Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form. Every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial, in order to attempt to escape, by simulation of death, its real agony. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Thus with the American presidents: the Kennedys are murdered because they still have a political dimension. Others - Johnson, Nixon, Ford - only had a right to puppet attempts, to simulated murders. But they nevertheless needed that aura of an artficial menace to conceal that they were nothing other than mannequins of power. In olden days the king (also the god) had to die - that was his strength. Today he does his miserable utmost to pretend to die, so as to preserve the blessing of power. But even this is gone.
ChaosMaterialist
Gooning 
Doesn't matter how many debates I try!
the anarchist dude who will do anything people decide on but really just wants to talk about underground metal while feeding the hungry
Or played a Harkonnen in Dune.
Didn't know this was an actual mindset in the industry, god damn.
capitalists aren't seeking out competitive markets, they're seeking out monopoly markets
The glaring hole in Thiel's thinking is imagining the dialectical opposite. If you become a monopoly, it also means you monopolize the attacks against you. Consider SEO; as Google grew in search marketshare, so too did SEO optimize towards Google search, which itself waters down Google's search and erodes their monopoly dominance. Microsoft Windows is another case study in how monopolization causes attack monopolization.
"That pill you took was part of a Democratic Primary program. It's designed to suss out your political position so we can pinpoint you within the voter Matrix."
"What does that mean?"
"It means, buckle your seatbelt, Liberal. Because Biden is going bye-bye."
Shounen Fans 
Yuri Fans
All revved up with no place to go
Fallout is an interesting case of tripping into a material analysis despite itself.
I think part of the reason modern Fallout games don't resonate is because of a shift in focus in Fallout 2.
☢️ Disclaimer ☢️ I'm about to critique Fallout and all of its runty children, but it comes from a deep place of love. Proceed cautiously...
The greatness of the original Fallout was it's relentless juxtaposition. Wandering around its world deeply reminded me of Percy Shelly's poem Ozymandius. The incredibly kitszch pre-war civilization was muted because you would only catch glimpses and fragments in the ruins surrounded by the Wasteland. You could say the old world haunted the world and people. The bleakness of the setting gave a sympathy to even the "bad" guys, especially when many player choices revolved around the best of bad options and unintended side-effects. The people living in that world embodied a critique of the entire ideology that created the blasted-out world. The game embodied a ghost story.
Where its own analysis falls over is a shift away from Ozymandius and into more familiar tropes typical of post-apocalyptic/fall-of-civilization fiction. The focus shifted away from the juxtaposition and towards an analysis of the people that lived in those ruins. We no longer see the games as a critique of Hubris, but a critique of their world, and (increasingly) a critique of the post-war inhabitants. The pre-war civilization went from haunting to set dressing. It's easy to point to Bethesda for this phenomenon, but (if we're being really honest with ourselves) the problem started in Fallout 2. The game became a franchise, and its own lore began to eclipse the general irony. In the original Fallout the pre-war culture was as alien to the world's inhabitants as it was to ours. Part of what made it work was the very little that was revealed in the bombed-out ruins. Now we have a fairly liberal (yes, even in FO2 and FNV) takes on the human condition, while the player has an encyclopedic knowledge of the pre-war world.
In a very real sense, where does the franchise go from here? Truthfully, nearly all post-apocalypse/fall-of-civilization fiction falls into this trap. Zombie fiction suffers from this phenomenon the most. In Fallout's case, returning to the haunted nature of the old world might breathe new life. It lends itself to a mysticism and reverence by the people living among the ruins.
I recommend anything Debian-based for the same reason I chose Debian first: If you have a problem, there will be somebody else that did as well and likely fixed it. If you are new, I would suggest Linux Mint or Ubuntu. Another plus is that non-free software is available for these distributions, like Zoom and Discord.
Gaming on Linux is an active area of development, almost single-handedly done by Valve, so this can be hit-or-miss. In general AMD graphics cards fare better with drivers, while nVidia has almost comically piss-poor "official" drivers.