Tears of the Kingdom. I did figure out where the tear in the Hebra geoglyph was and have gotten a bunch more since then. I went madlad and completed Gerudo second of the four areas despite Gerudo usually being the hardest area in these types of Zelda games, and honestly, the only really hard part of it was the temple boss, which took me a fair number of tries and a short detour from the temple for some cooking, but I eventually beat it when I discovered a trick for the second half of the fight. Now I’m just wandering the land filling the map some more and doing a bunch of side quests and shrines where I find them before I take on the Goron area third.

EDIT: I should note I’m not wandering without an objective, I wanted to make sure I visited Kakariko and Hateno villages at least. I actually spent almost my entire three-hour play session last night in and around Hateno doing side quests.

Both Flatpak and Snap are preinstalled but it defaults to debs/apt. Though through the command line they strongly recommend the pkcon command over apt itself.

Yep. I’m running Neon instead of Kubuntu for this reason. I didn’t want the hassle of dealing with snap, and I wanted the latest KDE stuff, so it’s perfect for me and I’m enjoying the experience. May not be for everyone, though.

So… it sounds like you’re struggling with Snap. In addition to others’ suggestion (try a different distro without Snap, perhaps one of those distros made by a different company such as Fedora (Red Hat), an OpenSUSE variety (SUSE), or even a corporate, less Snap-reliant Ubuntu-based distro like Pop_OS (System 76)), you could also try uninstalling Snap from Ubuntu or installing another binary option like Flatpak/Flathub and installing your software that way. Frankly, the amount of money these companies make working on Linux or Linux-based products has nothing to do with your struggles. Plus, the companies you mention do, in fact, make money working on the kernel itself because they contribute to the kernel as a project. Even Microsoft and Google do the same, though Microsoft does so for the sake of WSL and Google does for Chrome OS and Android. So plenty of people make money if the Linux kernel keeps having work done on it and keeps improving. I don’t see what the problem is with the kernel itself. The lack of polish, as you call it, in Linux-based OSes is not a fault at all of the kernel but in all the various other parts that go into the OS. And that level of polish can vary quite widely. As you note, Snap has been holding Ubuntu back quite a bit due to lack and reluctance of community adoption. Even just trying a different Ubuntu-based OS such as Pop_OS, Linux Mint or Neon may change your view.

Yeah, designing games geared towards kids and younger audiences isn’t just about story/aesthetics, it’s also about difficulty. Most young kids don’t have the attention span or critical thinking skills to sit there and try to beat an enemy or puzzle that older kids or adults would find genuinely challenging.

I could split Nintendo games (I’ve played) into three groups based on target audience:

Younger: cute art style, simple challenges, short game play for young children; Kirby, Yoshi

All Ages: easy-to-learn basics to get you through the main game, but there’s more complex stuff and greater challenge if you want it; mostly pick-up-and-play but not TOO short; Mario, Pokemon, DK Country, Super Smash Bros.

Older Gamers: more (relatively) mature subject matter, challenge from the beginning, complex mechanics and/or puzzles or both to get teen/adult brains going; Metroid, Xenoblade, Fire Emblem, Zelda BotW and TotK (previous Zelda games would be in my All Ages tier)

Flathub is likely safer than most other places to get flatpaks from, certainly safer than just some random repo you find on some guy’s website somewhere, but no software source is guaranteed to be 100% safe.

This week in TotK I cleared the first temple (Wind Temple) and have been working on mopping up everything I can in the Hebra region so I have to spend the least time there possible moving forward. It was my least favorite part of BotW and TotK didn’t really change my opinion. One related question though: guides I’ve found say you don’t need to do the geoglyphs in order, but I’ve found the one in the northern snowfield and have combed the entire thing multiple times, including where the guides say you find the tear, but the tear is nowhere to be found. I got the one just outside Rito Village, which is supposed to be second, right away, it was readily available. Are the guides wrong, are you forced to pick them up in order?

OSMAnd is how I use OpenStreetMap too. It’s quite good for road routes even in rural areas, but especially in those rural areas finding specific locations can be spotty or outdated. Even in my town of over 100,000, I still have trouble finding some local places like restaurants and businesses. I always try searching for what I’m looking for before I leave home, so I have access to my computer to pull up a map and address to pin onto OSMAnd if I need to. (I’m someone who de-Googles as much as humanly possible so I don’t use Google Maps.) With more up-to-date data it can be a great alternative to Google or Apple Maps, but that’s the nature of crowd built data: it’s only as up-to-date as the data contributors provide, and that’s both a strength and a weakness of OSM.

