Thanks. Appreciate the info. I’m kinda jazzed about this, TBH. I might buy another low-end gaming machine - this one was one I had specced out in late 2020, but it’s running out of disk space as gave it a very small drive - throw Linux on there, and start migrating over…I don’t want to play high-end games, mostly Metroidvania type of things and my kids play mostly the same types of things - stuff like Undertale, etc.

Linux is always such a pleasure to use. I’d love to remove yet another Windows machine from my life…

About Minecraft - what launcher(s) are you using on Linux? One of my kids is going through and playing all the old versions of the game, but I don’t know if that would work on Linux?

Well, damn. I might have to get a low-end “gaming” machine and use Linux on it. Windows is so frustrating to use - I don’t want to have my identity managed by their stupid fucking cloud just for a low-end gaming machine. They try to hide the local user path and they seem to keep trying to further enshittify everything about trying to use an OS for the way I want to use it. (Reminds me: I need to read Cory’s book)

I’ve used Windows off and on for years - I mostly stopped paying much attention to MS once I was able to use Mac/Linux for my work daily driver, and only use it in anger for things like gaming and mining.

Don’t some games have a “Windows only” logo on them? Are you saying it will use Wine to launch Windows only games?

I haven’t tried it yet out of sheer laziness, since I already have several Linux bare metal/VM instances running. Right now I have a Windows machine mostly dedicated to Steam. I have sometimes launched Steam on my macs.

Have you tried out Steam on there? I don’t know if there are any workarounds to running Steam games that require Windows; otherwise I’d probably switch one of my last Windows machines over.

What VPN?

That makes sense for your use case. My use case is that I don’t want my YT watching habits being scooped up if I can help it. At one point I might not have cared too much about things like YT, but under the current administration I have a lot more reservations about that.

Are there any alternatives?

Good to know. I was using FreeTube on a Linux machine I have set up to do most of my Youtube watching, but I had to disable VPN. I got tired of trying different countries and just turned off VPN. I’ll try Swedish servers…

Is that an option on Mac or Linux?

Thanks. It seems maybe Italy works for the moment anyway.

Do you know of a working exit country/location? I’ve tried a few different locations with no dice, but if I know there is one that works for someone else, I’ll certainly try that.

I’m using Private Internet Access. It’s weird, because as soon as I turn it on, FreeTube fails to play anything.

I’m not understanding why it doesn’t work when I turn on my VPN, though. Is there a way to watch Youtube and have the VPN on?

What annoys me is that they seem to just ignore any requests to fix things that are broken. For instance, I don’t want to see everyone’s incoming video by default. I have to turn it off for. Every. Single. Meeting.

And I’m hardly the only one. Here is an example of someone asking for this, back in 2020:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/can-incoming-video-have-a-default-to-turn-off/98c198b5-e9ad-48d5-80d4-dc7051968e51

I suspect that Microsoft views Teams users as basically hostages since it’s often something forced onto a big user base at many companies. If you hate it? Too bad: if you want to stay employed, you’ll just use it.

…and a lot that are not that independent. I never stopped using RSS. It’s only because it’s not so easily monetized that it’s not more widely known, I bet.

No, all the stupid white people are coming in for a heck of a lot of blame.

Way to go, dumbasses.

It’s probably because of the seasonal pumpkin candles, and seasonal pumpkin carving.

Nice to get some perspective on things. “Bidenomics” and “Bidenflation” was/is…not that.