Only downside is Debian 13 will likely forever be stuck with KDE 6.3.6, which has some noticeable bugs on my hardware that make Cinnamon more appealing for an LTS distro.

KDE really benefits from distros that keep it more up to date, to the point where even the KDE devs suggest avoiding KDE on Debian.

The problem is that the heavier weapons like the combine rifle are only introduced in the later part of the game from what I remember (I think I stopped somewhere around the antlions last time), where as it seemed like the first half was limited to the crappy weapons, interspersed with some magnum revolver ammo as a treat. By the time I would get access to the good weapons, I’d usually have already lost my enthusiasm to continue. If I had connected more with the story I could look past all that, but since that part just wasn’t engaging with me, the combat needed to carry the experience, which it just wasn’t able to do in my particular case.

I didn’t use the gravity gun as much as standard weapons since most of the objects available to shoot with it are usually quite large which obscured the view of the target (not a problem close up, but mid range and farther I’d have trouble with it), and I found it really janky to use in tighter spaces like hallways or smaller rooms, where the object being held would get caught up on the terrain or doorways.

handrails would also deflect objects shot with it, and a lot of the times when ambushed with a combat encounter, I wasn’t scanning the area for objects to pick up while being shot at, I would just engage immediately and return fire.

It’s a cool gadget, and perhaps others got past the issues I had with using it effectively, but overall I preferred just using a standard weapon, and in that realm the ones that were fun to use had little ammo, leaving me with the very weak pistol and smg, which I didn’t find terribly fun.

As I said, I generally found there wasn’t enough ammo to really use the revolver more than a few times in my experience, hence why I cheated infinite ammo for it.

I don’t have any nostalgia for the half life games as I didn’t play them growing up, but I also don’t think their age is really a contributing factor. Personally I found Half Life 1’s combat to actually be far more fun due to the enemies feeling a little less sponge-y, and the gunplay/guns themselves feeling more punchy and overall just better to me. HL2 I consider a step down.

There are shooters older than HL2 that I would consider to have much better combat, like Blood (1998) or Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001) despite their age. I understand that HL2 was trying quite number of new things, but ultimately my gripes with the combat are mostly down to what I consider to be a poor choice of damage variables in a configuration file, but that’s just in regards to my own preferences for combat in games.

From what I recall, I didn’t really enjoy using the gravity gun all that much since bigger objects had a tendency to clip terrain if they weren’t aimed quite right, and thus miss the enemy I was aiming at, which prompted me to switch back to the other weapons to finish off a gunfight. Admittedly that might’ve been just a me problem, and others had more success using it (I know the sawblades with the gravity gun were quite accurate and easy to use in ravenholm, but I don’t think they show up much after that area).

I felt like most of the game doesn’t really give you enough ammo with the non-standard weapons to really use them outside of one or two bigger fights, then I’d be back down to the smg, pistol, or shotgun (which I also felt was a little under powered unless you used the alt fire, but that chewed through ammo too quickly to be viable most of the time).

As someone who hates open-world ubisoft style games, I’m nevertheless not much of a fan of HL2 either. I tried it multiple times at different points in my life and each time found it to feel like a slog that I end up giving up on a few hours in.

I enjoyed the 1984 aspects of the world at first, but I ultimately can’t get past how bullet spongy enemies are. Virtually every weapon feels extremely impotent except the revolver, which has very limited ammo. I began to dread every encounter with enemies because it rarely felt fun to fight them.

On my last playthrough I cheated and gave myself infinite revolver ammo, which helped me get farther than before, but even then I was struggling to push onward after a certain point, just because it felt like endless waves of enemies being thrown at me with some mildly enjoyable physics puzzles tossed in between them.

Never felt a connection with any of the characters, and without that the gameplay itself just becomes repetitive to me.

Yes. But not every person who is shot or hurt in the future will be surrounded by ICE. Someone may be hurt while ICE is retreating, or towards the back of a crowd where they can be dragged away to be treated by those around them. This happened very often in the Hong Kong resistance and the rebellion in Chile in 2019, where activists began to set up impromptu medic stations to treat the wounded and the gassed.

We have to be ready to support more and more resistance if we’re to avoid them solidifying into a complete fascist takeover.

The Anarchists of Catalonia during the Civil war were successfully able to avoid authoritarianism.

Anarchism is the only ideology that is truly resistant to dictatorship in the long term.

You can have a strong military response without authoritarianism. The Anarchist military during the Spanish civil war were formed from the bottom up: a group of soldiers elect their commander, those commanders collectively elect their general, etc, with any of those positions of authority able to be recalled by a vote (outside of battle) at any time if those elected positions weren’t fulfilling their duties adequately.

