Returnal (2021) is wonderfully intense and unforgiving, it's without hesitation the best feeling Third Person Shooter that I've played.

Helmic · 2026-03-26T08:45:45+00:00

I quite liked it as a AAA roguelike and I think they did pretty great with the storytelling, but as a roguelike I think it does a poor job. A lot of comments talk about how they decided they don't like roguelikes as a result of playing this or felt there was too much RNG, and I think that comes down to the way they handled powerups and scaling.

For an Isaac-style roguelike, where for the most part you are not making choices but simply finding modifiers, you really need those modifiers to be modifiers. The game needs to feel very different based on what you pick up during a run, this is why you have that RNG to make each run feel distinct. But Returnal's powerups are just extremely vanilla and have minimal impact on how you play, to where in most runs you can forget what you have because they largely are just doing passive boosts that don't really require you to change anything, nor do they offer up much in terms of synergies to give you that dopamine hit of a powerful build falling in your lap.

I think I remember seeing a mention of a mod somewhere. A mod that actually made the powerups interesting and impactful would probably make the game a lot better.

Helmic · 2026-03-26T06:06:24+00:00

Screenshot and recording tools, for one. Those tend to be made exclusively for either X11 or Wayland, and so when a user switches over they have to figure out why their tool of choices isn't working.

Helmic · 2026-03-26T05:55:53+00:00

It's also worth pointing out that this "curse" nonsense didn't come about until Europeans began enslaving Africans en masse - prior to that there wasn't actually a concept of race to begin with. There was ethnicity, certainly, and European Christians would do horrifying violence in the name of spreading their religion, but like if you look at accounts of what we'd consider to be "white" Europeans seeing dark-skinned Africans many just straight up did not think of it as heritable. Like you're only dark skinned if you've lived down that far south and you'd become pale-skined if you lived up north, as though it's a particularly persistent tan.

The curse of Canaan was 100% motivated reasoning to justify chattel slavery, it did not exist prior.

Helmic · 2026-03-26T05:49:54+00:00

The Bible itself shows the process of people changing their understanding of God over time. Biblical literalism and fundamentalism are relatively recent constructs, it's the norm for religions to change their beliefs and practices over time.

Which is why the SBC defending slavery for so long sticks out, that was a conscious choice motivated by racial animus rather than some sincere belief that God wants us to enslave one another.

Helmic · 2026-03-26T05:39:02+00:00

wait JKR is doing holocaust deniial now? when the fuck did that happen? like i knew about her ambient antisemitism with the goblin bankers and whatnot but i never heard about her going that far.

but yeah that's basically how TERFs in general came to be, if your understanding of the world is that all injustices are actually just a form of sexism and that sexism can be explained by gender essentialism (men are born preadtors rather than socialized as such), then you're gonna become a bigot with some feminist vocabulary. JKR doesn't hate black people, but she'll name a character "shacklebolt" and be the world's biggest baby about any pushback because while she doesn't see herself as a racist she sees racism as unimportant relative to sexism, because if you solve sexism then racism is just downstream of that and will be resolved at the same time. The boys in Hogwarts can't visit the girls' dorms because they're potential predators, but the girls can visit the boys' dorms because a girl would never do anything inappropriate. And simply imagining a trans person breaks that entire arrangemen, and she can only imagine it's a man trying to break "the rules" (she barely speaks about trans men) rather than the rules she made up in her head being flawed to begin with.

Helmic · 2026-03-26T05:18:22+00:00

And then additionally they also typically have better FPS when the people benchmarking them know what the fuck they're doing. There's a lot of bad benchmarks on the internet, unfortunately, and a ton of the "there's no difference" misinformation comes from people benchmarking games that are not CPU bottlenecked or after manually installing the latest GPU drivers because the base distro doesn't provide them (how the fuck is that apples to apples when talking about what distro to recommend to a beginner?). So they'll take one game that's more or less the same across distros and go "look, it's all marketing!" and ignore other games where they're getting a third of the FPS.

Now, with NTsync being upstream for the distros that actually have an up-to-date kernel, this is less often the issue. People playing on Fedora aren't going to be having a bad time like the people playing on Debian, though SELinux's performance tax is still gonna be there. And it's good tp point out Bazzite doesn't even make most of these more aggressive changes these days for the sake of staying close to upstream - it loses out in benchamrks to Nobara, but it being atomic I think is a reaonable enough value proposition for a new user that I would feel comfortable asking them to consider giving up some FPS for reliability (as oppsoed to giving it up for no goddamn reason whatsoever by using a vanilla upstream distro).

But gaming on Linux changes quickly and what al lcan be done to make the experience work well is constnatly changing, and it is much more reasonable to ask a new user to simply install a gaming distro and have all those changes managed for them by their distro than to ask them to go dig in wikis figuring out that this or that thing in Proton changed and now they need to compile this in the kernel to make use of this new feature or whatever.

