in the web because it was probably some demo to a full game that wasn’t out or didn’t release. The whole thing was a mini-golf like hole where it starts you off in front of a drive-in movie theater with cars parked parallel to the screen, like they’re parking in a parking lot at a grocers. You had to hit the ball up a ramp and into the screen, which was showing a black and white swamp film. You’d be sent into the movie and had to put around the water to get to the hole. Camera wouldn’t move unless you entered a different area. Anybody know literally anything about that?

I mean, isn’t that just GOG though? At least for the majority of the titles they sell?

I’d say that’s more than controversial. It’s inhumane and should be outlawed worldwide. That’s more closer to Japanese “work yourself to death” kinda work culture than anything else. There’s a reason, from what I understand, that basically nobody, besides the bosses implementing this kinda policy, likes it.

Kinda fucked up that this person moderated hate posts only to find the child predators posting images of their kids on a different forum.

Don’t know about you, but whenever I see hate groups specifically targeting children, I think the intention is very clear. Not just spreading hate, but also wanting to act on one of the socially forbidden sex acts as well.

He releases the Epstein Files, unredacted, and maybe they Washington Commanders will change their name back.

In fact, until he does, I vote they change their name to the Washington Epsteins!

Well, since music is out of the question, it’s always possible to do things like finding old games you like online through places like MyAbandonware and attempting to burn them to a CD/DVD and seeing if they work. Not as convenient as just using something like DOSBox, but definitely rewarding in my opinion.

minecraft-cracked

Gotta assume that if any Arch users actually fell for that one, that they either let their kids use their device or they’re generally not smart ( which absolutely goes against my stereotypical view of an arch user ).

Faygo. Specifically either red pop or cotton candy. There used to be a single gas station at basically the far edge of town that sold it and nobody else had any Faygo whatsoever. Then at one point, a little convenience store right across from my favorite movie theater started carrying it when a new store took over. It’s real nice on the rare occasion I have it.

Fair enough.

Now we wait for the death toll to skyrocket as every other company follow suite.

For now, a fix that works for me on that has been just restarting my phone. Probably a very temporary solution that yt is working on preventing from working, but at least it works.