Some racing recommendations:

Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition

Enthusia

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 (the PS2 version is the best one)

Burnout 3 Takedown AND Revenge, both are stellar

Tokyo Extreme Racer 3 and Drift 2

The single player mode was decent. I like the career structure, it’s something unique compared to most other racing games’ checklists of events.

Driving physics were a minor improvement over Heat, which was already solid on that front (especially compared to the train wrecks of NFS '15 and Payback).

Contrary to most NFS fans, I wish they leaned more into the cartoon/anime aesthetic, something closer to Auto Modellista. I’m guessing EA didn’t want to risk it though, so Unbound’s aesthetic feels a little half-assed as a result.

Car customization is great as expected, Ghost nailed this in NFS '15 and basically copy/pasted the same system into everything since, which I’m fine with.

The multiplayer is live service garbage and I’m very disappointed that all post-launch updates have ignored the single player mode entirely… Or maybe I should be happy that they didn’t incorporate live service garbage into the single player…

Overall, 7.5/10 if you ignore the multiplayer. It’s Ghost’s best game.

Minor update on this: I ended up returning the Samsung G80SD since it was being a finicky piece of shit in other ways and got an HP Omen Transcend 32 instead (I know, HP sucks, but I have nothing but good things to say about my HP Omen 27i so I took the chance). Same exact 3rd gen QD-OLED panel but this time it just works™. 240hz, VRR, all good out of the box.

So my point about the monitor is kind of moot, the G80SD just sucks, Linux is fine.

Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite Wifi7

I tend to avoid Gigabyte, but the only stock of 9800X3Ds available was in motherboard bundles on Newegg, so I ended up with it lol

I also noticed that Bluetooth still isn’t working, so I am still waiting for 100% compatibility.

I game on Linux lol

is it even noticeable beyond 100hz when not gaming

Actually yes, honestly it’s most noticeable when moving your mouse or dragging windows around. It’s insanely smooth.

My old monitor was 165hz and I didn’t expect the jump to be noticeable, but it actually was. It’s definitely well beyond the point of diminishing returns (120 is fine imo), but it’s still a nice upgrade.

For sure, if I was in the market for a laptop, System76, Tuxedo, and (while not exclusively Linux) Framework would be at the top of my list

For general PC hardware though, I’ve always been late to the party. I upgraded to Ryzen 3000 right before 5000 was coming out, so hardware support was already perfect on Linux. That’s basically been my upgrade strategy for the past 10 years, so I’ve personally never really encountered these teething problems before now.

adding in support for end user hardware is an accident and requires extra effort on hardware makers’ part who don’t always rise to the challenge when they don’t believe it’s profitable enough for the effort; in which case, volunteers have to step in to fill the gap.

That’s really the crux of the problem. How can we make companies care and/or better support volunteers to get patches out sooner.

Readable on Voyager as well.

EDIT: Not to say it looks good, but it’s readable.

Nice, waiting paid off. I’m actually interested in picking up the new God of War and Horizon games now.

And here it is setting a Nurburgring lap record back in 2010.

It’s a stunning car.

I also do this with word definitions all the time.

The biggest problem to me was the official Proton reddit account making an official statement agreeing with Andy. Andy blamed this on a “miscommunication” and it has since been deleted, but probably only because of the backlash they were receiving.

Holy shit he’s still arguing with people about this today?

I started using FreshRSS around the same time Reddit killed their API, it has rapidly become one of my favorite self-hosted apps.

Also,

open source software releases I follow

You have just taught me that I can add github release pages to my feed, I love FreshRSS even more now.

Mostly games that don’t fit into an existing category that I don’t feel like creating a dedicated category for. Like I could create a stealth category for Thief and Hitman, but it would only contain those two games. Then there’s games like Transistor, Cloudpunk, Spiritfarer, etc where I just don’t know how I could even categorize them.

I mean, if you’ve already paid for the games in the past, and you’re going totally DRM free anyway… I feel like you’re morally all good to go sailing.

My problem with most Souls-likes is the slow/clunky (for lack of a better word) combat. I’ve bounced off Code Vein, The Surge, and Elden Ring (which was a refund instead of a backlog) over this. I want to try them again with an open mind at some point though, just with adjusted expectations.

Sekiro on the other hand I really liked the combat of, the reason it got backlogged is because I got tired of fighting through all the grunt enemies between deaths to bosses/mini-bosses. I like difficult bosses if I can immediately try again upon death (a la Furi), but it felt like Sekiro was wasting my time in comparison because I had to GET to the boss again for each attempt. The grunts didn’t pose enough of a challenge to be interesting, just enough to slow me down.

I’m not sure if that’s a common thing throughout the game, or if it was just in the areas leading up to the point where I stopped, but I am definitely planning on giving it another shot either way. It’s been a few years since I last played it.

I avoid early access in general, so I’ve only ended up with a handful from game bundles.

Sekiro, Code Vein, The Surge, and Steel Rising.

Honestly the first three are candidates for the “Dropped” category, I’ve started and given up on them before. I want to give them each one more chance at some point.

Very much intentional since I don’t own a headset at the moment. If I ever get one again, I’ll give the category an emoji to push it back towards the top lol