BallisticNG. Incredible WipEout homage, Linux native, VR compatible, runs locked at 60fps on Deck. Fun tracks, cool ships, nice lore. Physics and mechanics are by default more geared towards classic PSX games (1, 2097, 3), with “modern” physics and mechanics (Pure/Pulse/HD with absorb, barrel roll etc.) getting an overhaul in the next version.

Best “Classic WipEout” homage I ever played.

Vita3k + WipEout 2048 + HD DLC + Fury DLC = almost Omega Collection on PC 🤣

Runs great on Steam Deck too.

BallisticNG

Hey fellow WipEout junkie 👋

Very good choice going with Debian. It is simple, clean, can be as minimal or as “bloated” as you wish, and once you’ve worked out the kinks it will happily run for years without maintenance (except updates of course).

There’s a steep learning curve because as a user you’re expected to configure stuff yourself (although defaults are most of the time very sensible), but if you’re willing and able to truly learn Linux and the terminal and you’re familiar with your hardware, it’s one of the best platforms out there.

You and me brother.

Which machine did you choose? I went for the Lelit Bianca, never regretted it.

My ADHD brain panics if I need to catch a scheduled train and if I’m not actually there at least 1/4h in advance I melt into a puddle of anxiety.

But city trams and metros are absolutely fine. If I don’t catch this one, there’s gonna be another one in a few minutes. No worries.

Busses that are scheduled every half hour at most drive me mad tho. Did I miss it because it was 10 mins early because fuck schedules or is it gonna be 15 mins late?

Public transport in Europe is often in a sorry state, but trust me, it’s nothing compared to the US. Here in France, a lot of regional trains are very unreliable at best but at least high speed trains on dedicated tracks are fine (very expensive, but ok).

I don’t remember UK rail to be a shitshow and/or that expensive but my only experience is going to/from central London to/from neighboring counties and it was fine.

But in the US, oh boy. About 15 years ago I was living with some roommates in Campbell, CA and we went to SF one day. 1h drive mostly on shitty concrete motorways, including probably around $5 of gas. They were heading north for a romantic getaway so I went back to Campbell by myself. It took almost 4 fuckin hours, on maybe 4 or 5 different private companies, and cost me like $25 to get back.

Public transit in the US is so fucked up im almost convinced it’s by design.

Same. Old DB2 base from the 80’s that was migrated to Oracle in the 90’s then to Postgres in the 2010’s.

And the people there know all the column names by heart 😅

Go AMD. The open-source drivers already provide the best performance compared to the closed-source ones, and are included in the kernel and Mesa, which means the cards will work out of the box. For the best performance and latest drivers and optimizations you should switch to a distro with more up to date packages than Debian if you plan on buying a current gen card tho. For example, Fedora is a very good mix between working OOTB, ease of use and bleeding-edge packages.

nVidia is… difficult. The open-source drivers are getting better but are still way behind closed-source drivers, and each closed-source drivers version only works with a single kernel version. It might work OK as long as the drivers and kernel are kept in sync (I think Pop! or Nobara have nVidia specific versions for this reason), but otherwise each kernel upgrade is a risk. Plus nVidia drivers are basically shit with Wayland and cause a ton of issues.

Intel has a good track record with iGPUs so discrete cards should be as trivial to use as AMD ones, if more at the entry-level performance-wise.

I learned this week-end that Vita3k runs great on the Deck and that game compatibility has tremendously advanced, so I’m doing WipEout 2048 right now :D

Ubuntu’s version of Gnome is heavily modified to look and feel like their old Unity DE though. Vanilla Gnome like in Fedora or Arch is a vastly different experience.

pacman -Snstall -yefresh -yefresh -unly-upgrades

Yeah there’s no confusion in French because “étage” literally means “floor above ground”, so calling the ground floor an “étage” makes no sense. It’s called “rez-de-chaussée” (“at street level”) or RDC for short. Same as “sous-sol” (“under-ground”).

Man I love my Firefox/Gnome/Wayland/GNU/systemd/Linux/GRUB operating system!

I concur with the person above. I have a 4yo QcK Edge mat that still looks and feels almost new. If you thoroughly soak and clean them when they start to get grimy they’ll keep their properties for a very long time.

Debian has had MATE since forever. It’s as simple as typing

sudo apt install mate-desktop-environment

Honestly you don’t even need Ubuntu if you absolutely need snaps. You can install snapd on a lot of apt distros, or you can spin an Ubuntu container in Distrobox in a few seconds.

And that’s why we’re moving away from coding games where I work. Bad people try to cheat, good people can panic and shit the bed.

When I do interviews, I’m more interested in the candidate’s relevant experience, what kind of issues they faced, how they were solved, if they think they could have done things differently, and how they think. Code itself is irrelevant unless I can review a sprint’s worth of PRs.

When I ask more technical questions, I never ask for code but for an explanation on how they would tackle the problem. For example, I often ask about finding a simple solution to get all data relevant to a certain date in two, simple, historized tables. If you know window functions, it’s trivial. If you don’t, your solution will be slow and dirty and painful. But as most devs don’t know about window functions anyway, it lets me see how they approach the issue and if they understand what parts should have a trivial solution to make it simple.

Most proper denim pants are sized in inches, even from non-US countries.

But of course vanity sizing is a thing so a size 36 is closer to 38in unless explicitly specified, and most online retailers provide true sizing in cm anyway, so there’s that.

Here in the EU there are a few companies selling rebranded Tongfang or Clevo barebones without an OS. Some are Linux-oriented like Tuxedo, Slimbook or LaptopmetLinux, some are general-purpose or gaming oriented like Schenker/XMG.

Slimbook Elemental 14 start at around 600€, Tuxedo Aura 14 starts at around 840€ for what looks to be the same SKU but a bit more storage.

Where are you located and what’s your budget ? It might help point you in the right direction.