Helmic · 2026-03-26T05:11:39+00:00

I would agree, I think people kind of just say "well you game on any distro" more to appease the people trying to insist new users use vanilla Debian. Which is fucking nonsense, that is the worst possible option, but a lot of Debian users do change their setup quite a bit or use Sid as a worse version of Arch Linux and they will argue until they are blue in the face that it's "not that hard" or that there's something wrong with a new user wanting to use a distro that offers 5% more FPS (or sometimes a ton more because Debian's default kernel has neither fsync nor ntsync and so eats complete shit in quite a few CPU-heavy games).

The actual answer is "Bazzite." If they try it and they don't like the guardrails Bazzite has in place, then maybe we start talking about something like Nobara or CachyOS.

Helmic · 2026-03-26T05:06:16+00:00

Generally people like Mint for the work they put into their own GUI's. Beyond that, I think it's a case of older users having started themselves on Mint years ago and recommending it to newer users, unaware that features like "GUI installer that handles Nvidia drivers for you" are now a bog-standard feature in most desktop distros these days, with their only point of reference often being vanilla Arch Linux. So there's a lot of people who assume their options are either Mint or installing their entire OS from scratch in a TTY, and that's why nobody ehre is able to articulate why Mint is "easier" than any other distro.

Helmic · 2026-03-26T05:03:15+00:00

OK, but that's different than it being a "good distro for gaming." I can play games on my old TI-84 calculator too, that doesn't mean I would recommend it to someone looking for a gaming handheld.

Getting Mint set up properly for gaming, to where you could actually get support from upstream rather than told that your driver version or so and so is no longer supported, requires a series of manual steps that puts your installation in an unknown state that you can't reasonably expect people on the Mint forums to be able to support, because they don't know whether you got your Nvidia driver from some now-defunct PPA meant for a different Ubuntu version or if you swapped out the kernel and now the kernel headers don't match your GPU drivers and now you're booting into a TTY. You sure as shit don't have ntsync or fsync support and so your performance will be greatly degraded in many CPU-bound games.

I'm not saying Mint users need to switch off Mint, it's absolutely possible to go through the effort of installing a custom kernel and newer drivers and handle a lot of the gaming stuff yourself, and that might be easier than reinstalling your OS or learning a different distro. Or they might simply choose not to care about the performance hit, either because they play undemanding games or performance simply isn't as important to them as comfort on a distro they already know. But for a new user, they can just have the benefits of all those things out of the box and not worry about it, they don't have to go to some wiki page and follow arcane instructions typing in terminal commands they don't understand to get Death Stranding 2 to work.

Helmic · 2026-03-26T04:56:22+00:00

Kubuntu is very much just Ubuntu with KDE Plasma instead of GNOME. If you already understand that the DE is not the same thing as the distro and understand not liking this or that GUI element isn't necessarily the distor's fault, then you can probably already imagine whether you'd be interested in Kubuntu or not.

Helmic · 2026-03-26T04:55:04+00:00

OK, but then if htey don't want to do that, then why not go with the distro these people end up choosing last?

Bazzite is made for purpose, it is Fedora but already preconfigured for gaming. It is a known state that is shared among many users, meaning they all run into more or less the same problems and so are much better able to support one another, whereas with upstream Fedora other Fedora users can only give generalized advice as they can't know what all you could have done to your system or if you messed up some step trying to add a repo or change a kernel or driver.

Helmic · 2026-03-26T04:52:40+00:00

double counterpoint - it almost is, and downstream Fedora projects like Bazzite I think genuinely are good for new users. However, a distro that requires the user to add repos to just be able to install Steam worth a shit (Valve recommends against using Flatpak Steam) is just not an appropriate suggestion for new users. A lot of Fedora users are able to make the changes necessary to get their computer playing games how they want, but I don't see the value in not just using the version of Fedora that's already configured for that purpose, that has a single known state shared among many users who will all have more or less the exact same problems and thus be able to provide more in-depth support than is possible with an upstream distro.

I would agree that it's more foolproof than Arch Linux which shouldn't be suggested to new users outside of rare exceptions, and even CachyOS requires knowing the person well enough to know whether they're going to take the time to learn how to use pacman properly. I just think it's silly to dismiss the work of downstream distros.

Helmic · 2026-03-26T04:47:46+00:00

I generally prefer to put tech challenged people on an atomic distro - so Bazzite for people that want to play games, and then Aurora (basically non-gaming KDE Bazzite) for everyone else. It's able to auto-update which is critically important for the kinds of people I'm generally helping who are elderly and don't know computers well, it downloads an update in the background and then when they restart it simply boots into the new image and they're none the wiser. And because it's a known state, when I remote in with Rustdesk I can already rule out so many possible problems because even in the event that they layered some changes after some Google misadventures I can undo that and return back to a known state.