This structure was doubted and questioned at the time by a military advisor to Durruti (an important Anarchist figure):

One day Pérez Farràs stated his criticisms to Durruti directly: “You can’t fight like that,” he declared. In reply, Durruti said:

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: I’ve been an anarchist my whole life and the fact that I’m responsible for this human collectivity won’t change my convictions. It was as an anarchist that I agreed to carry out the task that the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias entrusted to me.

I don’t believe—and everything happening around us confirms this— that you can run a workers’ militia according to classical military rules. I believe that discipline, coordination, and planning are indispensable, but we shouldn’t define them in the terms of the world that we’re destroying. We have to build on new foundations. My comrades and I are convinced that solidarity is the best incentive for arousing individual responsibility and a willingness to accept discipline as an act of self-discipline.

War has been imposed upon us and this battle will be different than those we’ve fought in Barcelona, but our goal is revolutionary victory. This means defeating the enemy, but also a radical change in men. For that change to occur, man must learn to live and conduct himself as a free man, an apprenticeship that develops his personality and sense of responsibility, his capacity to be master of his own acts. The worker on the job not only transforms the material on which he works, but also transforms himself through that work. The combatant is nothing more than a worker whose tool is a rifle—and he should strive toward the same objective as the worker. One can’t behave like an obedient soldier, but as a conscious man who understands the importance of what he’s doing. I know that it’s not easy to achieve this, but I also know that what can’t be accomplished with reason will not be obtained by force. If we have to sustain our military apparatus with fear, then we won’t have changed anything except the color of the fear. It’s only by freeing itself from fear that society can build itself in freedom.

Source of that quote.

That structure worked very well from all the historical evidence we have, and they were effectively able to fight the fascists with very few resources, until the combined weight of the stalinist’s betrayal and Franco getting constant supplies from Hitler and Mussolini became too much to bear from a logistical point of view.

That’s true, though most of the results for Linux Mint slow boot show people finding it anomalous and try to help fix it, where as with Bazzite, most of the comments say that’s normal and they experience it too. The consensus I’ve seen suggests that Fedora Atomic boots slower than other distros, and thus Bazzite inherits that slow boot as well.

I’m not trying to suggest that Bazzite sucks or anything, it provides some very unique advantages such as the Deck mode, but at least in my experience, Fedora based immutable distros are slower on my hardware. If it’s not on yours, then I’m glad to hear that, but it its been very repeatable on my end.

Here are concrete steps we can take to combat this beyond making signs (which is still useful in itself):

I hope you’ll join us :)

Yeah I dunno about all that.

That’s been my experience across a couple different computers, one of which was a bit weak, and the other a very capable gaming laptop, both of which just felt sluggish compared to normal distros. This appears to be a fairly common observation of Bazzite, from what I’ve seen.

Bazzite isn’t limited, there are just different ways to do things.

I mostly agree, but I’d say it generally requires more research to accomplish certain things, and documentation for achieving those things on bazzite is far more limited compared to mainstream distros. I think Bazzite excels for people either doing simple things, such as just couch gaming, or desktop gaming + browser use and if everything is available by Flathub. It’s also good for people who are more experienced or willing to tinker.

But IMHO, at least currently, immutable distros aren’t ideal for the average user who might do more than gaming, or have older printers than need a driver from the manufacturer, or who may install things that aren’t in flatpaks (like a musician using Reaper). I think for now (because I do think immutable distros will be the mainstream in the future), normal newbie distros like Mint are still ideal since they cover the most use-cases and have the most documentation and application support.

No prob! :)

I’d normally suggest installing it on a separate empty drive to test it out, but I know it can be a real bear to access those to swap em out on a laptop.

In your case though, I think as long as you can get a Live version of Mint to boot successfully from a USB stick (like there’s no flickering issues at the desktop and everything renders correctly), that’s usually a pretty good sign everything will be fine after you install the Nvidia driver on a full install (not to say you 100% won’t encounter any issues, it’s still possible, but hopefully not!)

According to OurWorldInData, a person is almost three times more likely to be killed in a car accident than in a homicide by another person. (5.8 homicides per 100k people vs. 16.7 car deaths per 100k per year)

In comparison, non-homicide rapes are… 37.5 per 100k people (oof, much worse that I expected). However, most sources I can find seem to indicate a fairly small percentage of rapes are committed by strangers not known to the victim (A Better Way states it’s 28%). If we take that into account and apply it to the OurWorldInData numbers, it comes out to 10.5 people per 100k are victims of rape by total strangers.

That doesn’t account for the fact that many rapes are not reported, and the risk of rape can vary wildly between different states (holy shit is Alaska rape-y) so the real risk is probably a bit higher than my numbers in most areas, and lower in others.

