I think I have TTW on Epic, but I’ve tried Borderlands 2 and Destiny 2 and didn’t like them. Do you think I should still give it a go?

No, it’s Borderlands but with a Dungeons and Dragons/fantasy magic theme and slightly more over the top scaling than normal Borderlands. It was a COVID-era project that was a nice thing to have between Borderlands but Borderlands 3/4 are better Borderlands experiences for the time spent.

(I only use Linux so everything here runs on Linux via Proton)

Darktide is the current iteration of that game’s line, it’s in the Warhammer 40k universe (so Psyker instead of Wizard kind of theme).

It has a lot of flashy combat and depth to the combat systems. There’s a thing that looks like Jabba the Hut, leaves slime trails and has a breath weapon (spoilers, it’s slime)… it’s kind of like a Dragon.

However, while it works on the Steam Deck it isn’t a great experience and has a large install… but it is very hard to beat gameplay-wise.

Similarly, Helldivers 2 is an over the top Startship Troopers-esq PvE game. There’s no class mechanic, there’s a large amount of possible weapons and abilities (‘spells’, but artillery and air strikes) and a limited number of slots to put them in, so you work with your team to bring enough tools to handle everything. It is a bit better on the steam deck (played with keyboard/mouse on a TV @ 720p).

Risk of Rain 2 may be another one. It’s class based, co-op action roguelike. Each class has a defined set of abilities and acquiring loot is largely random has a series of mechanics to tame randomness and let you guide your build. The power scaling can get out of control over the course of a run and is very satisfying to pull off.

At core you’re racing against a clock that incrementally scales the hp/damage of everything while navigating around stages to open cheses and do various PoI mechanics in order to acquire loot. There is literally magic in the later expansions.

Note about expansions. Only the hosts needs to buy the expansions in order to unlock the in-game mechanics. The expansions also include extra characters and characters that you can unlock, only people who have purchased the expansion can select the new heroes.

The game has a cell shaded vibe that is very good on system resources and plays it well on the deck.

There’s a Risk of Rain Returns, a remake of Risk of Rain 1, which is a 2d pixel art side-scroller which has the same system of loot scaling mechanics but in 2D… it is an excellent game as well and it is ALSO multiplayer. Being 2d pixel art, it runs on basically anything. This game is mechanically more difficulty and unforgiving so only get into it if you really love the RoR2 gameplay systems and/or want a challenge.

And, as an oddball idea, look at Magicka 2. It’s a co-op game, but friendly fire is on because you can combine your spells in neat ways. The way you cast spells is very fun to learn but can require a lot of inputs so it may be harder to do on controller/Steam Deck.

It’s a less serious game, with humorous storyline. It takes a bit to learn the magic system but it’s worth it.

I’m sure OPs RTX 3060 will have a tolerable effect on the school children and the rainforest.

It depends on how complex you want to make it.

The simplest way would be to use a GUI tool like LM Studio, it has the benefit of selecting the model quants that are likely to work on your hardware and having sane defaults for the various parameters that you can work from.

Typically you’ll want to increase the context window, the default is good for short one-off questions but if you’re going to do RAG or coding tasks you will need a much larger context window. You will typically find this through trial and error, increasing until you hit memory limits or notice a large slowdown on tokens/second.

You can also have the model respond to an OpenAI-like API interface on a designated port/interface if you want to run non-chat tools through the same model.

Then, depending on the task that you’re trying to solve, you may want to find an MCP server built for that task which can provide the ability for the AI to interact with tools in a way that’s more controlled (giving an AI raw terminal access on a user’s machine is typically a bad idea).

If you need something more flexible that you can incorporate into scripts and automation, llama.cpp has been popular for a while. Like Linux distros, everyone is going to have an opinion on the best and whatever you decide on will be the wrong choice. There’s also Ollama and vLLM if you want to run a datacenter.

