Yep, plenty of girls/women out there who don’t really consider themselves “gamers” who will put multiple-digit hours into those management types of games. I personally know several like that. I would imagine a lot of women don’t really get into direct PVP online gaming due to the online environment and lack of attempts to appeal to female gamers with the designs of such games, but would probably play a lot of single-player in a bunch of different genres and series. As the article implies, Nintendo IPs in particular would be appealing due to lack of pandering to either the common “gamer” demographic or to what many other publishers think women want in games (overly stereotypical “girl stuff”).

I don’t usually end up using a lot of bird Pokémon in playthroughs (Flying types I pick are usually flying dragons). That said I do really like the sleek design of Galarian Articuno, and I had a Fearow once that was a star team member of the one nuzlocke I ever attempted (Fire Red).

Which makes it even more strange considering Ubisoft is based in the EU.

Tears of the Kingdom. I did figure out where the tear in the Hebra geoglyph was and have gotten a bunch more since then. I went madlad and completed Gerudo second of the four areas despite Gerudo usually being the hardest area in these types of Zelda games, and honestly, the only really hard part of it was the temple boss, which took me a fair number of tries and a short detour from the temple for some cooking, but I eventually beat it when I discovered a trick for the second half of the fight. Now I’m just wandering the land filling the map some more and doing a bunch of side quests and shrines where I find them before I take on the Goron area third.

EDIT: I should note I’m not wandering without an objective, I wanted to make sure I visited Kakariko and Hateno villages at least. I actually spent almost my entire three-hour play session last night in and around Hateno doing side quests.

Both Flatpak and Snap are preinstalled but it defaults to debs/apt. Though through the command line they strongly recommend the pkcon command over apt itself.

Yep. I’m running Neon instead of Kubuntu for this reason. I didn’t want the hassle of dealing with snap, and I wanted the latest KDE stuff, so it’s perfect for me and I’m enjoying the experience. May not be for everyone, though.

So… it sounds like you’re struggling with Snap. In addition to others’ suggestion (try a different distro without Snap, perhaps one of those distros made by a different company such as Fedora (Red Hat), an OpenSUSE variety (SUSE), or even a corporate, less Snap-reliant Ubuntu-based distro like Pop_OS (System 76)), you could also try uninstalling Snap from Ubuntu or installing another binary option like Flatpak/Flathub and installing your software that way. Frankly, the amount of money these companies make working on Linux or Linux-based products has nothing to do with your struggles. Plus, the companies you mention do, in fact, make money working on the kernel itself because they contribute to the kernel as a project. Even Microsoft and Google do the same, though Microsoft does so for the sake of WSL and Google does for Chrome OS and Android. So plenty of people make money if the Linux kernel keeps having work done on it and keeps improving. I don’t see what the problem is with the kernel itself. The lack of polish, as you call it, in Linux-based OSes is not a fault at all of the kernel but in all the various other parts that go into the OS. And that level of polish can vary quite widely. As you note, Snap has been holding Ubuntu back quite a bit due to lack and reluctance of community adoption. Even just trying a different Ubuntu-based OS such as Pop_OS, Linux Mint or Neon may change your view.

Seriously, on both ends. The players never learn to stay out of trouble, and the Vikings GMs never learn to avoid players with off-field issues. As a Vikings fan it gets really frustrating to see. Though I don’t know if the high number of issues is due to us having more players with those personal issues or due to Minnesota law enforcement not giving players a pass compared to other places (though I don’t have a problem with that - nobody should get a pass for dangerous behavior).

Yeah, designing games geared towards kids and younger audiences isn’t just about story/aesthetics, it’s also about difficulty. Most young kids don’t have the attention span or critical thinking skills to sit there and try to beat an enemy or puzzle that older kids or adults would find genuinely challenging.

I could split Nintendo games (I’ve played) into three groups based on target audience:

Younger: cute art style, simple challenges, short game play for young children; Kirby, Yoshi

All Ages: easy-to-learn basics to get you through the main game, but there’s more complex stuff and greater challenge if you want it; mostly pick-up-and-play but not TOO short; Mario, Pokemon, DK Country, Super Smash Bros.

Older Gamers: more (relatively) mature subject matter, challenge from the beginning, complex mechanics and/or puzzles or both to get teen/adult brains going; Metroid, Xenoblade, Fire Emblem, Zelda BotW and TotK (previous Zelda games would be in my All Ages tier)

If you use an IMAP email client the ProtonMail Bridge works great on Linux. VPN works well from the command line, though the GUI is still pretty clunky and RAM heavy and either way they really need to make Wireguard and Stealth available on Linux already.