That wasn’t the result I was expecting when I started writing this comment. I guess in conclusion, people are way more likely to be killed in a car accident than some rando murdering them, but depending on where they live, death by driving may be more or less likely than being raped by a stranger. So uh… Yeah. Not great.

I tried looking it up myself just now, but I’m not really able to find anything that would indicate you’d have a bad time on Mint with your 5070 TI. There was one guy on the Nvidia forum that said he was having a bunch of problems, but turned out his BIOS was the culprit. Another person who reported a problem on the mint forums discovered that his card was outputting to his secondary monitor which happened to be off.

Support for the 5070ti was added in the 6.1 Linux kernel, while the latest version of Mint defaults to 6.12 now. You should be able to install it and then install the latest 580 Nvidia driver from the Driver Installer tool and be off to the races without any real trouble, at least from what I read.

System 76 (Linux laptop maker) now ships a laptop with a 5070 Ti, so I’d be quite surprised if you encountered significant issues.

We’re going to need more community medics in the future who know how to treat life threatening bleeding. Our community put together a short guide on steps you can take to equip yourself with that life saving knowledge so you can help your own community.

Learn First Aid! ⛑️

It is equally, if not more important, to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt. This is a tremendously useful skill for anyone to learn, you can never have too many medics.

Tacticool Girlfriend provides a great introduction building a personal first aid kit, called an IFAK, which can deal with things like bullet wounds and other serious bleeding wounds. I also want to emphasize her recommendation of only buying medical gear from reputable sources (not Amazon!), such as North American Rescue to avoid fakes that could cost you your life.

But you’ll need to learn how to use that equipment, too. The best resource for that is to take a local Stop The Bleed class, which are pretty widely available in most places. They may cost a small fee, but can also sometimes be free. Alternatively, if you cannot access a local class, this video by PrepMedic will give you a solid understanding of how to use Tourniquets and Gauze for wound packing.

Injuries are less harmful if they are tended to early. Learning first aid can help conserve resources when healthcare becomes unaffordable. Having several medics in case of harm by police is an extremely powerful morale booster during a protest that may become a police riot. When you become comfortable with the basics of first aid, riot medicine is the next suggested step.

Establish or join local Mutual Aid networks ✊

If you haven’t already, get to know your neighbors. Mutual aid is a willingness to support and grow your community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.

These are groups using direct action to solve each other’s problems. Building strong communities makes it difficult for fascism to take root. The actions of the government are going to hit every community hard, and the ones who build trust in each other and work together are most likely to survive. We’ve been building a list of resources in !inperson@slrpnk.net to help you on your way. Also check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area.

This isn’t only for your own community protection. Your ability to organize today will change the political landscape tomorrow. When revolution occurs, the social organizations that show the greatest resilience through the regime are the ones typically calling the shots when the dust settles. When it comes to elections, get out the vote drives are useless if most of the voters are fascists. At some point, you have to do grassroots political education if you don’t want fascist candidates winning elections. Mutual aid networks are excellent forums not only for teaching each other good political ideas, but demonstrating them in practice.

Then I would suggest the standard Linux Mint Cinnamon, which as I said makes it extremely easy to install the Nvidia driver.

Off the top of my head,

• installing applications that aren’t available as flatpaks requires you to use distrobox to install them (not a huge issue if you’re familiar with the terminal).
• printer drivers are very difficult to install if your printer isn’t supported out if the box, as they cannot be installed in a distrobox container.
• changing user groups or permissions, such as to enable ssh or ftp abilities, is more difficult (it wouldn’t retain the setting after rebooting, didn’t research how it can be achieved).
• not a limitation, but it’s much slower in many ways compared to normal distros. It takes a long time for it to finish installing, booting is slower, updating is slower, etc.

There may be more limitations, but those are the ones I personally encountered.

I wouldn’t recommend CachyOS to newbies, as it’s based on Arch, which brings with it a much higher learning curve and maintenance abilities to properly use. For all of that, it gives very, very minor performance gains in gaming compared to standard distros.

Bazzite is more viable for a newbie, but the immutable base can be limiting depending on their needs, and may require them to learn how to use distrobox, which is quite advanced for a newbie.

I’d recommend new users stick with Linux Mint unless they have a multimonitor setup with differing refresh rates, or very new hardware that requires a newer kernel to function well, in which case Fedora may be a better option.

Floaters can vary drastically from barely noticeable (like in the meme), to extremely distracting (large black or gray dots floating around in the vision even when reading a book or using a computer), to limiting eyesight almost like cataracts.

In this study, one patient’s eyesight improved from 6/60 to 30/60 due to how severely the floaters obstructed vision.

And bear in mind, one of the physical alternatives to eliminating the floaters has a 7% chance of permanent blindness, whereas a single $16 bottle of concentrated pineapple enzyme can drastically reduce them with little to no side effects, and no chance of long-term harm.