We’re talking about TV shows and movies.

There’s normally one unrealistic conceit, eg aliens existing, that the audience believes. But then, the regular conceits like “The scientists studying the aliens speak like a bunch of robots and act like total idiots” become harder to believe.

I’ve heard this said, can you verify for me where the lawyer stands?

If his position is truly still behind his table, what if the witness/jurors are hard of hearing?

There’s a trillion ones around unrealism, so I may as well pick something that would be more enjoyable if fixed.

Professional chatter. Let’s say a team of 30 scientists have been trying to communicate with a dimensional portal for 5 years. They wouldn’t be using speech like “Identity verified. Doctor Faris, you are clear to approach the anomaly.” Often, they’d have extremely abbreviated lingo for everything they need to express that happens on a daily basis, and otherwise are chatting about other stuff.

“Ok, approach endorsed. Bob wasn’t so chatty yesterday from what I heard, we’ll just aim for 2 logic points for this cycle.”
“Ryan was suggesting we spread the cycles. Bob has to sleep sometime.”
“Yeah, 90% of us would rather listen to Ryan than Mick, but Mick signs the checks.”

So the only actual order comes from some obscure phrase like “Approach endorsed”, which they may only say verbatim for safety reasons. The rest is just workplace banter about how best to accomplish their task, none of it being essential. EDIT: And, to make clear, in the above quote, Bob is the portal/anomaly.

One plot point I liked of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. The Tolmekians are growing a Warrior. Enemies are on the way. Their princess orders them to unleash the Warrior. Her second says it’s not ready. She ignores him, it’s sent out. It’s not ready, and melts almost immediately.

The version of Lutris I installed used a file opening GUI to select the exact EXE to run. I was using simple unzipped folders, not installers.

Even if the fault of the game in question ends up being simple:

• It’s not fun to correct that fault on every single game I run
• It could be a slightly different fault on every single game

I am fine with one-time setup configuration for my OS to get preferences right, devices working, and settle myself to my steady workflow. I am not okay with doing laborious one-time setup for every single game I ever try.

I get that, and I like it. When it works. (Hitman 3, which I know works under certain distros/Linux hardware, did not load levels for me on Linux Mint 22) Even on Bazzite, Helldivers 2 needed command line args to avoid a white border around the game in fullscreen.

Plus, much as I like Steam, I like competition, and I buy games off of other stores pretty often. Some of those stores just give you a zip file to download in your web browser.

I knew I had whole folders of indie games that are just a folder with an executable, so I trialed those with Lutris. It needed a huge setup form just to run one of them, and when I finished, it wouldn’t run and gave no errors.

Having that as my experience for, as I said, a whole folder of games, wasn’t really in my interest. It takes too long for the community to say “Hey, I got Assassin’s Creed running! Just use Proton 8.13 beta, and add these 8 command line options”

It’s not just learning curve. It’s feature set, compatibility, and user experience.

Certain distros’ window managers may work just the way you like, or they might not and it may not be so simple to change it. The preferences menu on some of them is tiny.

That’s before getting into just how perfectly it will work on your hardware. I tried Mint 21 first on my machine, and even though my hardware is ancient, it didn’t support the wi-fi card at all. That stuff is kernel level. I even looked up version numbers and it was supposed to work.

(Mint 22 worked but that’s ridiculously late to finally start supporting this hardware. And, it could not run games as well as Steam Deck)

In the last month, I made a genuine effort to switch to Linux Mint, then Bazzite, as my daily driver. Mint could not run Hitman 3 for unexplained reasons. Bazzite frequently got graphical corruption issues when returning from sleep. Neither could run niche indie games and gave no error codes.

I knew I’d be doing some tweaking to get Linux working how I wanted, but it was missing configuration as well as being unreliable by default. I like the principle of using a non-MS OS, but I need it to work.

Not for the Dead by Daylight survivors, who path like mad parkour masters!

