My favourite line from Blues Brothers (forget which film) is when they are at the hick bar and they ask them what kinds of music they play here -

“We got both kinds, we got Country and Western…”

I am with ya. I completed it first time, took a while to get used to, very flawed game but did enjoy it. Basically became very powerful (fed on everybody lol).

On a replay trying to be ‘good’, it just annoys me that so much fun is taken away from you and it makes a tedious game excruciatingly tedious. Like i get it, making your choice to be good have consequences and you live with them. But that choice also directly stands in the way of fun. Dropped that playthrough after couple hrs.

Still would recommend for 90% off though.

How weird is it that there aren’t more good vampire games? Like hasn’t been a single ‘great’ game since Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines and even then, that was a pretty terribly made game. Unofficial patches and mods made that great! Seems to be such a gap in the market.

I think Vampyr comes with some serious jank, similar to VtMB before it, although doesn’t come close to its grestness, unfortunately.

Since you specifically mentioned gaming and streaming, a great option for you as a beginner is Nobara.

It is built specifically for gaming and streaming and has many of the tools pre-installed and makes DaVinci Resolve setup really easy (is a challenge otherwise lol). It’s based on Fedora, heavily modified kernel for performance and makes Fedora ready for gaming out of the box (which is why I discourage Fedora for gaming as a beginner, that takes a lot of set up for gaming and nvidia).

Nobara is also great for beginners because it comes with some brilliant GUI options - apps that let you click onto the specific drivers, packages you might need and the Welcome app includes options step by step of what to install. You will mostly use such an app for updates, so it takes away a lot of the fear of the terminal (but you can still use no problem). It also includes some great options for streaming apps you’ll need.

Also comes with KDE as its main suggestion (Nobara version of it or pure KDE, very little difference, basically the same with a few extra Nobara icons added i think). KDE is a fantastic DE, the workflow is similar to Windows out of the box and you won’t be unfamiliar with it, great one to start with. Plus its so customisable so you can get it looking very different from windows if you wish (which i did with mine).

They have a great Discord too if you wanna ask any questions about specific games or issues. It’s basically Fedora but gentler learning curve and everything you need ready to go out of the box

I can second Hyper X for Linux. Using the USB dongle is perfect for wireless, as I dont like having Bluetooth enabled all the time. I only enable it when using my controller on my laptop. Headphones are great and not crazy expensive. I just wanted headphones that worked and they do exactly that.

Haven’t had a single issue with my Hyper X Stinger headset across the distros I’ve tried (PopOS, Nobara, Cachy, Endeavor).

His film Only God Forgives has to be the most style over substance film if his, hands down

“I’d rather give up all of my data to Google so that I don’t have to… have the awful burden of carrying a wallet” lol

Big Cinema got to them of course!!!

Umm yeah, thats right! Big Cinema only wants certain films to be promoted and available, so it releases films at the cinema and it might seem its the exact same treatment as other films. But if those films criticise ‘the guilty’, then it disappears them. I heard it sends the films to CIA black sites, never to be seen again.

If I were you I wouldn’t wanna be caught up in such a serious conspiracy, what if Big Cinema gets to you for simply pulling the curtain aside?

Definitely dont wanna get caught up in the ongoing, underground war between Big Streaming and Big Cinema!

/s

To a certain degree, this has already been happening in Spain for over a year now (believe it started in 2024, possibly even 2023). Vast swathes of the internet gets blocked during games because they share the same Cloudflare IPs. It’s affected so many random businesses that have absolutely nothing to do with football.

https://reclaimthenet.org/laliga-block-causes-spain-internet-outage-and-vpn-surge

I first read of him in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (fantastic book). It really shows how awful this man was.

I also love this quote from the wiki article on his legacy -

He “had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history”.

Lol Heroes reference?

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/11/budget-samsung-phones-shipped-with-unremovable-spyware-say-researchers

I have to deal with tons of app issues in work, from users of Samsung and Xiaomi. I would honestly never buy either brand.

