Not really that big of a deal, but Baldur’s Gate 3 can be launched with the --skip-launcher command line parameter to, well, skip the launcher.

I wanted to be a bit more productive in my spare time, but I have made a huge mistake:
I started playing Vagrus - The Riven Realms again.

The world building in Vagrus is excellent. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic fantasy Roman empire, and there is a massive amount of text that details the world, and the people living in it. There is so much to read, that the devs even thought it necessary (and rightfully so) to display a warning about the sheer amount of text on the game’s startup screen, with the suggestion to refund it if one doesn’t enjoy a lot of reading. Sooo, of course this is the perfect game for me - or would be if I had more spare time.

The game is a mixture of trading sim and role playing game. You play a vagrus (a caravan leader), and travel the land trading wares, transporting passengers, spreading gossip and doing missions for different factions, you also have a lot of story elements that you can (and should) follow. There is turn-based combat, and during story events there are plenty of skill checks.

The game is relatively difficult, due to its interwoven mechanics. You need to calculate relatively tightly in order to make a profit, but if you loose people in combat, not having reserves might lead into a morale-loss and hunger death spiral… Also, due to the game’s grim settings, the choices one faces are more often than not to either do what is right, or to survive.

And their gamepads for Xbox were pretty good too. Past tense, because those of the Xbox Series X suck (including the “Elite”).

and adding it to Game Mode

Wait, waaaaaat? Lutris can do that? Okay, time to download it on my Steam Deck, like, right now. (Okay, not actually right now, I am at work, but today in the evening.)

Acquisitions felt kinda cool when Microsoft was dishing them out like nobody’s business prior to the pandemic.

No, it did not. Consolidation usually is bad for employees and customers, and anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the last 150 years has had plenty of opportunities to observe this.

Just to add this: Star Control 2 is not only free (as in free beer), it is free (as in free speech). The open source project is hosted on SourceForge (yes, that still exists), and has a website that is worth checking out: https://sc2.sf.net/

I have been using Linux for more than 15 years and would consider myself a semi-advanced user, but that thing in the screenshot - it scares me.

Android has become such an unusable mess otherwise…

I mean, you can’t even find the option to allow sideloading on my Android TV box without first enabling developer mode…

It really depends on what you are doing with your system…

On my main PC I want the full Linux Desktop experience, including some Gnome tools that require webkit - and since I am running Gentoo, installing/updating webkit takes a lot of RAM - I would recommend 32 GiB at least.

My laptop on the other hand is an MNT Reform, powered by a Banana Pi CM4 with merely 4 GiB of memory. There I am putting in some effort to keep the system lightweight, and that seems to work well for me up to now. As long as I can avoid installing webkit or compiling the Rust compiler from source, I am perfectly happy with 4 GiB. So happy actually, that I currently don’t feel the need to upgrade the Reform to the newly released RK3588 processor module, despite it being a lot faster and it having 32 GiB of memory.

Oh, and last, but not least, my work PC… I’m doing Unreal game development at work, and there the 64 GiB main memory and 8 GiB VRAM I have are the absolute bare minimum. If it were an option, I would prefer to have 128 GiB of RAM, and 16 GiB of VRAM, to prevent swapping and to prevent spilling of VRAM into main memory…

Anything 2D… Or emulators for old (2D) consoles, or DosBOX…

I would recommend to play this on Switch though. That’s because, unlike the PC version, the Switch version can be played without an Ubisoft Account. All one has to do is to disconnect the Switch from the internet, and suddenly the game runs without login.

I would recommend to play Skyrim on PC though. Even if your computer is old, you should be able to get a much better experience from it than the Switch version.

I mean, I played it on the Xbox 360, and it worked like a charm. On an ancient three-core console with 256 MiB of RAM.

Then I wanted to replay it on the Switch, and was disappointed. There are a lot of physics glitches on the Switch, but what is worse is that the NPC pathfinding takes a lot longer on the Switch, such that NPCs move in nonsensical directions during combat, as they start to follow paths that they would have needed several seconds earlier. Instead of moving near the player to attack, they move near the position where the player had been some time ago. This is particularly bad on the overworld, but also noticeable in dungeons.

I already asked over at the GoL forums, but I think it’s worth repeating: Does anyone know where one might find a legal download of this game? https://www.mobygames.com/game/3132/rally-championship-international-off-road-racing/

It seems GoG does not have it, and I would really like to play it again - for nostalgia reasons.

You can also use Steam as a launcher. In Desktop Mode there is a menu entry “Add a Non-Steam game to my Steam Library”. For Windows games, you can just browse to their .exe file. After adding it to the library, you can open the Library Entry’s Properties page, and choose Proton as compatibility tool.

That way you get your non-Steam games in your Gaming Mode launcher.

To get nicer images, there’s a website named https://www.steamgriddb.com/ that also has a small Flatpak tool that you can use in Desktop Mode to set icons/banners for your Non-Steam games.

The Orange Pi Neo will ship with a custom version of Manjaro, and is imho the only Steam Deck competitor that is even worth considering.

Just take an Xbox 360 gamepad, and an Xbox Series gamepad in your hands and compare them. Press the buttons, move the sticks, try the triggers.

One feels like quality. The other feels like <beep> - especially the D-Pad.

I loved that game, and completed it twice, but the last chapter (or last 2 chapters - depending on which ending you get) is super annoying. The encounters are repetitive, and there are quite a lot of them. It’s almost the same group of enemies again, and again, and again. Once you have a working strategy those encounters aren’t even that challenging, but if you play turn-based, they take a lot of time…

I’m still hooked on Backpack Battles. It’s slow enough that medicine-induced-brain-fog ridden me can play it, and it’s a lot of fun.

Stay away from any Xbox Series X/S gamepads. They are cheaply made trash.

I bought the standard version of it for my Deck, expecting it to be somewhat comparable to my Xbox 360 gamepad (which I really like, but which does not have Bluetooth), but nope, it is so much worse…

A friend bought the Elite version, and he also agrees that those gamepads are utter garbage.

Backpack Battles. I should have never bought this. It’s eating all my spare time.