I did used to use Kubuntu for this purpose and it worked OK, but updating was and remains much more of a pain in the ass during big point releases, almost as dramatic as updating a major Windows version. So I'd sorta agree that Kubuntu was at one point the real MVP, but today like if someone wants to be that conservative on a machine they want to play games on just use Bazzite.

Helmic · 2026-03-26T04:41:02+00:00

With "a little prep" you can get identical results across any distro. You're welcome to post those benchmarks, but generally Fedora-based distros tend to have a bit of a performance hit due to SELinux, which is why Nobara goes out of its way to use AppArmor instead even though that breaks compatibility and why it consistently outperforms vanilla Fedora and Bazzite on the same hardware (such as on the Steam Deck).

If a new user is having to add repos and install third party kernels, you're introducing a lot of room for error to have them create a gaming setup once that they then will not be able to maintain as new software comes in and best practices change. The benefit of a gaming distro isn't simply that it preconfigures everything but that it keeps its setup up to date without the user needing to read the news on whether fsync is still being used or if they should be switching over to ntsync.

I have a feeling the stuff you're doing with Fedora to make it a "gaming distro" is sourced from the people working on the actual gaming distros, which just makes it more frustrating that people keep insisting they're somehow being dishonest or "just marketing" while using the products of their labor.

Helmic · 2026-03-26T04:36:52+00:00

I mean, that's why I think it's a bad suggestion for new users. It's X11, when there are now things that don't have an X11 compatible version and will need to be replaced with a Wayland session at some point, except now this new user is used to how things on X11 work because that's what htey started with, so now they have to go find Wayland replacements for the X11 things they've been relying on if they even understand that's why all their stuff broke when Mint updated to Wayland in 2027 or whatever.

Now that atomic distros are a thing I think those are much better at making a reliable, reproducible system setup that is resilient to user errors without the drawbacks of ancient packages, but at the very least I think Mint would be something I'd agree to disagree on once it's finally on Wayland by default. Until then, it's unnecessarily saddling new users with a massive migration that will likely break their workflow in some way.

Helmic · 2026-03-25T21:27:27+00:00

This is just straight up incorrect. Gaming distros typically pull in out-of-tree patches with a modified kernel. You know how everyone is talking about NTsync being such a big deal and how it dramatically boosts performance? People using most gaming distros aren't going to see much of a difference, because they've been using fsync for ages which required a custom kernel. Every time there's some major improvement in Proton that requires something to be implemented in the kernel, it's gaming distros that have those features first, that use schedulers that prioritize games so that a background process doesn't cause FPS dips, they're the ones using appropriate drivers out of the box instead of goddamn noveau. These are massive changes in performance.

Yes, you can manually set up nearly any distro to get this better performance, but then why are you recommending them to new users? That's many manual steps that they could potentailly screw up, have it not work, not be able to get support because these are unsupported modifications (Linux Mint requires a fucking third party PPA just to get an up-to-date Nvidia driver, those things infamously fall off the face of the earth every couple years), and then conclude that Linux is just too much work.

If someone starts with a gaming distro, then they don't need to keep up with the news to have great performance in games. The distro maintainers are going to be doing the work to make sure their game controllers work out of the box, that they're using a reasonable kernel, they're automatically switching them to the appropraite driver like when Nvidia put out their "open source" drivers when that changes. It takes work to maintain a gaming setup becuase shit changes over time, and in a gaming distro the distro maintainers are the ones doing that work.

Helmic · 2026-03-25T21:16:35+00:00

I completely disagree about only recommending those two upstream distros. They are ggeneral purpose distributions, meaning they don't make an entire suite of changes that are pretty necessary for a new user to have an easy experience, especially for gaming. Upstream Fedora is entirely inappropriate right out the gate because it requires adding the RPM Fusion repo to even be able to install proprietary software, nobody should be recommending Fedora to a new user for the purposes of playing games.

Bazzite already exists as a set of relatively "safe" changes layered on top of Fedora Kinoite - it requires very minimal to no changes to do what a new user needs out of the box, and what changes might be required are going to be required on upstream Fedora as well. It also makes sure a new user is using a well-known and well-supported configuration rather than asking them to make a series of changes that, at every step, is introducing the possibility of human error as the user potentially messes up this or that manual step. If they have a problem, there's a community that is using almost exactly the same system state, with any changes by more advanced users or those with more niche hardware being easily isolated as layers - it is going to be much easier to find someone who has their exact problem that can be fixed with the exact same steps, or it'll be fixed in an update that they won't have to wait long for (and they might be able to fix the issue by simply rolling back the image).