Model-wise it completely depends on the task. Do you need a multi-modal model that supports vision, is it going to be coding, is it trained to use tools/MCP servers, does it use reasoning, etc. The Qwen models are open weight and available in many different quants. The version 3.5 models run well on consumer hardware and can use vision, reasoning and tools.

I’m running it through Llama.cpp but it will likely be available via LM Studio as well.

The beatings cyberattacks will continue until morale security improves

Think of Louisiana before Katrina. Those systems of pumps and dykes are expensive and had been neglected… which was fine right up until they were severely tested by Katrina.

Our orange city counselman stopped funding repairs and inspections on the dykes and pumps many years ago (when he destroyed CISA). They’ve been deteriorating from neglect ever since.

A large hurricane is going to hit at 14:00 UTC

(In 10 minutes)

It’ll almost certainly be handled quietly and nobody will know but system admins, but this could be a bigger thing than usual.

0118 999 881 999 119 725 3

We’re YOUR emergency services

To add to this, it uses a shim vulkan layer to create a fake X11 window for the overlay to be drawn onto and sent inputs and then it translates that into Wayland.

It’s a neat hack.

AI is good at RAG tasks. When you’re asking it questions about text that is in the context window, the hallucination rate is significantly lower.

It can fill that gap between documentation and implementation that isn’t always obvious to someone who is new and answer question that they may not be able to form into a search string. The kind of simple questions that, in some Linux communities, would invite assholes (like ‘how do you set permissions’ or ‘I want to add my user to a group’) to tell them to RTFM. Now TFM can answer their questions directly.

There was a GTA6.exe that appeared on the torrent sites around the time of the first gameplay video leaks, I’m sure it got a few people.

I’m going out on a limb here, but I don’t think the kind of person who contributes to FOSS projects get into it for the fame and attention.

zswap

As an aside, I just read that zswap is getting a pretty big performance increase: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Better-Zswap-Performance

I was looking into upgrading storage and ended up opting to buy 20TB in HDDs for my NAS.

I have to shuffle Steam games around but at 10Gb, it goes pretty fast (and you can run most games directly off the NAS) and the array can survive if a drive fails (ZFS).

You need the extra hardware to run the NAS but HDDs are a significantly cheaper option and you don’t need SSD speeds for most things.

CachyOS

Arch

and medium sized ones

The sneaky ‘after’, implying some sort of causation. Clickbait headline, nothing article.

Next up:

“First user reports of RTX 5090 with melted connector after Dolly Parton dies.”

That’s an odd issue.

Holding W shouldn’t prevent the Esc key from being sent. It makes it sound like something happening in the hardware.

Are you using any gaming mice/keyboard that may have a macro enabled? For example, if you wanted to run forward for a long time and the game doesn’t support autorun you could have a macro that held W which could be toggled on and off through a keyboard/mouse key.

I wouldn’t worry about it too much since you were able to resolve it by rebooting. If it’s something happening constantly then it would be worth troubleshooting, but generally you are wasting your time trying to find out what happened during a one-off issue.

If it were happpening to me, I’d wait for the issue to occur again and then SSH into the machine from elsewhere and run evtest, select the suspect keyboard, and see if it is emitting scancodes.

This will tell you if the problem is the hardware or something in the system. Seeing scancodes that are showing the W key would mean that the hardware is sending the keys, not seeing scancodes either means that the problem is your system OR that there is another device sending the scancodes (the other device will show up in evtest as well).

Copying them this way isn’t officially supported, but moving them via Steam can be annoying if you have a lot of updates waiting (it won’t move a game unless it is updated for some reason).

e: I was wrong, user below is correct

This is because, while EasyAntiCheat was installed previously, it wasn’t enforcing. So Linux clients could run because EAC wasn’t kicking anybody.

In Early Access, EAC will be enforcing because it is one of the systems they want to test at scale.

As it stands now WARDOGS plans on adding EAC Linux support but it isn’t ready for the playtest. So once EAC is enabled, without a valid Linux client, it will kick Linux users.

This is just more of a ‘This is currently Beta/Early Access’ thing than a ‘WARDOGS hates Linux’ thing.