I’m in my forties and what you’re describing doesn’t sound normal at all. I beat myself up good in my younger years with sports and still do somewhat regular cardio and weightlifting. I have a bum knee and hip problem, shoulder issues from weightlifting injuries, and my back gets stiff and sore on a good day.

None of that stops me from functionally living, and none of its anything the occasional ibuprofen or toke won’t fix in the short term. I can still exercise, do physical labor, open all the jars, and be generally active, and without pain the majority of the time.

What you’re describing sounds more like an inflammatory disease or auto-immune disorder. 110% get a second opinion from a different doc, or a third if needed.

Ah thanks. I didn’t follow to the release page and just skimmed the article, should have read closer.

Maybe a stupid question but… what exactly was illegal about this? I’m sure there were ToS or EULAs violated, but what law is he being charged on?

I spend a bunch of time in log reviews in my current role. “Googling the error message” image is literally hanging on my office wall.

Use the latest proton GE and set the following launch options:

PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1 %command%

Oh and the battery can drain out pretty fast too.

Depends if you have the OLED or the LCD model. The OLED has been surprisingly good with battery. For really high end games that max out the deck it’s maybe 2.5 to 3 hours, but for most games I’m getting between 5.5 and 8 hours battery, and for low spec indie games and lower end emulation like GBA it can run for up to 12 hours in some cases.

I bought the 512 GB OLED back in May with no regrets. I’m surprised how quick I am to turn in the Steam Deck now instead of booting up my gaming PC. I wouldn’t say it’s changed how I play, since I already tend to game with a controller, but it’s great fun, and so far I don’t think I’ve encountered a single game in my Steam Library that wouldn’t run. Plus, I love handhelds and portable devices in general.

A few games have needed minor tweaks (proton version, a fix that would also be needed in Windows), but everything has worked. As a disclaimer though, I don’t play online competitive games, just single player and co-op stuff with my wife, so YMMV.

On the other hand, I’ve found some games work that I couldn’t even run decently in Windows. Like Rainbow Six: Vegas. On Windows it would never properly work with a controller but on the Deck it was no problem. And Silent Storm ram out of the box, no tweaks at all. Linux is awesome like that for older titles.

It’s also been great for emulation, at least through PS2 and GameCube, I don’t emulate much above those. Emudeck is nice, and I was already familiar with EmulationStation since I use that on a Powkiddy X55, so that was nice.

One thing I will say is a game changer is the suspend function. Being able to tap the power button and sleep it at any time and then pick up where you left off later is amazing. Reminds me of the old Nintendo DS, just shut the lid and get back to it.

All told, I’m really happy with it.

Same. I was very impressed by the games that work despite being unsupported. Heck, I’ve got Rainbow Six: Vegas working on it with gamepad support. I couldn’t even do that in Windows.

My understanding is Retrodeck is a cleaner install, being self contained as a flatpack… and that is.

Emudeck works with standalone emulators that are just hooked into EmulationStation. That means more frequent updates. Also, Emudeck supposedly had better performance due to this, but take that with a grain of salt.

I mean, it should be fine, just because the PSU can provide more watts doesn’t mean the system is actually using that much power. I have an 800w PSU in my gaming rig, but its average load is only 240 - 320w during gaming (I’ve measured it by powering the system with a portable Ecoflow battery).

Honestly Arch-based is a good choice, but straight up Arch for a newbie? Nah.

I’m running EndeavorOS with KDE and it’s been solid for gaming. A few bugs, but mostly minor, like it picked the wrong default NIC driver (but still worked) and SMB shares wouldn’t auto mount recently until an update a week or two ago.

My main PC for non-gaming runs Manjaro. I know there are haters about it, but it’s been a solid distro for general use, and I’ve encountered no issues to speak of.

Just be sure to get the edge release if you care about gaming or have current (like newer than 2021) hardware. Mint’s main release is on an old kernel, 5.15 I think. Mint edge release is running kernel 6.5, which is from earlier this year.

“The incident is widely characterized by critics as an example of mishandled manhandled customer service.”

Just a typo.

Microsoft will just enable it via an update once all the fervor dies down. They haven’t abandoned the plan, and won’t, not while your data is pure profit for them.