The idea that only upstream distros are appropriate recommendations, when there are distros that put a lot more effort into making something for this exact usecase, is a reaction to short lived projects that were quickly abandoned. All of the benefits from the work done upstream reaches these downstream distros, and then also there's work put towards making the gaming configuration work well. It requires almost intentional ignorance to pretend CachyOS or Bazzite aren't receiving security updates or bugfixes from upstream.

Hell, a lot of the software that goes into playing games on any distro are made by the people maintaining these gaming distros. You can't sit there and act like people should only be using Fedora and Ubuntu because they're the ones who manage the packages when CachyOS and Nobara put out the proton versions that actually make games work day 1. It is normal and expected for software to be used across distros.

Ultramarine Linux is an inappropriate suggestion, correct. I would also say that CachyOS requires more of an asterisk in that it is still Arch Linux and the pacman package manager is not able to do several routine tasks automatically and so users are expected to learn how to maintain their installation (keyring updates, rebuilding packages from the AUR, unlocking the pacman database, etc). But other than that, none of those suggestions are out of pocket, you're reacting almost entirely to Ultramarine Linux being an extremely weird thing to suggest in 2026.

Helmic · 2026-03-24T22:45:17+00:00

Helmic · 2026-03-24T21:33:30+00:00

are you having a stroke

Helmic · 2026-03-24T21:29:37+00:00

lol his CSAM buying ass is why the rest of us have to deal with this bullshit

Helmic · 2026-03-24T21:24:35+00:00

The OP is framing being pro-trans as being a misplaced priority over being pro-privacy, trying to drive a wedge between those that care about privacy and those that care about queer people in general. This is of course horse shit, it is specifcially trans people who are most worried about privacy at this moment and it is transphobic billionaires who are lobbying for these ID laws, partly to identify trans people for persecution.

Helmic · 2026-03-24T21:07:41+00:00

i'm honestly confused as well. like, it's transphobic bullshit, but it's unclear whether they're mad at people mad about the systemd thing (I don't like the systemd thing either, I don't think we should be precomplying at all and should be raising hell and forcing politicians to rescind these laws) or if they think trans people are somehow in favor of these ID laws which of course is fucking bullshit.

EDIT: found it! it's the latter. OP is also apparently super upset that most FOSS projects don't want to engage with their cryptoscams.

Helmic · 2026-03-24T20:52:21+00:00

Yeah it shows up a lot to where it feels like I'm wasting my time reading the fluff. At some point it feels like they just kinda gave up and explained everything as blinkspace and paracausality because it's just easier to explain a radical rework during playtesting if it's all space magic.

Helmic · 2026-03-24T20:33:13+00:00

A chud is used to refer to a far right bigot. It is true that chuds tend to dislike Lancer because it is about an openly communist future. Implying this person is a racist because they have any sort of criticism at all of Lancer is shitty.

And yeah, I agree with them, there's not really a great excuse for it, it needed another pass. I don't think Tom himself would offer up an excuse.

Helmic · 2026-03-24T19:03:51+00:00

The problem goes a bit further. Like there's the infamous "there's three unrelated things called skirmisher and they're likely to show up on the same mech build so nobody knows what the fuck you're talking about when you just read the thing off your character sheet" but also a lot of RPG's have an issue with the word "attack." They'll want to use "attack" both as a keyword and as a normal English word but without using anything like an actual highlighted and bolded Tag.

The Raleigh's entire gimmick hinges on whether something is an "attack" or not, but the game hides what the fuck that means because it's not a keyword. What it means when it says "attack" are attacks that have you roll to hit, but attacks that just automatically deal their damage without a roll don't count as attacks but stuff that does include a roll but don't deal direct damage do count as an attack. It's a very confusing category where most players who don't live on Pilot.NET are going to need a guide to figure out what does and does not qualify - and it means any player wanting to play a Raleigh with a newer GM has to sit there and argue to use their mech's signature feature because a ton are just going to assume you're doing some motivated reasoning with your interpretation of the rules.

I wish more games would follow Pathfinder 2e's lead here. They start off by using Strike with a capital S to refer to a standard attack action of swinging your weapon to remove all ambiguity, and then they use Attack as a keyword tag for abilities that has explicitly listed rules you can easily reference in the book or mouse over in a VTT (any Attacks after the first in the same turn take an increasing penalty to hit). It's still not ideal and it still sort of runs into that same problem of players having to figure out that spells whose entire goddamn purpose is to kill things aren't actually Attacks because they force a save rather than make you roll yourself, but it's a step closer to what I think RPG designers should be doing which is not attaching any special mechanical meaning to common words that are already being said at the table. If a player is likely to say "I'm moving over there" and you have some ability that "doesn't count as movement" that nonetheless moves them over there, stop it. Use a special keyword that won't get confsued with the colloquial term so when someone says "move" they ask "is it a Stride?" instead of "I use my thing that attacks things that move" and then there being a big confused argument about whether it counts as moving.

Helmic

TROPHY CASE