In that case you are best off with Kubuntu, since UE for Linux is distributed as a .deb.

If you prefer to compile the engine yourself, then you can use anything you like, but OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is worth a look since it’s a rolling distro and stays up-to-date (especially handy for GPU drivers).

Exhibit number 4,923,768 for why patents should not exist and need to be aggressively banished from civilization.

Desktop environment will be the most impactful for you. I recommend picking a distro with KDE Plasma, which will feel like the best version of Windows you’ve never seen before.

If you are almost exclusively gaming and don’t want to fiddle much, Bazzite.

If you like to fiddle: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Fedora. If you want more Ubuntu compatibility, Kubuntu.

There are lots of options and it’s hard to go wrong. Bazzite is special in that the system is immutable, so everything needs to be run as a container.

If you don’t have social media you must be “hiding” something and will be denied entry.

…no I won’t name the reasons why. Do your research

Oh. Oh no.

I will explain the reasons why, because it’s important to understand this without sounding like the antivax equivalent of a white knight.

First, forget the word monopoly. It’s a red herring. We are going to talk about trusts. A trust is any kind of organizational structure (one or more companies) that control or seek to control a market through centralized leadership. Trusts can lead to monopolies, but they are distinct and do not need to be (and rarely are) monopolies. The key defining feature of a trust is the use of market capture strategies that are unethical, anti-competitive, clandestine, underhanded, etc (“legal” or not).

Valve is neither a monopoly nor a trust, by definition. While they control a huge portion of the PC gaming market, they operate with transparency, do not sabotage competitors, share their technology freely with potential competitors, and do not push any anti-competitive policies (like exclusives, rules preventing offering products cheaper on other outlets, etc).

There is healthy competition in the PC game space, but Valve has held the lead by offering the best, most attractive platform for consumers. From social features and integrations, to regular discounts and sales, to a healthy and robust community review system, to automatically elevating great new content that might otherwise be missed, to enabling new platforms and technologies (VR, Steam Deck, Linux)… they provide things that customers and sellers love.

Compare their competition. GOG is great but their DRM free policies (which are great) limit their use by sellers. Publishers all have their own stores now, but those are unattractive for a wide variety of reasons - splitting your library, using even more proprietary software to access your content (new stores and launchers), and for all that inconvenience you don’t even get a discount when Valve isn’t taking a cut. Finally, there’s Epic. Market share is Epic’s game to lose, and they are losing on their own merits. Their product lacks basic consumer features that Steam users expect (social features, performant storefront, trustworthy reviews, etc) and they have repeatedly engaged in anti-competitive behavior through the use of exclusives. At one point, Stardock’s Impulse platform was well on its way to becoming a legitimate competitor, but then came the fateful decision to sell out to GameStop, who destroyed it.

Steam is no monopoly or trust. They are simply successful because they are well liked and they are well liked because they give customers and sellers what they want. Nobody else is even trying to compete with Steam right now. Epic could, but they aren’t, and only Tim Sweeny could tell you why.

The alternative is “drop bombs”.

Rounding up leaders and putting them on trial seems like a more civilized international approach than engaging in the same bloodthirsty, explosive, surprise-murder that is literally the whole problem here.

I know there decent alternatives to SalesForce, but I’m not sure what you’d replace Slack with. Teams is far worse in every conceivable way and I’m not sure if there’s anything else out there that isn’t already speeding down the enshittification highway.

I agree. However, it’s important to point out that the apathy has been manufactured by those with the wealth and power to benefit from it in the short term.

Or a have specific space constraints. AIOs are great for SFF builds.

Consider all the governments currently trying to pass dangerous, invasive, anti-privacy, anti-encryption laws in the name of “safety”. I think that’s what the OP is talking about.

These types of things are inherently introspective, so anyone that puts a little effort into it will always find an explanation.

Why don’t we have laws that bar discrimination for anything whatsoever that isn’t related to a person’s own actions? The problem is that we keep creating “protected categories”, which implies that we are okay with discrimination until a particular brand of it rises to a critical level of crisis and public outcry.

Treating people poorly based on things out of their control is deeply unethical.

This why they are so obsessed with AI. When AI can do whatever they want, the rest of us will be exterminated like pests.

I have always been amazed that countries are allowed to get away with this. You would expect that a country that does this would have their leadership rounded up by an international strike force instantly and hauled to Hague.

Psilocybin appears to rewire your brain. It has long been known that guided trips can have very long lasting benefits. This study includes therapy, which is critical for cementing the long term benefits of psilocybin treatment.

Why do so many games have such broken, awful, undercooked end-games? It’s endemic.

Gerrymandering. Registration purges. Compromised voting machines. Voter suppression and intimidation. Banning mail-in voting. Closing, relocating, and reducing polling sites.

Insert meme: “Is this voting rights?”

The end-game gets extremely grindy very suddenly, like running into a wall. Until you reach that point, it doesn’t feel grindy in the slightest.

The PVP implementation is a dumpster fire that undermines everything the game (and source material) is supposed to be about. If they aren’t going to do lore-appropriate faction-based PVP, then they should just remove PVP entirely. It’s amazing how wrong they got that when everything else is so right.

Otherwise, the game is incredible. It’s tense, scary, satisfying, lore accurate, and never, ever dull.