Call PS3 and Xbox 360-era army slop what you will, but at least it had functional graphics, no noise, no visual bugs, no temporal smear, and most of the time it worked on release.

IMO, most modern games are so bad that Brown Army Slop™ looks good in comparison.

Wget?

I have always used what PopOS bundles. It used to be the proprietary driver, but ever since a certain driver version, they have switched to the Nvidia-made FOSS driver. Because nvidia stopped developing any sort of proprietary components in the driver and just made the FOSS driver instead, which became the “official” Nvidia driver in May 2025 i think.

Edit: Correction, only the kernel modules are all FOSS, while the userspace modules such as CUDA for example are still proprietary.

You can criticise Death Stranding for a lot, but it had the goddamn bollocks to do something innovative and interesting with movement.

Speech note. Support a whole lot of models and you can even do some voice cloning.

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/handheld-gaming/rog-xbox-ally-runs-better-on-linux-than-the-windows-it-ships-with-new-test-shows-up-to-32-percent-higher-fps-with-more-stable-framerates-and-quicker-sleep-resume-times

https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/linux-supercharges-the-rog-xbox-ally-x-higher-fps-smoother-performance-and-a-big-win-for-handheld-gaming

https://www.techspot.com/news/109968-microsoft-xbox-ally-x-handheld-runs-better-linux.html

I dislike Linus Drop Tips, his “reviews” and questionable attitudes.

For that goal, really stick by the FSF recommendations, for that, they are perfect as they have strict requirements.

But I think calling other GNU/Linux distros black box only because some drivers are proprietary is a bit too far, some people just prefer a “minimum damage” approach and that’s a compromise everyone needs to decide for themselves. If I were living in China or Iran, however, then I would exclusively run distros like that as well.

Edit: typo

The fact that a custom designed windows running native games is still worse than GNU/Linux and translation for every single operation is astonishing.

This interface looks beautiful. Perfect for a DIY media centre.

I call it media centre because I hate the word Smart TV and everything it stands for.

“I can’t switch, there’s this one function of this one programme that I may need in the next 50 years.”

Maybe not what you’re looking for, but there’s a program called “Money Wallet” on Android. It’s on F-Droid and free software. Maybe my favourite because every time I spend cash I just open it up and I enter what I just spent.

For professional use, I’d recommend GNU Cash, though.

Oh no! It only plays the CoD games that were good.

IMO: let windows have that, as these games do some SCP-level containment for everyone sane in this hobby.

Man, prices are going to be so nice once the bubble bursts.

The GPL doesn’t force to contribute. But if you make changes to it, you need to have these changes reflect the liberties you yourself received. Megacorporations use the so-called “Explore, Expand, Exterminate” model, the GPL stops this from happening.

Also, I have a rudimentary idea how to fix this. So if anyone who’s more competent than me would like to have a go at it, please do so.

Basically found a non-profit ad agency for free software. Basically the agency would create turnkey ad and branding concepts for certain free software projects that would like to have it and in return they get 5% of their donations, for example. All of the money gets reinvested back into the advertising for the member software projects. Also, it could be very easy, the ad agency would, in broad strokes, just have a competition parity strategy where they essentially do whatever the competition does, in broad strokes, for their advertising and “just” adapt it to what the free software project needs.

Yes, it’s some random “idea guy” on the internet coming up with something that’s coherent and smart sounding. So take it for what you will.

Oh my, YES. Before I entered the world of free software, I was turned off by it. Reason is, I thought to myself, hold on: “If it’s gratis, then it’s going to be at the level of quality of all of these malware-ridden, barely functional, shareware programs.” Luckily I’m smarter now, but free software has a branding problem. It results from these programs often being developed by incredibly competent turbo nerds, the result of this is the advertisement reads like a technical manual or a spec sheet.

Proper advertising is helpful. It informs users about what they can do with the programme. They don’t care about it being programmed in hyper-efficient C, optimised with hardware acceleration or the underlying mathematical principles of how something is being processed. They care about getting the results they want. Instead of darktable, for example, talking about “4x32-bit floating point pixel buffers”, instead, they should talk about what users can use Darktable for. Sell the fantasy of belonging to the best, only thanks to Darktable and getting superior results from the programme. Show people the stunning results that real pros got by using Darktable. Show that there is a real community around the programme, and not just a GitHub repo. These things matter.

Darktable, in my opinion, is the best raw editor out there, and yes, the “4x32-bit floating point pixel buffers” and other incredibly well thought out features are the reason why that is. But 99% of users wouldn’t know why these things listed as their features are so massively useful and make Darktable so ridiculously superior compared to the competition.

I genuinely think that if more free software projects would invest in proper advertising and branding, that GNU/Linux and free software on it wouldn’t have 3% market share, but would be the monopoly in the computing market.

Edit: GIMP is another perfect example. It has another problem, and not just the name. The website is completely barren. “High Quality Photo Manipulation: GIMP provides the tools needed for high quality image manipulation.”

Gimp has not only more features than Adobe Photoshop, but most of them are significantly better. IMO, they need to communicate this and just bundle the extensions. Gimmic is basically tripling the amount of things you can do with it and resynthesiser is a massively useful function to have. “Normies” don’t want to fiddle around with plugins. IMHO: The extensions are very good, highly stable and should just be integrated.

Now, while not exclusively text-to-speech, but my favourite programme for that would be Speech Note.

For these requirements, I’d recommend PopOS. Thanks to its app centre being very well designed, you never need to touch the terminal for anything. Package managers are apt and Flatpak, so you get full access to basically anything that GNU/Linux has to offer. The install itself is super easy as well. I think it may be one of the best beginner distros.

Congrats on saving your parents’ master of business administration!