Free: Battle for Wesnoth is really great, I haven’t played it in a long time but it was already great like 10-15 years ago so it’s probably even better today, Nethack (if you don’t mind the starting difficulty and the “graphics”) is also great, VERY complex gameplay but very rewarding if you know it fairly well. Also saw a video of Xonotic today, looks also really good if you’re into fast multiplayer arena shooters (Quake-like). Heard positive things about 0 AD as well (Age of Empires-like). All of these are open source and in the extra repository on Arch.

Non-free but really cheap: Stardew Valley is probably great, I’ve never played it and it doesn’t look like my cup of tea but I’ve only heard positive things plus it’s like #1 or #2 rated on Steam, so it must be really good.

Non-free: Stellaris (got into it recently, great game and well-maintained Linux client (not at all common), much better than I expected, VERY complex and content-rich, quite expensive when you want all DLCs. It’s like a live service game, you’ll pay quite a bit if you want everything, but you also get tons of content). Also, Alien Isolation is one of my favorite single player horror games of all time and it also has a Linux client (which was a surprise for me) but that one is probably outdated and not maintained anymore by now I’d guess (but didn’t look it up) so it might be better to play the Windows client via Proton. I’m not up to date on that though - look it up. Oh, and POOLS also has a Linux client, that’s a great small walking simulator, “Backrooms”-like, very atmospheric and great visual design.

While this is “nice”, I guess, I also can’t fathom how naive this generally seems.

X is a proprietary black box and X or L.Ron Musk can change the algorithm literally at will, what they show which persons and when and when not. There is NO time ever where users have have any control over it, and to perform a statistical analysis on an online service blackbox is also kind of pointless because the blackbox can change randomly, at any point in time, possibly right after the analysis has concluded, or right before. I mean it’s not like the blackbox is in your hands so that you can actually study inputs/outputs and get consistent results. Every time you visit any X URL, there’s potentially a fresh blackbox version deployed to you (you don’t know and you can’t know). That makes it rather pointless IMHO. And it’s just as pointless to believe what X claims about these issues. Of course they’ll always claim that they don’t manipulate. And you can never prove or disprove it, because of a complete lack of control over it from the user’s end. So they can do what they want, as long as they do it sneakily enough that no one notices.

For example if this study comes to the conclusion that there was no manipulation during the time of the study, that’s meaningless because it could have happened before and it could happen afterwards. If it comes to the conclusion that there was manipulation at a certain time, then X can always claim that they’ve already “fixed” the issue and then it’s again a new black box and no one knows when the next manipulation is being activated.

The ONLY solution to this is to ONLY use open source platforms where not a single company or host is able to do what they want with the complete service. Or in other words, the only solution is to avoid X and other proprietary social media platforms like the plague that they are. Because communication should not be controlled by any big company.

The only “wins” for this current US regime are negative records: most cruel, most degenerate, most stupid, most racist, and so on. And the “grand prize” for these wins will be war (civil or conventional) plus a spot in history among the worst people ever to destabilize and rule a country.

There are also 2 types of penis, not sure what they’re called in English exactly but we call them blood penis or flesh penis. Blood penis is quite small unerect but can grow up to multiple times its size and also gets thicker when erected. The majority of men actually have this type of penis. The other type is the flesh penis, where the erect penis is almost the same size than the unerect one. It doesn’t grow much when erect. Both types of course get hard when erect. Since I sometimes see those jokes about small penises in unerect state I assume that quite a few people don’t know of these 2 types and their differences, and if you don’t know this kind of important detail then a flesh penis might look more promising when you’ve only seen it unerect. But, of course, there can still be size differences between different ones. Independent of the type. Anyway, the main point is if you really want to compare penis sizes you always have to do it in erect state, otherwise it’s completely meaningless.

Maybe it works as an excuse when you claim you just wanted to train your own AI model with all those pirated books and videos. But who am I kidding. The reality is that copyright violation, as well as quite a few other things, is only really a crime if you’re poor. This current “endgame capitalism” era we’re in is becoming extra-legal quite fast. Maybe we should start making interactive law books where you can view whether a particular law actually applies to your person or your company, or not. Just to keep up with the times.

All MS needs to do is cook their frogs (users) slowly, over years, and MS will be just fine and can add whatever they want. As long as they do it slowly, incrementally. Postponing Recall after the first public backlash was also smart, because the audience tends to forget over time and now it’s psychologically not such a big deal anymore already.

I’m sure users will find some convenient excuse this time as well, maybe “yeah sure it’s spyware but at least I can turn it off until the next update”, not realizing that Windows in the past had no spyware included at all and that the amount of spyware that you need to turn off and also ensure it’s off after each update has grown significantly over the years. In fact I’d even guess that without 3rd party anti-spyware-tools or well-configured group policies it’s impossible for the common Windows user to find and plug all the holes which leak data. And even then, future updates might introduce new data leaks or re-open old holes.

As long as this situation doesn’t change, as long as there’s no really simple way to turn off everything from one convenient place, this company is just screwing you around. Remember that Microsoft is, at least since Nadella is CEO, not in the “we sell you a decent OS and that’s it” business anymore. They’re in the data business. They’re in the “we sell or gift you a somewhat usable OS with minimum maintenance from our side and in return we get more and more data from you. Also please use our online services so that we get even more data” business. And now they’re also in the AI business, which means they want not just more data from you but they want to feed their bots literally everything you’re doing, and that is only possible by having constant screen sharing with Microsoft active.

The biggest problem of all this is that if you want to have a secure or private communication with a Windows user, you’d first need to check whether they don’t have this stuff running in the background, because this gets data from all sorts of applications, including any open chat windows, and it also gets input from your microphone. It’s like every Windows user will have a Microsoft camera behind them pointed at the screen at all times and one has to hope that this camera isn’t actually on. If it is on at any point, it will undermine the security and privacy of any applications the user has open, because it can see and hear everything in clear text/voice. Or in other words: it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to ensure that you can still have a private chat (voice or text) with a Windows user…