Sorry to hear. I’m not sure what you mean by desync? Do you mean that the remote players lose track of what’s happening on the server? I don’t recall having major issues with that. I think our game is always hosted by the same person, so maybe it could be dependent on host?
Sweet! I have to look more into Fanatical. Thanks!
The Ascent
Oooh, let me second this recommendation! I play this fairly regularly in online co-op with my remote gaming group. It’s an isometric perspective cyberpunk-themed action game with gorgeous, detailed environments.
What exactly do you mean by bargain bin though? I just checked and The Ascent seems to be going for almost $30 at the moment. I think I bought it on sale for quite a bit less, but I still wondered what you meant.
If I could throw out my own recommendation that’s even cheaper than that, I’m always trying to get more people to know about Project Zomboid. Another isometric perspective game, this time it’s an open-world survival game with incredible gameplay depth and also online co-op (or PvP). The graphics look somewhat antiquated, but it more than makes up for it in almost every other area. Some people have played this for hundreds or even thousands of hours, so the return on investment tends to be through the roof.
This is amazing, thank you for writing it!
I don’t know about Lenovo in general, but the two things I like about Thinkpads in particular and why I generally stick to them are their keyboards and the mouse nub / joystick thingy (trackpoint).
Their keyboards The keys on their keyboards are still curved to give you proper tactile feedback of where your fingers are relative to the keys (unlike the abominable flat square keyboards on many/most other manufacturers), and the trackpoint is a great way to use a mouse-like pointer without moving your hands from home position on the keyboard. It looks like some current models are doing away with the trackpoint, which I think is a terrible mistake.
I’m not sure if any manufacturers still have either of these features or both on their current laptops, but they’re absolutely must have features for me.
Also, I usually buy used/refurbished Thinkpads cheap from ebay.
I’m not very knowledgeable about or experienced with Linux yet, but from everything that I’ve read, I have the impression that Arch is the one that’s oriented to power users, not OpenSUSE. I’ve seen OpenSUSE suggested as one of the more beginner-friendly distros, apparently one of the, if not the most stable rolling release distros, and supposedly has one of the best KDE integrations. That’s the one I’m leaning towards adopting as my first Linux distro to really use seriously to replace Windows on desktop (as opposed to just playing around with it). I am also considering the other flavors of OpenSUSE besides Tumbleweed: Slowroll and Leap, in that order.
I agree with your feeling that going with one of the source distros that other distros use as a base is a better bet, and have seen some reviewers say as much. As far as I know, the big 4 in that regard are Arch, Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE. Most everything else is apparently either a derivative of one of those or a niche independent distro.
Oh, wait, now that you mention that it’s bringing back some memories. Yes, I think we have run into issues like that, but it wasn’t so much that we stopped playing because of it. It’s been a little while, but we’ll get back to it eventually. I just love the environments on that game.