Roku Jellyfin app has been pretty good lately, few complaints now!

Mint

I see Mint as the more reasonable option that keeps 98% of the advantages of Ubuntu, with less of the crazy. I was a xubuntu user a decade ago, but have been very happy with Mint xfce since I switched.

Thanks for the rec! I also love that you presume that there will be a next time, cuz, uh, that’s accurate. These little boxes are powerhouses, I probably want one for a TV set-top box now that all the TV boxes (Roku, Amazon Fire, even Android TV and soon Apple TV) are riddled with ads.

Beelink and Minisforum are legit

I wish I knew a lot of this when I first started shopping for a mini PC. I ended up with a Beelink model that I’m quite happy with, but it seems almost luck that I didn’t pick another one, and I would have liked a “reputable brand” search function.

Lawnchair is what I switched to after Nova Launcher was purchased. Honestly, I have few complaints, it’s been plenty good enough for me.

Anti-Cheat is a bitch

Seriously, I don’t know how this one is solvable, to be honest, without major investment and support from the game companies themselves.

performance issues are definitely not universal

Agreed!

Don’t @ me too hard, but I think @luciferofastora has some good points on sound and anti-cheat. They don’t affect me, mostly because I don’t like PVP games that need anti-cheat, but they represent a huge chunk of the market and I do wish they worked better on Linux. I’m fully on Linux for my daily driver and generally have good experiences, I’m not even considering going back to Windows, I just wish things worked better for everyone.

It looks quite usable, to be honest. I would have loved to use it back then.

I’ll have to give that one a try!

Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain. Quite a learning curve, but I loved the different ways you can win (conquest, trade, black ops) and how much you could customize your ships or pick unique races with tolerances for different planets.

Game strategy advice for a 30+ year old game? I love this so much, you guys are awesome.

omg YES. Nothing I have found since then has quite scratched the same itch of flying around with a friend on some random dude’s server. So much fun!

Puppy was going to me my suggestion too, before I read that you’d already used it. Maybe try some of the other versions? If you used a Debian- or Ubuntu-based Puppy, you could try a Slack-based one, or vice-versa. Puppy’s organization is a little confusing, in my opinion, but it does give a user some options. You also might try some of the “puplets” that aren’t official Puppy distros but are part of the Puppy family.

https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/family-tree.html

Cool, I didn’t know that existed.

But honestly, I want something like a 4-5" screen, what used to be normal, it would actually be a hand-sized device.

ChatGPT is pretty crap branding too, for the record. They just somehow managed to mainstream it. All the LLMs after it try to have cooler names (Bard, Copilot, etc.) but the kludgy first name is still better known.