Windows Vista completely died on my laptop back in 2009. I’d vaguely heard about this other OS called “Ubuntu” shortly before that seemed neat and was especially cool because it was free, but was too nervous about breaking my machine to try it before, but because it was already broken at that point, I had a friend burn me an ISO and installed it. I learned Ubuntu was actually Linux when I was configuring and learning how to use it, and that’s when I learned about concepts like FOSS, Linux just being a kernel and not the whole OS, and the idea of Linux distros. The only time I looked back was dual booting a gaming PC with Windows 10 for a while just before Proton came on the scene. Even then, booting into Windows was rare, only for games that did not work on Linux at the time, which with Proton releasing and constantly improving, became even rarer as time went on. A failed distro upgrade last year (likely due to me messing around with Mesa driver versions) finally had me wipe the Windows side from that PC altogether and go back to only running Linux when I clean installed over both Windows and the other broken Linux install. Truly haven’t looked back since.

Generally I agree. Many of the largest and most popular distros are run by corporate entities: Canonical (Ubuntu and its various flavors), Red Hat (RHEL, Fedora), SUSE (SLE, OpenSUSE), and so on. Many more of the popular distros are community developed but are based on, or draw heavily from, corporate distros. Most of the more “beginner friendly” distros just so happen to be these corporate distros or ones based on them. It would be foolish to think Linux would be where it’s at today without the contributions of these companies and others such as Valve, who has almost singlehandedly made Linux gaming commercially viable. It’s still up to the community, however, to keep these companies honest when it comes to staying true to FOSS principles and compliance with the FOSS licenses they work under. That includes things like telemetry and a respect for privacy and security, allowing for freedom as to when an end user wishes to update their software, and retaining the open source nature of code and companies’ contributions to it. Corporations have the freedom to use and contribute to open source software, and they even have the freedom to make profit from it. But they have no more or less freedom than anyone else has to do so as well, and that’s where we have to keep an eye on them.

The only times I allow it myself are in this case (zero legal availability) and for unofficial/fan translations of games not available in your home region/language. Nobody would be getting your money anyway, no theft of compensation/profits there. If any games do become available, though, then we should support them. The more we put our money where our mouth is for a return to market for these games, the more incentive there is for companies to bring more of them back.

This is especially true when it comes to traditional gender roles in the workplace. Women in Japan are often only hired as secretaries or “office ladies” in big companies, basically to shuffle papers and serve tea. Not exactly big decision-making roles. Heck, even making an announcement is likely a big thing in this regard for a Japanese company, if they actually follow through they could really be seen as progressive by Japanese standards.

I’m a week into Tears of the Kingdom and slowly unearthing my dormant skills from BotW. I don’t remember basic enemies being as strong as they are, or else I missed something about gaining stronger armor/defense. Plugging away and will get better over time, though.

Maybe not endless Mario movies, but more Nintendo movies for sure. I’ve seen rumors that about an animated Zelda movie floating around with the success of Mario.

I just started the other day, so about 4. 😋 Just got to the Temple of Time, so assuming I’m about to leave tutorial island.

True, the Joy-Cons do have the notorious drift issue, but that’s not really a form factor issue. Improvements in form factor can help fix the issue, most importantly an increase in size to fit all the components in comfortably, but the source of the issue wasn’t the form factor of the Joy-Cons.

Though yeah, I would look at primarily making the Joy-Cons, or at least the grip they come with, bigger to actually account for the hands of a person above the age of 8. We know, Nintendo, you mainly think of video games as children’s toys, but you may want to look at gamer demographics, even on your own consoles, again. They don’t need to make them too much bigger, but at least big enough to not cramp a person’s fingers trying to use a single Joy-Con turned on its side.

More memory storage would be great too, especially if the trend towards digital only distribution continues. I’d prefer continued commitment to physical media, but now publishers are even pushing it more towards the disk/SD card basically just holding DRM for a game you still have to download, not to mention DLC and updates. I don’t even have a particularly large Switch library but my 128 GB SD card is filling up fast.

I used the same Ubuntu install since at least 18.04, possibly back to 16.04 (can’t quite remember if I upgraded to 18.04 as a fresh install), up until my upgrade to 22.04 from 20.04 failed. I took that opportunity to try a different distro, which eventually led to my current KDE Neon install.