I’m suffering for that right now. Sony Bravia.

Firstly, I didn’t want to buy a smart TV, but that’s pretty much all that’s sold anymore. I also didn’t intend to connect it to the internet, but a well-meaning guest wanted to watch TV at night, and thought he was troubleshooting, not realizing he was in the TV menu and not the streaming box.

The TV updated, and IMMEDIATELY got worse. Formerly, if I turned it on, it would go straight to the streaming box. Great! As shitty updates do, it changed the settings, and would instead open to the TV’s menu, so it could advertise streaming services. It also forgot that the TV input is HDMI 1. It became strictly worse, in the rare edge case of every fucking time you turn it on.

I don’t trust it to not automatically connect, or to forget my login credentials, so I go to do a factory reset. It’s literally an option in a menu. The TV gets stuck in a boot loop. Talking to support, they think it broke the mainboard. A factory reset bricked the TV.

It’s under warranty, but this is fucking crazy. NEVER connect your TV directly to the internet.

Fun and completely unsurprising fact: this is already the case with Ronald Reagan. He’s buried at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, which charges admission.

These people never stop grifting, even in death.

I’ve had “When Will You Die” by They Might Be Giants in regular rotation.

We’ll exhale, we’ll high-five

We will know at last how great it is to be alive

We’ll be lining up and buying tickets

And then we’ll be jumping up and down on your grave

Computer, end simulation.

COMPUTER! END SIMULATION!

Sorry, this is the first I’ve heard of Palantir Gotham.

Jesus Christ, I hate media-illiterate nerds. Batman, famously, DOESN’T TRUST COPS!

He died as he lived: blaming systemic issues and right-wing violence on minorities.

There’s a good movie in there, spread thinly over three. Like butter scraped over too much bread…

yay anarchism

For what it’s worth, I was in a similar boat. I wanted to try WMs/compositors, but the configuration seemed daunting. Then I gave Dank Material Shell a try and it just configured the vast majority of the system very nicely. I still had to change some window rules in the config file, but even that has a GUI now. I also heard great things about Noctalia, and I’m sure there are others as well.

I still think KDE is a top-tier option, to be clear. :P And adding tiling to KDE is also a great way to get the best of both worlds, just from the other direction.

But consider,

gronk

Seeing Copilot in Notepad of all places is what finally made me quit Windows for good.

I’m on EndeavourOS, which like CachyOS, is a derivative based on Arch. They smooth over a couple of the things that make Arch difficult: the installation, and initial packages.

Part of what makes Arch difficult is that it updates its repositories very quickly. That’s good in many ways, because you get new features and new drivers more quickly, but sometimes things are buggy or break. From what I’ve heard, it’s honesty fairly rare nowadays, but it’s still a best practice to check archlinux.org before proceeding with a major update.

Anyway, I’m in a very similar boat. I’ve bounced off of Linux for various reasons in the past, but between Linux getting better and Windows getting worse, Linux is the “just works” option for me. It’s not perfect, but any snags I’ve had have been smaller, less frequent, and more often fixable.

Windows had trouble with it too and in more irritating ways.

Honestly, I’m embarrassed how long it took me as a human being to realize that things don’t have to be perfect to be better. I would be way harder on any change than I was with the status quo.

Anyway, yes, especially after having more and more issues with Windows 11 in particular, for me and my use case, Linux is genuinely easier to use day-to-day. Is it perfect? No. Is it better? Yes, no contest.

I do enjoy the tactical side of inventory management, but that’s only for a specific kind of game, and even then, slot-based inventory works so much smoother.

There’s an artist who did that, and created a series of Trees of 40 Fruit!

I think the trick is that it works better the more closely related the trees are. These use only stone fruits.

In addition to what others have mentioned, Mausritter might fit the bill!

Oh yeah, the thing I appreciate most about 2e were the campaign settings. 3e was also pretty great in that regard, but without quite the variety.

To take the rose-tinted glasses off for a bit… yeah, I would rather play mechanically better games. I might dip into 2e or 3e for a short adventure, but if I want to do a campaign, I’d look elsewhere. There are systems that do old-school D&D better, modern D&D better, and other things entirely. Speaking of Planescape, I was thinking of running something like Blades in the Dark, set in Sigil.

If you’re interested in the history of the hobby, it’s important, and there are good bits in there, but… yeah. It’s extremely messy, sometimes outright broken, and sexist even by the standards of its time and context.

I love 3e, but it was the first edition I played. If you look at it and think, “No, absolutely not,” I can’t argue with you. :P It’s a mess, but it’s in my trash pile.

“A love letter to 2e” actually sounds a lot better than anything else I’ve heard about the revision. :P

Also, I have a soft spot for 3.x, but my potentially controversial opinion is that 1e is the worse edition by far.

And what’s going on with the speech bubbles in the fourth panel?