I live in a small city built out a couple decades ago

It’s probably a fair point to mention that smaller cities and towns have wildly different parking needs than NYC, where the majority of residents don’t own a car. The existence of parking minimums in a place like New York is just bonkers. (Thanks, Robert Moses!)

I still expect plenty of parking to be built after any city repeals parking minimums, it just isn’t an excessive amount, and the city and developers soon start arriving at a natural equilibrium (compared to an inflated floor) of what is actually required, depending on what kind of business or residence it is, where it is located, etc.

The big factor about parking is how much it adds to housing costs. The Government Accountability Office did a report in 2018 that estimated that parking requirements added $50,000.00 to every housing unit sold. Obviously, some parking will probably be needed, but just reducing the amount has the effect of an immediate per-unit cost reduction for a given multi-family project. https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-18-637.pdf

Mint

I see Mint as the more reasonable option that keeps 98% of the advantages of Ubuntu, with less of the crazy. I was a xubuntu user a decade ago, but have been very happy with Mint xfce since I switched.

I just started Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, which I’ve been meaning to read for ages.

Before that I read The Queen’s Thief series, by Megan Whalen Turner, which was fun.

Anti-Cheat is a bitch

Seriously, I don’t know how this one is solvable, to be honest, without major investment and support from the game companies themselves.

performance issues are definitely not universal

Agreed!

Don’t @ me too hard, but I think @luciferofastora has some good points on sound and anti-cheat. They don’t affect me, mostly because I don’t like PVP games that need anti-cheat, but they represent a huge chunk of the market and I do wish they worked better on Linux. I’m fully on Linux for my daily driver and generally have good experiences, I’m not even considering going back to Windows, I just wish things worked better for everyone.

It looks quite usable, to be honest. I would have loved to use it back then.

I’ll have to give that one a try!

Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain. Quite a learning curve, but I loved the different ways you can win (conquest, trade, black ops) and how much you could customize your ships or pick unique races with tolerances for different planets.

Game strategy advice for a 30+ year old game? I love this so much, you guys are awesome.

omg YES. Nothing I have found since then has quite scratched the same itch of flying around with a friend on some random dude’s server. So much fun!

Puppy was going to me my suggestion too, before I read that you’d already used it. Maybe try some of the other versions? If you used a Debian- or Ubuntu-based Puppy, you could try a Slack-based one, or vice-versa. Puppy’s organization is a little confusing, in my opinion, but it does give a user some options. You also might try some of the “puplets” that aren’t official Puppy distros but are part of the Puppy family.

https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/family-tree.html

I’m fine with this, particularly since you can just tick the box and still access them. Linux Mint is such a good gateway for new Linux users, it makes sense to hide unverified flatpaks until they understand the risks. Plenty of people (perhaps myself included) won’t ever need to worry about unverified flatpacks if their needs are simple and they don’t add much beyond the standard software.

Mint

I definitely found Linux Mint the easiest version to switch to, coming from Windows. All the menus and icons were basically where I expected to find them. I couldn’t have cared less about Wayland support, I just wanted to do basic tasks and for my printer to work, and Mint did that out of the box.

Honestly, this is good advice. It’s much better to keep personal computer activity on a personal device, whether that’s on a ThinkPad or anything else.

Martha Wells’ Murderbot series is funny, fast, and breezy. The first one, All Systems Red, is basically novella length, and a good yarn.

I have a soft spot in my heart for Puppy Linux, I had a laptop hard drive fail on me when I was in school and I couldn’t afford a new one. I made it through the last semester booting Puppy Linux from a USB drive. It was no-frills, but it worked.

My life is a little better knowing this fact. 😄

ChatGPT is pretty crap branding too, for the record. They just somehow managed to mainstream it. All the LLMs after it try to have cooler names (Bard, Copilot, etc.) but the kludgy first name is still better known.

Easier said than done sometimes. That’s the advantage of Ubuntu, Mint, etc. — they minimize the number of weird quirks you run into.

Probably my favorite comment on that video:

I live in Japan, one of the biggest car developers in the world, but also a country with possibly the best public transport system out there. I guess a clever dealer never uses his own product…