I do tech support in a school that still has Windows 7 on all PC’s. These are old relics from 2008 and just this week I was informed we’ll have to manage with them for a few more years. There’s no way I can upgrade those things to Windows 10 not to mention we don’t have the licenses. They can barely run 7. I’m thinking of throwing a user friendly Linux distro in those things. The principal liked the idea but I’m not sure the users will like it. But Windows 7 is becoming a liability.
I don’t know much about linux, but maybe try those debian stable distros (mint, ubuntu, or debian itself).
When we use linux for basic things like browsing the web, opening pdf files, editting a picture (on gimp) and so on, I don’t see much of a difference on the experience.
By the way, I once installed linux on a old laptop with 2GB ram, the performance got so much better, I was even able to play simple 2D games (kingdom rush) at 60 fps, this wasn’t possible on the old windows 7 it had installed.
Everything I did on the school pcs would’ve been just as easy and likely easier to do with Linux. Our 7 PCs were slow as hell and that was when those PCs were new.
ChromeOS flex could also be a way to go for education. You can manage them through Google admin if you have Google workspace for the district.
I believe so, I’m not an IT admin but I believe that’s all my school just had for their enterprise enrollments. Would give you more restrictive control over the students than you would on linux
I agree. School admins don’t care. They want the most control over the hardware issued to students and google’s stack is admittedly much better than what you can do on windows and mac.
I got a bunch of old Thinkpads for my classroom at the school i work at and installed Ubuntu on all of them. They run smooth like brand new laptops, and I have been surprised to see my students having an easier time using Ubuntu than Windows 11.
Just put linux mint and its basically the same experiente imo. Also much safer, since now to download stuff they are going to have to rely on the graphic app store application which is much safer then downloading on the internet.
Hades is a steal at 5$, if you’re into more casual gameplay vampire survivors is also a steal at 3.50 (includes all the dlc), if you want something in between brotato has been a wonderful purchase for me. If you want more of the frantic play style, but shorter sessions and less RPG decision making elements, 1 finger death punch is only a buck.
All of the source games are on sale, I recommend portal> portal 2 /half life 2 > left 4 dead 1&2
Slay the spire for < 2$ is an absolute steal, if you think you might like deck builders that’s one of the o.g’s. another most excellent deck builder, monster train, is also less than 2$, I cannot recommend them both highly enough.
The room is an excellent puzzle game, especially for 75 cents, not personally sure about it’s sequels but I’ve heard they’re equally good.
Don’t starve for 2.50 is amazing, but if you’re at all multiplayer inclined, get ‘don’t starve together’ (I believe it comes with a second copy you can give to anyone)
Hexcells, hexcells 2, and lyne are great if you like puzzle games (everyday genius square logic is also great, but not on sale and no longer supported by devs) delete is also good, and on sale, but it’s much more once over it’s done game (like the room)
Doom (2016?) Is a great first person shooter at 4$, and fallout new Vegas is a great first person RPG at the same price.
FtL at 2.50 is amazing, and after you’ve sunk a hundred hours into it, download the ‘across the multiverse’ fan made expansion, and sink another thousand hours into the game.
And if you’re considering Diablo 4, I plead with you to give path of exile a fair shake first, it’s free to play, only cosmetic micro transactions, and so much more fleshed out of experience.
I stand by each of the above games, if you give any of them a fair shot and walk away considering it an actual bad game, hit me up, let me know what made it bad, and I’ll toss you a game key (of my choosing) of equal or greater value (than the sale price of the game you thought was bad)
Edit, not sure where the hell I got those prices from, I think it may have been showing me "complete the bundle"prices on games I already owned that had bundles with everything else I also owned? I’ll go through and change my reviews based on the prices I find, it’ll definitely change a couple of my “absolutely must have at this price”
Don’t Starve no longer gets updates since the studio only focuses on Don’t Starve Together now. So I would recommend Don’t Starve Together even if you don’t want to play multiplayer.
My friend who loves the game told me about it when they stopped adding content to DS a few years ago. You can see it on the steam updates. DST gets content updates all the time but DS only gets the occasional bug fix update.
