sudotstar

Yes

It's not like Nova Launcher, but I've been really enjoying Kvaesitso. It does support icon transformations (better than Nova does IMO) but provides a very different interface that's focused on search.

We haven't seen what actual game progression will look like within the expansion, but I feel like if progression ends up looking similar to vanilla with the vast majority of resources going towards science production, the quality mechanic will not even be a large part of the game if science itself has no benefits from increased quality, so I hope that there's more news to come on how quality will impact progression. It feels like this information about this was intentionally left out in today's update, likely to allow diving in deeper in future updates.

I think most "casual" progression around building more "factory parts" in vanilla usually looks like a single assembler slowly churning out items to fill up a single chest (or a few slots within a single chest), and just letting that run while focusing on other active tasks. I think quality will help make that specific part of progression a little more interesting, with needing to recycle lower-quality products back into the manufacturing chain, and/or tiering your outputs and prioritizing putting the best machines in certain areas while saving the mid-tier ones for other use cases. The randomness factor is concerning on the surface, but at least based on the numbers presented, it looks like the ability to produce items of a specific quality is very much intended to be a consistent factor, and not something akin to like hunting for rare drops in an RPG that tend to be tedious.

"Nerfing" Speed Modules by cutting their quality seems a bit reactive to the traditional/overused "assembler w/ Prod3 modules surrounded by beacons with Speed3 modules" setup, and I'm not sure if this is intended to shake that up so that there isn't a single "right answer" for every type of product being manufactured, but given that current Factorio is what a factory with all "worst" quality manufacturing would look like, this feels more like unlocking new ways to grow the factory that aren't just scaling out the same patterns from before, so I think this might be okay.

Overall I'm pretty excited about this within the context of the expansion. I think this is a good way of producing a different and fresh new experience to building the factory, while not invalidating the way Factorio has worked before, and I expect that future FFFs will be showing more about progression within the expansion and other new mechanics that play off of quality to provide similarly different experiences from the base game.

The reality is that the number of games, even AAA ones, that are releasing at that high a "minimum" performance requirement is incredibly small compared to other games that do release with more modest system requirements. Games that are "just good enough" graphically to go along with their gameplay tend to be the norm, I think, with the few games that really go for pushing visual fidelity being respectable in their own right but not frequent enough to fret about. What will matter the most is what games you want to play and what their requirements are, and that's basically impossible to project out 1, 3, 5 years out or however long you expect the hardware to last.

For what it's worth, I have a Steam Deck and spend a lot of time playing on it, but pretty much every "AAA, big budget => big graphics" game I want to play I'd exclusively do so on my gaming desktop (or remote play on Deck if I want to play it there at all), while sticking to 2D and lighter 3D games on the portable device directly. This is mostly due to what kinds of games I enjoy playing on what form factor, as for example my decision on what to play docked vs portable on the Switch is much the same way, and for about a year after buying the Deck, my desktop hardware was so out of date it was getting generally worse performance than the Deck yet I'd still use the desktop for "spectacle" games, but the necessary graphical quality to go along with that tends to correlate well.

The reason this is known is because this supposed device is using the same AMD APU used in the Steam Deck. It's unlikely that a standalone controller would have a dedicated APU like that without becoming a full-on portable gaming device of its own.

IMO this isn't a real "solution" to the problem here, but this article states Android 14 also allows Google to manage device CAs remotely and push updates via Google Play, and goes into detail about how that mechanism is poorly documented publicly and is basically only an option for Google themselves, not any third party device administrators.

Google can easily claim that all security concerns are handled by their own management while continuing to deny access to all third parties to actually handle that responsibility themselves if desired.

I think this game definitely has the hardest shinespark "puzzles", but the actual execution of shinespark is much easier than in previous games which balances it out. Super Metroid had items where figuring out what shinespark maneuver to do was easy, but actually executing it was difficult, while Zero Mission and Fusion had easier-to-pull-off shinesparks with harder puzzles.

With Dread, the challenge is almost entirely in figuring out what to do, once you know exactly where/when to shinespark the actual execution is very intuitive and feels amazing when you land a complex sequence of shinesparks/speed booster runs/wall jumps.

For me it's always been after I tried to resize a partition.

I recommend using whatever is the "least hands-on" option for your boot drive, a.k.a your distro default (ext4 for Debian). In my admittedly incompetent experience, the most likely cause for filesystem corruption is trying to mess with things, like resizing partitions. If you use your distro installer to set up your boot drive and then don't mess with it, I think you'll be fine with whatever the default is. You should still take backups through whatever medium(s) and format(s) make sense for your use case, as random mishaps are still a thing no matter what filesystem you use.

Are you planning on dualbooting Windows for games? I use https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs to mount a shared BTRFS drive that contains my Proton-based Steam library in case I need to run one of those games on Windows for whatever reason. I've personally experienced BTRFS corruption a few times due to the aforementioned incompetence, but I try to avoid keeping anything important on my games drive to limit the fallout when that does occur. Additionally if you're looking to keep non-game content on the storage drive (likely if you're doing 3D modeling work) this may not be as safe.

I think moving the folder under ~/.local before splitting the cache folders out is a bad idea. Many people will have specific backup or sync solutions in place that want to include config, recreate data, and exclude cache, so the XDG spec has separate locations for them.

Windows's dedicated Saved Gamed folder is within the same user-specific directories that Documents and AppData are in, and would still allow for game saves to be user-specific.

I have played the original, and will be playing the remaster, though not on Switch, I already own the Japanese version on Steam which will be patched with the localization upon release in the West.

It's quite a fun, fast-paced game, as Falcom action RPGs tend to be. Being a PSP title originally, I think the game format works well for shorter, pick-up-and-play sessions, making it ideal on devices like the Switch and Steam Deck. No context or experience with the wider Trails series necessary, all connections to the mainline series are just simple references and the game has a standalone story (unless you're deep in the rabbit hole of lore crack theories).