Star Citizen is an insane phenomenon to me. It’s a good game and a massive fraud at the same time, and one fuels the other.

Let’s give credit where credit is due - the game is incredibly immersive. The massive social element, ability to walk and explore things outside your ships and rovers, to customize them, to create all the inventive ways to make money and to prevent hostiles from doing the same is fascinating. It’s…believable, immersive, real. No other game has nailed it just so accurately, and I would invite you to experience it by yourself, but…

But once the player’s attention is caught, they become a milking cow. You want to develop in game? You have to pay up big time, lest you want all your ships and money go away with an update. They don’t go loud about their wipes, and most players face them when they’ve reached a certain point in the game - at which point they either lose all progress, or start to buy their ships for cash. For, like, hundreds or thousands of dollars per ship.

While this may sound bollocks to someone who haven’t played it, but the way it is normalized in the community combined with the element of frustration of losing everything in a universe player now cares about really drives folks to spend massive sums on the game.

Back in the pre-war era, I remember a person from Ukraine (a country with per capita GDP of ~$5000, or 1/16th that of the US) secretly stashing over $1000 to buy a new ship, adding to his ship park of $4000. His family (wife and two kids) haven’t been on a good vacation for years, and this amount of money would allow them to do so several times over in the southern Ukraine, but he bought some virtual ships. No, really. He was a clan leader, so he felt like he had to have all the nicest ships at his disposal, and his only grief was that he couldn’t afford the $8000 and $21000 ship packs.

The way community psychology works in the game is insane, and I believe a study could be made on how exactly was this all pulled off. Catch with a good premise, and make sure to never let the player go. I’mma be clear - what made me leave the game is not the sudden realization of its predatory practices, but simply the fact my computer started lagging heavily in the new areas, and me not having money to upgrade at the moment. I did consider buying a $400 ship just to have a decent hauler after wipes though, despite myself living in a not-so-rich of a country. Looking back at my Star Citizen experience though, I see how crazy it would be.

Elder Scrolls 6

Alpine HQ

And if you’re a real fan of Synology ecosystem, there is Xpenology basically porting DSM onto any hardware you want, compatible with all apps. Iirc, the only thing NOT working is QuickConnect (for obvious reasons)

Russia is one of the key destinations for piracy because of lenient laws and even more lenient police practice regarding it.

I’m 128, it’s up to you to decide whether it’s high enough or not.

Generally, I am successful in my studies and pursue career in science. I am not a high earner, and doing mental work still drains me heavily. I take a few hours of dumb physical work every week to reset. I am more or less satisfied with my life, I do have a romantic partner and generally find it easy to navigate social situations, but I’m introverted and need to recharge. So, you can say I have a high burst productivity all-round, but I’m not good at a long game.

This is just me though, and one thing to remember is that there is no objective metric for intelligence, and it can be divided in many different ways. Some people are great at solving math problems, but are dead stupid in social situations. Some go vice versa. Some have a gift for certain areas of knowledge or skills where they are way above average, while having underwhelming performance with the rest.

For example, I excel at disciplines that require me to connect many diverse data points (my area of interest is microbiology), but I’m not that good at following logic through many layers of calculations and linking it back to source (as in physics/math; I’m still able to carry out calculations I need for my work, but it’s exhausting). I acquire language skills quite readily, and have good auditory perception overall, but have high reaction time and struggle driving or doing competitive sports/gaming (no, higher intelligence doesn’t mean faster reaction).

Overall, I’m just a normal human, fairly smart, fairly capable, but nothing supernatural and sometimes straight up underwhelming.

This is always a tradeoff.

KDE tries to be universal and useful for everyone. No matter what you plan to do with your system, KDE has convenient tools for that. But, no matter how they try to make the system less busy, full set of easily available functions always stands in the way of minimalism.

Threadiverse kinda captures it, but it also calls association with Threads (by Meta), like if it’s the parent of it, while in fact it’s not even part of it.

Gonna talk from KDE positions here. GNOME, too, has its place, but I recognize it’s not for everybody.

More pleasant to look at

Certainly not for the average person. For a normie user, KDE looks way way nicer, and it’s certainly way more modern than either XFCE or Cinnamon. Sure, the latter can be made into something modernishly enough, but the customization options are way more limited here. Either way, out of the box, KDE is much more preferable to most.

User-friendly

Can hardly find anything that is more user-friendly than KDE. Everything you can possibly think of is available graphically, the interface is extremely sleek and ergonomic, and you can change anything at all to your liking. Which leads us to…

Customizable

Why would anyone say XFCE or Cinnamon are more cutomizable is beyond my comprehension. XFCE can be somewhat reasonably customized, but the anount of technical knowledge required to do anything more than resizing bars is beyond the scope of normal users. Cinnamon is outright rigid, and its customization options are extremely poor by any means. KDE is easily customizable and can be turned into anything through a what-you-see-is-what-you-get graphical editor that requires 0 technical knowledge. Still, if you really want to go the old school way because you’re used to it, want something not offered, or can’t imagine yourself descending into the GUI designed for plebs, you can do it too. KDE is king when it comes to this aspect.

Stable

As far as XFCE goes, this does hold quite some weight. It has a mature codebase, allowing it to have plenty of things figured out. For mission-critical systems, it might be preferable. Same can’t be said for Cinnamon, but either way, every popular DE is stable enough for home use without much worry - including KDE.

In any case, having used all four, I stopped exactly at KDE and GNOME - the former being perfect for casual multitasking and entertainment, the latter being nice for focused work.

Ability to properly work with apps outside the officially recommended list, to customize Docker containers etc.

At least from what I can recall from 1-1,5 years ago that I used it.

1. Wrong community, maybe? Lol

2. iirc, algae are better oxygen producers per units of mass and volume, so a tank full of algae might actually be better than a tree. One issue though is that trees can grow on open ground, while algae require a tank to be built, most likely negating the economic benefits. Also, trees are more aesthetically pleasing.

Honestly, on my Fedora I have to fix things more rarely than in Windows 11. Granted, Linux troubleshooting is sometimes more time-consuming, but I haven’t met a single issue that would take hours to resolve in a long while. Ironically, my partner wasted about 6 hours recently getting Windows 11 to work with audio devices on a remote desktop client.

Still, we have to admit fixing some stuff in Linux is complicated enough to be outside the scope of regular everyday user.

Some apps and front ends support showing your post and comment “karma”. Eternity, for example

Do both

On the second question: no one bids as high as Google, simple as that. Others may emerge, but no one’s gonna pay that much, and with Google out of the race, the bids can get even lower.

Nice as a starting point, but not enough features to make it worth it for advanced setups.

OnlyOffice crashed for me repeatedly on Debian, LibreOffice did not.

But otherwise yes, I prefer OnlyOffice as well for a much friendlier interface.

LibreOffice just commonly puts mundane parameters God knows where.

Underrated comment

Can’t say for TeamSpeak, but will say for Linux: setting everything up and figuring out your steps in edge cases is the hardest part. Once you figure it out, it gets so much easier.

It’s not hard, but the more laptop lasts, the longer it will take before you buy a new one.