Regarding your comment on Diablo 4… Is that really the case? I played Diablo 2, skipped 3 and then played Diablo 4 a few weeks back during the free weekend on Steam. I’m admittedly a casual player, but I enjoyed it a lot. I didn’t love it, though I like it. It was familiar with clear improvements, and I was able to jump right into the game and had an enjoyable experience (I’m aware others could have a different experience especially end game). Gameplay was smooth, UI was simple to navigate while chilling on the couch with a controller, story was interesting, fights were satisfying, and the choices I made for skill progression and weapons all made for a decent experience in the 6-7 hours I played till the level 20 cap. I don’t care about character customization with cosmetics, and have never/will never spend money on mtx especially in a game with this hefty price tag. With all that in mind, the trial was enough to make me consider buying it on sale, and am now considering it again.
But I’m frugal, and have heard from sources online and friends that Path of Exile is Diablo but much better, so I tried it. I gave it 2 hours, and I was personally lost. Not sure if it was the UI which felt clunky and unfamiliar, or the story that didn’t draw me in, or the fact that it felt almost expected to read through wikis to be able to get a decent build, but after two hours I didn’t have fun and uninstalled it. Is it worth it to try again and see if it will scratch the arpg itch?
Path of exile is a love letter to diablo 2. It also has materia from ff7 and the sphere grid from ff10 turned up to 11.
It is also deep as fuck, and thus easy to get lost in. There’s tons of side projects in the game (mining, heists, hunting, just to name three I remember). The skill grid is huge. The in game economy is complicated.The core game is huge and then there’s a huge end game about exploring maps that has its own skill grid. It’s like a decade of content.
You can play it casually. Just go and click on monsters , pick good sounding stuff on level up, and have fun.
You can also look up a guide for your build. You’ll probably do better, but then you’re following a guide.
If you want a game that has a lot of depth, it’s fantastic. If you want something shallow but fun, it can still work but it’s possible you’ll hit parts where your character is built poorly and struggles.
That’s cool, yeah I can see that it can be as deep as you want it to be.
I gave it a shot again last night, and enjoyed it more. Watched a short beginner video that clarified some of the clunkiness I felt with the UI, and my controller worked this time. It crashed 7 times in 2 hours, which is 7 times more than Diablo 4, but it’s a free game so not complaining. Each time the UI would stop responding for 4-5 seconds while the game kept going, then it would show a frozen start of the GGG intro, then crash to desktop. Last time I played it didn’t do that. Meh.
I do find the economy very complicated, and am finding it a little hard to identify the worthwhile loot so that I’m not going to Nessa to sell a few random pieces every 5 mins.
I do also find the fights somewhat repetitive, but that could just be my uneducated witch/necro build. Minions do the tank duties, while I sit back with chain lighting, lobbing fireballs at everything moving. Pretty satisfying, though I feel it could get tired soon. I think I only used a health potion 4x and mana 3x while playing last night, getting up to level 10, doing the main and side quests up to “The Way Forward”.
That’s weird that it crashed so often for you. I don’t think it’s crashed 7 times in the 300 hours I’ve played. Did you do the usual “update your drivers and os” stuff?
You can get a loot filter that will make it more obvious what items to pick up. www.pathofexile.com/item-filter/ladder/follower . Some items sell for more valuable currency (like an item with all 3 color sockets linked together, or one with six sockets, etc).
The game does pick up as you go farther. You get more sockets on your equipment so you can add more support gems and skills. The beginning is pretty easy, though.
There are also other potions you can slot in for like more speed, resistances, and such.
There’s a lot of depth. More than I really know in detail.
Now I’m thinking of downloading it again :thinking:
I loved diablo 2 and 3 but 4 was very meh for me. Path of exile was very confusing to me so I dropped it. You should give grim dawn a chance. It’s so good.
Game often goes on sale along with the dlc. If you decide to give it a chance, check out grimtools for fun builds, calculators, and many more tools. The game is actively being developed after so long, and it’s just so fun to play. It’s what diablo 4 should have been.
Now that you mention it it’s kinda weird it isn’t. When our phones, servers, infrastructure, social networks, chat apps and even AI are all open source why are games all still built on proprietary software?
You know, as someone who doesn’t have a PlayStation, I want to support PS game developers by buying the games on Steam. But after this atrocious nonsensical debacle by Sony, I will have to leave for the high seas.
To be fair, I do have to keep my wife from getting a PS5 for the FF7 remake games. SE will eventually release them on PC, and modders will fix whatever shit port job they do this time.
However, this does not come from a place of logic; she wants to see Cloud and Sephiroth fuuuuuuck.
Oh, we know. She still insisted on the PS4 version when that came out. We comprised as I bought her a used copy to avoid giving SE any ideas that it’s ok to do that shit lol
They have to comply with GDPR as their website is accessible from EU countries, as long as they have data to identify a specific EU citizen.