Hell with them, no more Windows PCs in my home. I’m sick to death of everyone and their mother trying to both advertise to me and sell my data without my permission and at zero benefit to me.

But Snyder is an artiste! 🙄😒

Thanks, had no idea. I initially read it so long ago that “shadow libraries” weren’t much of a thing (if they existed at all yet?) and actually wrote my own scraper in Python to download it.

Worm is exactly the kind of chaos that would exist with supers. Attempted mitigation and control, but those with selfish interests and villains often coming out on top, much like those in power and wealth in the real world. WtC has a lighter perspective to tell its story, but Worm is straight up “what if the most horrible person you can think of could also kill with a glance/touch/etc. With no consequence?” And worse. Here there be monsters, quite literally, and humanity is losing the battle.

It’s an absolutely incredible series and I’ve read the whole thing twice at this point, but it’s often very depressing, and the bad can be really bad.

If you want to read Worm there are web scrapers online that can convert it to an ebook format for easier reading, rather than needing to browse the parahumans site.

I really like Marion G. Harmon’s Wearing the Cape series for this. Hero teams are governmentally regulated, and state or federally mandated, and have to work with local authorities whenever possible, often acting as first responders specifically regarding super villain events. They’re required to plan and mitigate collateral damage. Heroing is literally their job and they have standard and on-call hours, as well as patrols and the like.

Socially heroes and villains are treated kind of like celebrities, and there are sort of unwritten rules about no killing, and no going after civilian identities or people’s families outside of costume as that’s grounds for both villains and heroes to look the other way regarding the aforementioned “No killing” rule.

With the knowledge that villains are hard to impossible to fully stop, emphasis exists on imprisonment and rehabilitation, and over the course of the series some villains and heroes end up changing sides.

There’s one hero in the series who is a federal agent with the ability to replicate clones of himself and is embedded in most hero teams, as well as being secret service, generalized security, and informant as all clones have the knowledge of the rest. Nobody he works with outside of the President of the U.S. even knows how many of him are out there.

On top of this, besides the typical hero teams, there are more “B grade” teams that are not specifically super heroes but act as emergency responders and construction crews for both hero events and fights as well as generalized incidents, and things like heroes without borders that act as global humanitarian aid on a volunteer basis, similar to Doctors Without Borders.

Vigilantes are frowned upon, and can end up liable for crimes as they’re not sanctioned to use their powers to fight.

It’s a very interesting series, and deals with a lot of “real world” consequences of super heroics, including long term injury and death, PTSD and other trauma, and the impact of things like super powered terrorism and extremist groups, as well as anti-super sentiment.

——

Besides that series, I’d also recommend the web serial “Worm” by Wildbow (John McCrae), but that one’s a doozy, both in terms of content (it only goes from bad to worse and things never really get better) and length (it’s absurdly long, maybe equivalent in length to 15-20 full length novels, broken up into fairly long chapters and sections).

The fact this is even necessary makes me want to shit a brick.

“Do you want to make an online account?” No. “Okay, please set up your local account.”

That should be it. And honestly, even that’s egregious to me. Signing into online bullshit should be opt-in, not opt-out. Thank goodness I don’t use Windows anymore, finally wiped the last Windows machine in my house this past week.

Also if i want to make a plex server on an old PC, what would people recommend?

My plex server is headless, running Almalinux. Doesn’t take much, I have it running on a very old NUC8 (NUC8i5BEK). The box is also running Asset UPnP and AudioBookshelf server too.

Personally, unless the server will also be the client (as in, you’ll be watching from the server box and not a streaming box, tablet, TV app, etc), I’d skip any GUI and just install it from the terminal, save your resources for what matters. Desktop environment is pointless for a server machine.

If you were buying a cheap machine to handle it today, I’d probably recommend a Beelink (or other) mini-PC with a Ryzen 5000 series chipset (5500u/5560u models with 16GB RAM can be found very cheap, generally $215-$240 new these days). The 5000 series in particular are very power efficient for something you likely will leave on all the time, and have both 6c/12t and 8c/16t variants, though the 8 core ones will probably be more like $300-$320.

Whatever you buy, if it comes pre-installed with Windows, delete the OS. I wouldn’t trust preinstalled on these boxes, and in any case Microsoft is getting really sketchy with this whole Windows Recall thing anyway.