Flathub is likely safer than most other places to get flatpaks from, certainly safer than just some random repo you find on some guy’s website somewhere, but no software source is guaranteed to be 100% safe.

Ironically my most dominant unit in either of my playthroughs was my Warrior Anna paired with Tiki. Granted, Tiki will make any unit good (I gave Tiki to Jean in my second playthrough and he was almost as dominant) but I don’t think she really needed Tiki, she would have dominated anyway. Legions of nobles and trained soldiers, outperformed by a child. Lyn was another emblem who made both the units I gave her to into monsters: Ivy with her unique class in playthrough 1 and Bow Knight Etie in playthrough 2. Diamant in his unique class was also really good, with either Ike or Roy.

We can hope, but it’s more likely they’ll be like, “hey, that’s an idea, let’s all do this!” The most likely thing they’ll do is absolutely nothing, though.

This week in TotK I cleared the first temple (Wind Temple) and have been working on mopping up everything I can in the Hebra region so I have to spend the least time there possible moving forward. It was my least favorite part of BotW and TotK didn’t really change my opinion. One related question though: guides I’ve found say you don’t need to do the geoglyphs in order, but I’ve found the one in the northern snowfield and have combed the entire thing multiple times, including where the guides say you find the tear, but the tear is nowhere to be found. I got the one just outside Rito Village, which is supposed to be second, right away, it was readily available. Are the guides wrong, are you forced to pick them up in order?

I just installed Neon on my PC a couple months ago and it’s my daily driver. Yep, it’s still a thing. 😁

OSMAnd is how I use OpenStreetMap too. It’s quite good for road routes even in rural areas, but especially in those rural areas finding specific locations can be spotty or outdated. Even in my town of over 100,000, I still have trouble finding some local places like restaurants and businesses. I always try searching for what I’m looking for before I leave home, so I have access to my computer to pull up a map and address to pin onto OSMAnd if I need to. (I’m someone who de-Googles as much as humanly possible so I don’t use Google Maps.) With more up-to-date data it can be a great alternative to Google or Apple Maps, but that’s the nature of crowd built data: it’s only as up-to-date as the data contributors provide, and that’s both a strength and a weakness of OSM.

Windows Vista completely died on my laptop back in 2009. I’d vaguely heard about this other OS called “Ubuntu” shortly before that seemed neat and was especially cool because it was free, but was too nervous about breaking my machine to try it before, but because it was already broken at that point, I had a friend burn me an ISO and installed it. I learned Ubuntu was actually Linux when I was configuring and learning how to use it, and that’s when I learned about concepts like FOSS, Linux just being a kernel and not the whole OS, and the idea of Linux distros. The only time I looked back was dual booting a gaming PC with Windows 10 for a while just before Proton came on the scene. Even then, booting into Windows was rare, only for games that did not work on Linux at the time, which with Proton releasing and constantly improving, became even rarer as time went on. A failed distro upgrade last year (likely due to me messing around with Mesa driver versions) finally had me wipe the Windows side from that PC altogether and go back to only running Linux when I clean installed over both Windows and the other broken Linux install. Truly haven’t looked back since.

Three Houses was easy enough that in my playthroughs deaths were rare even without using the rewind, but I get what you’re saying. Though Three Houses was also unique in that it was much easier to optimize characters to perform well (what with the game taking place in a school and all) and IMO party slots per map felt a lot less restrictive than especially Engage. In Engage I felt shorthanded for the challenge the map presented far too often, and it felt like IS was trying to build difficulty through sheer numbers of enemies to the point of it almost feeling unfair at times. (I will say Awakening felt rather fair and well balanced. I’m playing through Echoes now and it would be balanced… if not for that absolutely horrible map design. How did IS think anyone could get through a map where you have to send your units down literal gauntlets of bow knights that can hit you from a distance on both sides AND take out armored units at the end of each gauntlet, without losing at least half your team, especially when the only ones who can really damage those armored units are squishy mages?)

Props to you for clearing it. I can’t play modern games on Classic mode, I get too attached to the characters and am not willing to either constantly reset or just keep going when one dies. Plus, I don’t exactly know if modern games are just harder or require more grinding (that they have the ability to grind in the first place is a modern thing), but characters seem to just die more easily in modern games, at least the way I play them. I’ve gotten to the point that deaths are rare in a replay of FE 7, but when I was playing through Engage, Awakening or Echoes they’re falling all over the place.

It’s not a super-hot take, but art style >>>>> graphics when it comes to “beautiful” looking games. There are games coming out today that can run on a toaster that look far better than many AAA titles with all the fancy lighting effects and ray tracing that require you to dump 4-digit sums into a monster gaming PC to fully enjoy, all due to how the smaller games masterfully handle their art design.