When it comes to the UI, I guess it depends on what you’re used to. The LibreOffice UI is a lot more similar to the UI used by MS Office 2003, so I’ve always been pretty comfortable with it. But Microsoft’s “ribbon” UI which debuted back in 2007 is now old enough to vote, so I can see how there are people out there where that’s all they’ve ever used.

Personally, while I’ve learned to deal with it in Word and Outlook, even after all of these years the ribbon still pisses me off every time I have to use Excel.

That’s not fair. You can make bootable Linux flash drives in Windows too.

I get the impression in the Star Wars universe that technological advances have slowed to a near halt. All of the tech is really old, and very little has changed for quite some time. A brand new X-wing or lightsaber or landspeeder isn’t all that different from one that was built 50 or even 100s of years ago. That’s one of the reasons why stuff in Star Wars looks so used - as tech doesn’t go obsolete, stuff ends up staying in service until it’s completely worn out and every bit of life has been squeezed from it.

That’s why you don’t really see where the technology comes from - the big innovators, discoveries, etc. are long in the past. Though we do get to occasionally see factories and manufacturing facilities where things are being built.

If it makes you feel any better, from a quick scan through some of the images the vast majority of them at least seem depict the characters as older and grown up.

Out of the box, Vim’s default configuration is very basic as it’s trying to emulate vi as close as possible. It like if you want things like headlights or a heater or a tachometer in your family car, you got to create a vimrc and turn those features on. That was my experience when I first started using Vim - I spent a lot of time messing around creating a vimrc until I got things the way I wanted.

One of the big changes with Neovim is their default settings are a lot more like what you would expect in a modern text editor.

Generally I find many these frameworks will make some complicated things simple, but the cost is some things that were once simple are now complicated. They can be great if you just need the things they simplify - or in other words can stick to what they were intended for, but my favorite way of keeping things simple is to avoid using complicated and heavy frameworks.

Well, at least it’s 1920x1200 resolution. The old 10" netbooks mostly had 1024x600 which was terrible even by standards from 15 years ago.

My first Linux install was Slackware sometime in the late 90’s. I didn’t really use it though, as I never managed to get it working with my dial-up Internet. Stupid winmodems.

The first distribution I actually used was Mandrake. Others I’ve used since then include Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS. I’ve landed on using Manjaro on both my main desktop and laptop, though I have secondary machines running Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, and EndeavourOS.

I remember in the original 1990’s NASCAR Racing game, I discovered a glitch where if I managed hit an AI car into the outer wall a certain way while driving backwards, it would launch said AI car backwards at some incredible rate of speed which could make for some spectacular wrecks.

Anyhow, that’s what I spent most of time doing.

Does Encarta count as owning an encyclopedia?

I’d at least start them with something simple like Paint or Notepad. Once they have that down, then you can throw the disaster that is the MS Office file save dialog at them.

With the N64, it helps if you can hook it up to a TV from around that era too. Games like Goldeneye look terrible on a modern LCD. I had that experience myself - “Man, I know I’m used to modern games now, but I don’t remember these games looking this shitty”. Then I dragged out my old CRT and hooked it up, and instantly it was “Now this is how I remember these games looking like”.

At best, I’ve seen a small discount and whatever is traded in is junked to keep it off the second-hand market.

That’s interesting. I always felt the newer Bond films were taking themselves a bit too seriously. I suppose this might be why.

I remember my first game of Stellaris many years ago - I had bought some pack that included some of the DLC out at the time. The crisis was bugged so that even after I beat the crisis and wiped it from the galaxy, the game didn’t recognize that I had done so which left the game unbeatable. This was my first playthrough, no mods or anything like that, and I hit a game-breaking bug.

I played quite a bit of Stellaris as it was (still is?) a fun game, but I am more of a casual gamer and every time I picked the game up again they had changed at least one major mechanic, and there was yet another DLC out if you wanted the full experience. Encountering bugs in a play through was common, and game breaking ones would still pop up from time to time. Finally I just got fed up, especially for the cost of some of the pricier DLC you can buy a game like Factorio which is a much better value.

So at this point I’m done with Paradox. I suppose if I really had the urge to play Stellaris again I’d find something out on the high seas, but there’s enough other, better polished, games out there to keep me busy.

When I was at college us physicists would joke about the biologists and the chemists and the mathematicians and the engineers, and in turn they’d joke about us, and we’d all have a good laugh over it.

I suppose it would come down to the context and how it was said.

And for all the money you spend on a Paradox game, you end up with something that feels like a half-finished beta.

Have they watched it more than once? I actually thought it was okay after watching it the first time, despite the confusing plot and a bunch of minor characters I just couldn’t keep straight. So I decided it was worth another watch so I could pick up more of the story, but instead the second viewing was just painful as I ended up realizing how terrible and nonsensical the movie was.

I use BiglyBt on Debian. I use BiglyBt because I previously used Vuze, and I used Vuze because I previously used Azureus. I don’t really remember why I went with Azureus originally, but it may have just been because it was popular at that time.

I get the impression most people use other bittorrent clients nowadays, but BiglyBt does what I need it to do. I never really used any of the “advanced” features of Vuze myself, pretty much only using it for torrents.

The sad thing is back in the Windows XP days Microsoft had the focus stealing thing pretty much solved. Well okay - I remember you had to install some of the PowerToys or make some registry edits to get at some of the settings. But once setup pretty much nothing could steal focus away from the current window, which was a welcome change from where we had been. That started to break again in Windows 7, and has gotten worse with every release since then.

Admittedly XFCE isn’t perfect either, but it’s much better behaved than modern Windows.