I’ve never been into tablets, are Surfaces as easy to install Linux on as a PC? Is there any bootloader unlocking or anything like on a phone, or is it more like secure boot on a PC?

I had installed Linux on an old Chromebook and it would always offer to wipe the hard drive on every boot, so now I’ve assumed that some hardware isn’t as Linux friendly as others. I think a lot has changed since I got my desktop and the last laptop that I installed Linux on.

And are the Linux touch screen interfaces any good? I tried a Fairphone that was running something Linux and the touch interface was lacking. (It was a great tiny laptop for using a terminal though).

And last random thought… I loved the 10” netbook form factor back in 2009 or so. I think tablets are a similar size, but the weight is in the “monitor” part, I preferred the bottom heavy laptop form factor. Are the Surfaces okay for that, or top heavy enough that they can fall over and can’t have the angle adjusted finely like a laptop?

My problem may be related: how do you find people to follow? I wish I could just follow communities like on Lemmy. I’ve tried following hastags I’m interested in, but it seems like they aren’t always used.

I’ve instead searched for topics that I’m interested in, followed a bunch of people, then unfollowed the ones that post too much stuff I’m not interested in. But this seems like a pain.

I also don’t necessarily want to see everything that a single person posts.

Cool, thanks! This is what I was looking for. I’ve briefly tried playing with Nextcloud before, but this seems like another good option.

This is what I do for my own notes now, but could it work for students writing essays and that sort of thing? I suppose there must be some markdown to HTML/PDF/etc converters (also probably ODT or DOCX or whatever).

This is actually what I did when I was in school, and overall it was quite pleasant. There was some WYSIWYG LaTeX program too that I shared with some colleagues when we were working on a document together, I remember it working okay.

But I don’t see the average student, especially studying non technical stuff, to pick up LaTeX just for normal sort of essays. Even I am fairly rusty now. And honestly I don’t even know if I could have managed it during high school, where I had to write English essays and stuff with specific formatting for references. (I am grateful that my engineering education was less strict about that sort of thing).

I was hoping that someone would suggest a self hosted web document suite, I think “Nextcloud” is a popular one. Then it should work on any OS, and you don’t have to worry about syncing files. Even if you can pay to have someone else host an instance (not sure if this exists), and ideally a program that can keep a local backup synced to your PCs would be a big step in the right direction. Syncthing seems pretty great, though I haven’t used it much, and on iOS it doesn’t seem to be able to run in the background.

edit: I just read another comment that recommended OnlyOffice, this seems like another good option (source: this reply: https://lemmy.ca/comment/9415293). Aside: is there a proper way to link to a comment on lemmy that will go through your own homeserver?

What do you recommend? I love LibreOffice on Windows and Linux, and it still works well on macOS but the GUI seems weird on it, the buttons are really large. I still use it but my partner is put off by it.

I already basically get that half the time I boot into windows after an update. They say “let’s finish setting up your PC” and try to get you to pay for one drive, office, even game pass.

I’m so glad gaming on Linux has gotten to such a good state. I barely ever boot into windows now. (The “ad” on boot up is probably only once every few months, but that’s about as often as I boot into windows).

Thanks for this info. I’ve always wanted to try some of the FF games, is there any benefit to playing them in order? I rarely manage to stick to a new game, so I’m wondering if I should just try one of the most recommended ones at first, then I can play the others if I liked it. (But I don’t want to spoil the story, if there’s much connecting them)

I came here for tips to be happy but I still enjoyed your tangent dog story. I hope your dog is okay!

I was wondering what this was, here it is:

Ryujinx is an open-source Nintendo Switch emulator created by gdkchan and written in C#. This emulator aims at providing excellent accuracy and performance, a user-friendly interface, and consistent builds.

(from https://ryujinx.org/)

Thanks a lot! Excited to use darkly-pureblack now on web.

Ahhh… memories are flooding back now. I remember the screen would get distorted and change into the mini game. Agreed, it was amazing and I also can’t believe it was hidden. I miss little gems like that in older video games.

This is awesome! “The Incredible Machine” seems like it’d work great too. It was a bit awkward to control in the browser (having to bring up the keyboard a few times), but I’ll have to try their app later.

And yeah Ur-Quan Masters didn’t play very well. I figured it would be better than nothing on a long flight, though. (But who am I kidding, I always have my laptop with me anyway)

You can either use on-screen touch controls, or you can press anywhere on the screen and have the ship move to that location (while constantly firing). The on-screen touch controls do not work very well for me, but the “follow my finger” method works pretty well. I think I made it through “hard” or maybe medium with it.

It’s not ideal, you have to stop moving to stop firing and let your generator catch up if your shields took a lot of damage. But it’s fun enough as a casual game if you have a few minutes to kill. Or maybe it’s just the nostalgia that makes me enjoy it.

And you trigger sidekicks or toggle weapon firing modes by pressing the info on the right side of the screen. I assume this was added for the mobile version, I didn’t think it was clickable in the original, though I doubt I ever tried it.

Awesome, thanks! I played Sonic when I was younger, but somehow I never tried any of the others you mentioned. I’ve been meaning to try the “Final Fantasy” series forever and it never occurred to me that it would work well on a phone.

My raspberrypi works great as a backup git server, as long as it doesn’t fall off my table and get stepped on or rolled over by my chair. I also host a few static webpages on it for cooking recipes.

It actually has better uptime than my desktop, which I occasionally boot into windows when I (rarely!) encounter a steam game that doesn’t work well on Linux.

It does not work well as a DLNA server though, though it seems to manage lower resolution videos okay. I think I tried both tried reading videos from the SD card, and a USB external hard drive.

I tried “Out of Space” last night with my partner and wow, you weren’t kidding. I really liked it, but we died every time. Eventually we switched to the easier “zen mode” and were able to win a few matches. I couldn’t help but wonder if the balance wasn’t finely tuned for 2 players, maybe they balanced it for 4.

For anyone interested: this is a really fun game, but it’s not quite as much like “The Sims in space” as I expected. It’s closer to “Overcooked, but with some placeable furniture that you need to interact with”.

If anyone knows of a co-op (not necessarily local, but that’s a huge plus) game like “The Sims”, I’d be very interested. Rimworld is close, but the multiplayer mod didn’t work well for us. I think my partner’s old laptop couldn’t keep up at 3x speed, causing big desyncs. Factorio is great for co-op IMO (though not at all like “The Sims”, more like Sim City)), but my partner doesn’t really like it because of the gritty environment.