gonzo-rand19

No, it's not just developing countries on older hardware

I was talking about Counter Strike specifically, because you used it as an example.

Microsoft doesn't own Windows

They literally do. Look it up. Windows is developed and maintained by Microsoft. They own all trademarks and intellectual property related to Windows.

Valve runs steam as a gig economy app, there are very few guardrails and instead very strong algorithmic discoverability management tools. Steam has shovelware for the same reason Google Play has shovelware, Steam is just WAY better at surfacing things specifically to gamers.

I never disputed this, but you are arguing that PC games are all shit for some reason or another unless they're ported either from or to PS5.

Incidentally, most of these new games support controllers because the newly standardized Xinput just works.

Newly standardized? Xinput was created in 2005. It has "just worked" for ages, because it is officially supported by Microsoft through Windows. Because they own Xbox, Xinput, and Windows.

Valve has a whole extra controller translation layer because everything else kinda doesn't and they wanted full compatibility

So that they can support other controllers that aren't Xbox...

You're talking out of your ass here and not even paying attention to context which you yourself brought up. Not to mention you aren't even aware of why Xbox had such stellar support (Microsoft is one of the largest tech companies in the world and own the PC OS with the largest market share by a longshot) and how that support translated to the modern rise of PC gaming.

The average PC is an old-ass laptop used by a broke-ass student. Presumably that still is a factor on why CounterStrike, of all things, is Steam's biggest game.

It's because of the high percentage of players from developing countries, countries where high-end electronics aren't accessible, or countries with weak economies. Russia, Brazil, etc.

It sure was a factor on why WoW or The Sims were persistent PC hits despite looking way below the expectations of contemporary PC hardware.

When Sims 4 came out, people upgraded. They cancelled Sims 5 so Sims 4 remains, with largely the same specs. That's not something consoles can change. WoW is similar, which is why there's no WoW for PS5.

The beginning of competent console ports in the Xbox 360 era revolutionized that. Suddenly there was a standard PC controller that had parity to mainstream consoles and a close-enough architecture running games on a reliably stable hardware.

That's because Microsoft owns Windows and Xbox, not because Xbox revolutionized gaming. They had the ownership of 2 platforms with significant lock-in. It's like if Nintendo owned both the Switch and PlayStation (which they almost did lol).

Sure, there are PC exclusives because they rely on PC-specific controls or are trying to do some tech-demoy stuff or because they're tiny indies with no money for ports or licensing fees, or because they're made in a region where consoles aren't popular or supported or commercially viable.

So there are 14,000 titles new to Steam in the last year and your conclusion is that they are all either keyboard-only, tech demos, indies, or from a poor nation? Wild. You just said that the Xbox controller opened up a new world over 10 years ago and yet you also believe that these new games just aren't usable with a controller?

With no PS5 the only games that make sense to build for PCs are targeting integrated graphics and lowest-common-denominator CPUs.

Are we just ignoring all of the PC-exclusive games PS5 players will never get to play? And the games that were PC-exclusive until their success prompted a console port? The PC catalog dwarfs the PS5 catalog by hundreds of modern titles, and thousands if you count retro games. Steam (just one of the PC software distribution platforms) added over 14,000 games in the last year and there are fewer than 3,500 PS5 games in total. I can tell you that "targeting integrated graphics and lowest-common-denominator CPUs" has never really been a priority in the PC space; you can see this trend even before consoles like the SNES existed.

That's why PC games in the 2000s used to look like World of Warcraft even though PCs could do Crysis.

A lot of PCs couldn't do Crisis. It was a hardware seller because a lot of people significantly upgraded just to play it. Games in the 2000s looked like that because highly-detailed 3D polygonal models used too many resources (mostly CPU at the time). It made more sense, for developer and user, to limit the polygon count for everyone's sake.

Even in the modern day, World of Warcraft is an MMO and the textures and other assets are deliberately less detailed to optimize performance, so this isn't really a fair comparison and doesn't really demonstrate that consoles prop up the PC market (especially since WoW wasn't available for consoles during the peak of its success and was also a hardware seller due to that exclusivity). It's like comparing Plants vs. Zombies and Half-Life 2, or Destiny and Alien: Isolation.

Brain damage from an injury made him "dumb enough" to drive a truck. It's a joke riffing on the idea that someone who's smart shouldn't do a job for "stupid" people lest they waste their potential.

What if is there are sad but nonetheless valid explanations for the massive civilian death tolls?

Can you think of one that doesn't make Israel look like they're doing Holocaust 2.0 in order to clear the Gaza strip for Israeli settlers? They've committed several war crimes, including maiming and starving children.

I don't think you're a jerk. Your son is 16, more than old enough to handle it. The fact of the matter is that, in professional sports, most young boys are scouted by the time they're his age; if it hasn't happened yet, it probably won't.

He needs to start planning for a more realistic future, but he's allowed to think you're being too hard on him. You don't have to be responsible for his mistakes if he chooses to make them, you already did your job by telling him to think more realistically.

Do you think he might be good enough for a foreign league if he works his ass off? Not every basketball player is good enough for the NBA, but a lot are good enough to play in China or Europe, for example. Maybe, if this career is what he really wants, it would help your relationship if you gave him some pointers about playing in a league he might be more competitive in.

That said, you could also try to see if he might enjoy sports medicine or some other adjacent career, like training. Surely you know what might be a good fit for him outside of being a player, considering your experience. Giving him other options that still allow him to be close to the sport might be a nice way to show him that you still think he can be involved in professional sports in some capacity.

Absolutely wild claim considering the centuries (millennia?) of indigenous migration in the area...

I dunno, maybe if you never put it up again. But you could also think of it as a performance where the act of putting up and taking down the banana is part of the art. And the person who "owns" it gets to be part of that, which is special.

Israel is an ethnostate because they are deliberately ethnically homogenous and view Arabs as inferior on an institutional scale, not because of their state religion. A state with a religious ruling class is called a theocracy.

I see what you're saying because religion has societal and cultural impacts that reinforce specific behaviours, but not all states that have a state religion are actually theocracies in the traditional sense.

Hmm, I suppose the big difference between Fedora and Kubuntu is that Fedora is a fixed point release distro (similar to rolling release but less frequent) that applies updates only on restart, so it's possible that it needs a moment to ensure that everything is compatible.

It's certainly a weird choice to kidnap your desktop, so I don't blame you for being annoyed. If that's causing this, then you might want to try a stable release distro. This is part of why I like Debian, because it doesn't change very quickly and updates are unlikely to need special care to ensure stability. Debian also doesn't have the issue you're talking about, it updates right away in the background.

Kubuntu is Ubuntu-based (duh) so if you like how it behaves, you could try Debian (which Ubuntu is based on) or try another flavour of Ubuntu. Pop!_OS and Zorin are both Ubuntu-based and should definitely be on DistroSea.

I'm not familiar enough with KDE to know what you mean by a Windows-esque update step, but if you can explain further I'll see if I can find something for you.

Alternatively, someone else might pop in with some options.

For gaming, people often recommend Pop!_OS, Bazzite, or Zorin, but you can use whatever you want if you are a tinkerer. I use Debian and have a great time gaming.

Outside of gaming and if Windows software compatibility isn't really something you're worried about, you can use any distro you want.

You can try some of them out using a web browser with DistroSea if you feel like it, though they don't have every distro because that would be nuts.