So in theory, if you’re from EU you could put your name and surname on your Steam profile, have it archived and then file a GDPR request to have all of your data removed
They have to comply with GDPR as their website is accessible from EU countries, as long as they have data to identify a specific EU citizen.
There’s currently American laws that if not followed, States have a right to pursue a lawsuit. Many American companies shrug and wait for the paperwork. Often, it takes a few months for that paperwork, and then years before it moves through the courts. Imagine a EU company getting that paperwork. Besides the initial “I’m in the EU, I don’t have to follow your American laws”, the court case would take YEARS to materialize.
Now flip that for American companies following EU rules.
A law is only as strong as those who enforce it. Look at Twitter. How many warnings will the EU give and still not do anything about it?
I’m not saying this to wave my freedom around. This is just reality. Major American companies to this day still are lax around GDPR. So a small 1-person company is going to shrug and do whatever they want. Until they do something outrageous like terrorism or CP, they’ll at most get a strongly written letter.
And by then, they’ll just bankrupt their company and start a new one.
Again, not saying that to be a jerk. I’ve been on that side of arguing that our products should follow GDPR, watching some manager tell me fuck off, then literally nothing happening for years.
Twitter confirmed that the breach occurred on November 4, 2014. Yet, the company remained unable to determine who was affected by the issue before September 5, 2017. Between September 5, 2017, and January 11, 2019, Twitter’s breach also impacted users from the European Union and the European Economic Area (EEA).
Which to be fair, is a more than enough law for 98%++ of the population and all companies, too. Just not for the biggest companies who really ought to always be upgraded one “unit”. That is, instead of 500 Kiloeuros, they get to pay 500 Megaeuros.
Yeah that’s not great but not too surprising when it comes to the Irish DPA.
They are seemingly very corrupt. They pretty much refuse to fine any of the large US corporations like Facebook.
And while they have actually fined Facebook multiple times that’s because the rest of the EU (EDPB) forced them too. It wasn’t a willing decision on their part. They have also cried to the Irish government (or parliament) to get a new law that makes it possible to get the reporting party (I.E. normal EU citizens and NGOs) to pretty much sign a NDA regarding everything in the case.
Why are they like this? Why do they interpret the GDPR differently than the rest of the EU and coincidentally they interpret the law in Facebook’s favour?
I have no evidence but to me it seems extremely likely that they are directly bribed or more likely IMO is that Ireland wants to keep all the tax avoiding US companies in Ireland and they do this to keep them happy and when they get fined anyways they can blame the EU for the fines.
Oh and Ireland is still the one that’s actually issuing the fine, so they get to keep the money even when they were forced to do it.
On another note, I suspect that DPAs are more eager to fine when it’s something that’s done explicitly bad. Like refusing to delete data.
It’s probably just hard to include both character sets since the game was originally made in English with specific programming for Roman lettering. Same thing with GTA V. Any Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters just turned into squares.
There’s two Carmacks in gaming and I can never keep them apart, which is a point of cognitive dissonance for me because one just held a right-winger convention and the other was one of the minds behind the now-defunct Unreal franchise that I still miss to this day.
This past fall’s harvest, actually; that is a perfectly cromulent question to ask for once. As it is, pretty sure my brain mixed up the credit screen for Quake 3 with UT2k4.
Y’know after wracking my brain for the past 15 minutes you might be right; I might’ve somehow mentally mondegreen’d the credits screen of Quake 3 Arena over that of Unreal 2k4
Biggest improvement is probably the 30-50% increase in battery life. The deck already gets much better battery life than the ROG Ally or Lenovo Go (especially on low demanding games, it can get 2-4x the battery life), so this will further cement it as the best handheld PC for actually playing without the device plugged in.
I mean running the same game at the same settings/resolution/etc the Deck will get significantly better battery life. You can offset this somewhat by using task manager to close background processes in windows, but it still takes a lot more power to run stuff on the ROG Ally than the deck.
An example from Ally reviews was Stardew valley ran at 6-8w on the deck, but was pulling 16-20w on the Ally with same settings. Using task manager to close windows processes for the Ally down to the 12-15w range, but that’s still a huge jump. This isn’t even taking into consideration that you can tweak deck performance settings to run Stardew valley at a much lower power setting, I’ve seen people go as low as 3.8w giving them 10+ hours of battery life.
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