Of course, it could be because they’ve already died hundreds of times.

I’m sometimes annoyed at the trend of celebrating a dev when a game turns out well, but blaming the publisher each time it’s bad. It’s quite often a two way street…

HR departments aren’t that lazy…

Just edited to include my following experiences with Bazzite. It’s possible this will be the end of the road for me. I collected some of my annoyances/critiques of each distro in a notebook. I am guessing many of them will be sorted into “Yeah, we’re used to fiddling” but I still feel at least several of them would just qualify as poor QA and bad UI decisions.

I made my move just recently. It was rocky, I ran into some issues and some of them were my fault.

I’m willing to put up with it currently not because Linux has gotten markedly better, but Windows has decided (yes, decided) to become significantly worse. Microsoft could have done nothing and I would have stayed a loyal, koolaid-drinking consumer of theirs.

From what I’ve seen, the closest thing is Bazzite. Steam OS, at least its current iteration, is really made for the Steam Deck, and I think Valve lost interest in keeping its own distribution.

My main stuff is the forced-AI. I’ve watched the Start menu, the core of the computer, get slower and slower and just stop working because of infinite efforts to over-complicate it. Then there was that guy who tries to put out a simplified version of Windows, who found that removing the new Recall feature caused Explorer to crash - indicating the core of the operating system UI is now baked around that existing.

I just did my install of Linux Mint. I have a number of complaints that are really the fault of Microsoft, other things tripping me up that are just about me learning differences; BUT I still find there’s some things Linux could take as lessons.

One of them is keyboard shortcuts. I learned Windows shortcuts because they followed intuitive logic, like what role the “Tab” key has and what the Shift key is doing to adjust its action. Linux apps often make up their own logic around this, which even if it made sense internally, doesn’t work with apps like Firefox which are still using Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs, possibly to keep Windows parity. Then, since Linux is supposed to be built to customize, if I try changing the terminal to switch tabs using Ctrl+Tab…it just doesn’t let you; pretends you didn’t press anything. Stock boot of Linux Mint 22.

You’re right that they shouldn’t be changing just for aping the dominating competitor; that’s how we unfortunately got Chromium supremacy. I still think there’s gentle UX considerations they could handle more often though. Basically the type of thing decided in board rooms that engineers would lose interest in.

Oh yeah, I definitely plan to install Heroic and Lutris, which simplified a lot of things. I’m trying to figure out which will be fastest if I happen to have a lot of indie, DRM-free games that follow the format of:

• Download zip file
• Unzip to folder
• Run exe in folder

Ideally a launcher could handle some of that relatively quickly for me without too much manual configuration. On Windows, it’s just unzip and then double-click, which of course will now change a little bit.

A VM is an interesting option - I vaguely recall interacting with very slow VMs a while back but supposedly they’ve gotten better. I don’t know if they’ve ever reached suitable gaming performance, or video editing performance though.

I wasn’t dedicated to Mint, but every thread on distro has had its arguments (eg “Whoa, no, I would NOT recommend xxx to a newbie” “yyy isn’t mature”), so it’s difficult to decide who to trust given the goal of Linux.

I had a bit of experience using Steam OS daily when a Deck was my only computer. I’ve heard of Bazzite, but wasn’t quite sure it was mature enough.

Is there any organization out there that could actually promote an “Acceptable ad standard”? Like, maybe even something within web specs?

A long time ago, ads were slightly irritating, rarely useful, and considered a necessary evil for gently monetizing the web. We’ve had this slow evolution to draconian tracking nightmares that are genuinely dangerous and often written by malicious untraceable actors. I almost feel like we could pressure back towards decent ads if there was some standard by which they only received basic info about the user, showed basic info about a product, didn’t pollute the experience or ruin accessibility, and were registered to businesses by physical address with legal accountability for things like false advertising.

That is…perhaps a vain hope though. It’s just hard to picture futures where all websites run off of donations or subscriptions, because advertising is fucking hell now.