Don’t waste your time. It’s honestly fucking awful. Reading it was like experiencing someone mentally masturbating in real time.

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.

Face it, they can do whatever they want with your computer and you’re powerless to stop them.

Not my computer. They can't do shit if it's not installed.

This is why you should not trust them regarding Recall. They will not let it go. It will be forced on you eventually.

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

Just a typo.

It's a deeply complex game dating back thousands of years. It's extremely compelling, difficult to learn, and you could spend a lifetime mastering it. I can understand why the church fears it. Who has time for a sermon when you could be studying Tsumego and learning Joseki?

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.

steam://controllerconfig/413080/2866090215

Try this config. I posted about it above. It's worked well for me to the point I'm no longer even comfortable playing GW2 on a keyboard, I'm able to react much more quickly to everything with the gamepad setup. Most important thing is always use action camera for combat and general exploration unless you specifically need the mouse for something.

Here you go: steam://controllerconfig/413080/2866090215

Paste that steam link in a browser while Steam is open and it will pull up the controller config.

Control mappings have face buttons and R1/R2 as attacks, L1/L2 as button layer modifiers, Joystick mouse and more. F-keys are on the d-pad, and most mouse related functions are active while holding L1. Pressing L2+R2 heals. Back button is your "interact. L1 + R3 switches between "action" camera and regular mouse mode for aiming. Action camera is better for combat, and is the mode I use like 90% of the time. Dodge is on R3. L3 swaps weapons. There's also key combos for all the mounts, special action abilities (N key, on L2+back)... basically, everything you could possibly want to do in-game, there's a controller way to do it. You may need to remap some of the mount buttons, I forget if I did custom mappings for some of those, as I have a lot of mounts (everything except roller beetle and gryffon).

Hope it works for you. I think it's a great config, but my perspective may be skewed since I'm highly accustomed to it from muscle memory and using it for years (with Xpadder even, before steam controller mapping was a thing). I've used this config for every single class in the game and dialed it in so I can play literally any class without issues, including ones that have a number of aiming skills like engineer and elementalist. Actually, elementalist is a blast for this, dpad was perfect for switching elements compared to fumbling with F-keys.

I dunno about this one. Waiting to see what the crowd thinks as far as reviews. Secrets of the Obscure was as mediocre as they come and I have doubts now.

I’ve been playing it on a gamepad since 2012. I’ll see if I can get my Steam config link for you later.

Try entering the pin wrong repeatedly. May not work, but there’s a setting to force a wipe if it’s entered incorrectly 10 times. Will only work if that was enabled that at some point, but it’s worth a shot.

For instance, you can’t factory reset an iPhone without connecting it to either an OSX computer, or a PC running their special program.

This is patently untrue. Settings -> General -> Transfer or Reset iPhone. You have the option from there to wipe all data, do a full factory reset, or transfer the phone's data to another device.

I've no idea where you're getting your info from.