Greybeard here.

I worked for a company with a wild mix of DOS, Win 3.1, and Win 3.11. Then we got new PCs, some ethernet hubs and switches (instead of the damn coax cable with terminators) and started to move to Win95.

Win 95 was a beast. It came in a bunch of floppies. It took ages to install, and you'd find after one hour that the last floppy was corrupt. Also, on our cheap hardware (Siemens-Nixdorf Pentium PCs) sometimes the sound card or the ethernet card would go missing. Nothing short of a reinstall would solve it. Temporarily, of course.

The Win 98 came along. All our problems were solved. It was a 32 floppy install job, if memory serves. No, no CDs on our company. Still, it crashed a lot, and Microsoft Office had a tendency to simply destroy 100+ page documents when it was not crashing.

At home I used Windows, because how else am I going to play games, right? But I kept experimenting with Linux, and liked what I saw. There were many pieces missing (no USB for a very loooong time, for instance), but what was there was rock solid compared to Windows. And you could COMPILE YOUR OWN DAMN KERNEL, fer chrissake! How powerful was that?

Eventually, distros started to emerge that made some pain points go away. I remember Corel Linux, Caldera Linux, Mandrake, RedHat, etc. I settled with Debian because 'apt-get dis-upgrade', of course. Then Ubuntu came along and made Linux more pretty and usable for simple folk. They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.

I got ever more tired of Windows nuking my boot sector, the viruses (virii?), the hunting around for drivers, the having to throw away good peripherals because windows thought were too old to support.

I made a choice and dropped Windows. I missed a lot of the gaming scene until Wine and Steam caught up with the state of the art. In the mean time I made use of emulators and had a good time playing console and arcade games.

Oh I was teased about it. Fellow IT workers (proper MSCE type people) would give me a hard time because "Linux has no future", "Unix is dying". I guess the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do.

All I know about British politics I learned from "Yes, Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister", so I know for sure nothing will change.

I had erased that information from my memory. Also it took a long time for Linux to gain USB support, then a long time to get WIFI (also because of the cheap vendors that used windows drivers to do the heavy lifting). Yeah, it was a very uphill struggle, with Microsoft actively pushing against Linux (remember the 'Linux is a virus' narrative?) I'm amazed we made it this far.

You're an inspiration to us all. Well done, sir!

I on the other hand may have crossed the threshold where I have more games than time to live. I'd better get a move on.

It started with me manually downloading a mod and shoving the files into the Steam game directly.

Then I installed the windows version of Nexus Mods Manager using Wine and pointed it to the Skyrim in Linux Steam that runs as a Flatpak.

Yes, it is a dumb hack. But it works.

I understand that.

I upvote insightful, educational or newsworthy content and downvote clickbait. Especially YouTube clickbait.

It's not the cost. I've not pirated anything since Steam and GOG came along. It's just that games nowadays want you to be online all the time, force you to open accounts you don't want, try to sell you in game items (that's a brilliant idea to get money from certain types of people, a bit like religion, do congratulations to whoever came up with that).

I want games to be single player playable, offline, start to finish. I'll buy expansion packs if the game is worth it. It's it too much to ask?

Way back in the late XX century.

Oh look, Netscape Navigator is back.

They used to say that every product evolves until it can send mail. In that sense, this is now a mature product.

Of course nowadays no product is finished without built-in LLM functionality, so I'll wait for that

Some games you sometimes load just to hang around. This is one of those. Lovely game.

I'd add Valley and Sable to this group.

Thank you, I'll check it out.

Still playing Skyrim. Can't seem to put it down.

I've modded it a bit and started over. I'm picking up more hidden details that I missed the first time, and I'm abusing some game mechanics to be all powerful. Muhahah!