They are both filled with proprietary garbage, you have to use workarounds to try and disable and even then, these two companies are some of the worst for simply ignoring the workarounds and overriding them.

https://dontkillmyapp.com/

https://dontkillmyapp.com/problem

I bought a laptop very similar (same model group but from the year after) to this just before Christmas for my niece. Got it 2nd hand, as my brother was just looking a laptop that she could browse on and maybe do some homework.

I refurbished it and got it cleaned up and I tried lubuntu, xubuntu, linux mint xfce and one other (forget now). Same thing kept happening. Would simply freeze when trying to boot them. Had removed Secure Boot too.

After couple days of trying I ended up giving up and going with a Windows 10 LTSC IoT version from Massgrave for her.

Wish I had better news or something more productive for you. Sorry!

While my personal opinion is that the ending was very silly lol, I would still highly recommend Sense8 overall (original idea was just awesome). I thought it was just such a lovely show at times, could make you laugh and cry. Really highlights how empathy is fundamental.

Came to say Serenity (it’s just a great end, tying up a main plot point and a small background plot point, with a fantastically emotional end) but since that is already top of the list I will go with a terrible one.

Sense8.

Started out as pretty great series, I absolutely adored the first series. I felt the quality was there even if super cheesy at parts. Then the 2nd series happened and soon after, news it was cancelled. The quality had dropped quite a lot but still not terrible. Then they were given the opportunity to do a 2 n a half hr special to tie up loose ends.

It was massively rushed, the quality was completely gone, some of the characters just acted so different from how they had been previously and some were barely in it.

To be honest, I think I am still grateful, at least we got a resolution but sometimes i remember how sucky it was, i think perhaps they should have just left it on a high (even though it had already started to falter in the 2nd series)

Fun fact - In the film The Bodyguard, Whitney Houston plays a famous singer who’s being stalked and her new bodyguard, Kevin Costner’s character, brings her to one of his bars… a country n western place. They dance to the Dolly Parton song and this is kinda the start of their relationship and they fall in love.

Fast forward to the end, and Whitney Houston’s character decides to cover the song in a new album and goes on tour and it’s a massive hit.

Good film by the way, worth a watch even it’s a bit cheesy. The stalker guy is actually lowkey terrifying lol

I moved a couple months back fully and have tried quite a few distros (before I figured out the hardware issue I was having on my Acer laptop). I have mostly used Pop OS (pre-Cosmic) and now Nobara is my daily driver.

Nobara is fantastic, it suits my use case perfectly and has everything ready to go essentially. The set up was very smooth and maintenance is a breeze. I did try Cachy too (when i still had my annoying hardware fault) and would love to try it again at some stage but I’m settled on Nobara and feel like the Fedora base is the perfect platform for learning more Linux in depth.

I was initially in love with Gnome and hated KDE for how it tried to copy Windows with the bottom left menu - I wanted something fresher. But i have used it more and customised it so its less like Windows and I adore KDE now as well.

I still use Windows on a separate laptop for work and its hilarious how shit Windows 11 is now, especially in comparison to using such a beautiful desktop environment on my personal laptop. So many things are broken and I just hate the fact that its almost entirely spyware, being filled with vibe coded ai shite and they still try and serve you ads when searching for stuff.

Fuck Microslop! Will never buy another Windows machine.

Aw yeah that makes sense actually on rereading it. I think i was going to try the Proton Bridge at first on moving to Linux but then saw it was only available via their paid version.

That put me off lol, so I’m just sticking to using it via browser and their own mobile app for now.

Just to clarify - Protonmail does have a mobile app (works great by the way, especially on Graphene)

https://protonapps.com/

According to Israel, they have, ahem… ‘the most moral military in the world’. And according to this psychiatrist these suicides are attributed to ‘moral injury’ due to ‘accidentally’ killing women and children.

With the amount of women and children murdered by the Israeli army, surely the entire army should have killed themselves through ‘moral injury’?

Perhaps the truth is simpler, Israel is a genocidal apartheid ethnocolony that forces its citizens to be complicit in its bloodshed through conscription and these are the few soldiers with any shred of morals left.