So it's the perfect sleeper PC that can be procured at work without anyone raising eyebrows because it's not in-your-face gamer aesthetic

Care to ELI5 for us casuals who did not catch and are missing the obvious?

Now that you say it like that, why do purely singleplayer games need internet connectivity at all beside DRM and shovong DLCs down peoples throats

If you had real shitty internet back in the day (read 56k modem) and you liked to play russian roulette you would dump satellite traffic with a skystar2 DVB-S card. You never knew what you'd get realistically, found some true gems underneath mountains of coal in the day of (still) unfiltered internet.

Yep, used Skygrabber, you could filter out files depending on extensions, filenames etc and could narrow out what you wanted. Still had no real way of knowing what you'd end up with as you were effectively just passively listening on the satellite traffic. It was wild as you could fill out a 40 gig drive overnight without issues in the era where people were downloading a MP3 album for hours.

Just to add a perspective from the other side of the fence, I have a gaming laptop running Windows 11 (yes I know) where this (or a very similar) issue has been plaguing Ryzen users for at least a year and a half. The issue is that TPM per se is not causing issues if turned on, but if BitLocker encryption is on it will cause occasional audio stutters and intermittent complete system halts. The only thing that reliably helps is completely turning off Bitlocker, the TPM chip can stay on and is of course needed for W11. OEMs and AMD have been digging their heads in the sand like ostritches and they have released the odd fix that does nothing to fix the underlying issue. I can't see MS doing anything to reverse course on requirements and am getting a bit fed up with their BS lately, browsing what distro might suit me best and might pull the trigger and finally switch...

Ubisoft won't own my money too!

This one's hilarious, but that one's not gonna work for long as they will axe almost all non-government approved VPNs

I'a bit lazy so I just use precompiled apk's from some good soul from the internet and avoid the hassle alltogether. I roll with a release until something breaks, whick can go for quite some time and then manually just install the new build, works flawlessly. Here's the source I use

Maybe yt-dlp might be for the job?
Just a few days ago I downloaded some videos from Vimeo without issues which required sign in to even view

KDE plasma. Coming from 30 years of running exclusively windows it's just the most comfortable and easy for me to use (way more than Gnome). Easily configurable, works. Can't ask for more.

Who in their right mind celebrates kills on humans, in the end only regular people get harmed in any conflict, never the instigators from both sides

Just a few days ago I pulled an old Sony's NWZ player as they still have superior audio quality compared to phones. I had to throw it away after 10+ years as the battery died.

You may hit the nail on the head, once you get the broom you just breeze past everyhring. The forbidden forest may be the most dense content wise on foot, everything after that does feel more sparse as it was designed with the broom in mind. All in all I still enjoyed the game and got my moneys worth out of it, I did pick it up rather cheap on a sale

See people wouldn't need to install Word if the builtin wordpad opened Word documents. They can upsell it to you and use your data

I dont know man, I installed Liftoff as I want a consistent UI throughout iOS and Android and so far it’s great. Roll with whatever works for you 🤷‍♂️

Various stuff, some not best practice per se but here it is (more focused on digital sovereignity than anything else these days):

• Degoogled my android phone to the greatest degree without breaking essential stuff. Noticed better battery life so a unintended win
• moved off from Outlook to paid hosted email in my country. Cheap, reliable and have full control over it. Also in case of any issues way easier to get support
• Cancelled M365 subscription as I don't use office and was using it purely for cheap OneDrive backup for family
• Moved all my files for me and my family off of OneDrive to my Synology NAS. Ended up using more of its functionality, happy with the purchase. Doing the occasional backup to the external drive just in case
• Ditched proprietary authentication apps in favor of Keepassxc. TOTP codes on any synced device so if I lose my mobile phone I don't get locked out of anything. Local only was mandatory
• For work stuff I use ente auth, separating work and private MFA
• Replaced windows on all my machines with linux. Its become more user friendly in recent years and does not get in my way.
• Replaced all US service providers with EU ones where possible, if any service gets cut off for EU I won't lose access to anything important, never know with Trump these days...

Right off the bat it sit right, thank you

Those two are really the only good use cases today for facebook. Insane how Marketplace pretty much overnight almost killed local listing sites. Events I don't see good alternatives, don't have much hopes for that one, time will show

In the same boat, I miss it still, other ones have a worse UI for me and hate the ad slots in the app although I have DNS ad blocking but its still annoying. Do update me if you find a good replacement as we're looking for the same thing