It's a lot easier to design when the only payout are pixels on a screen.

Countries like Belgium and the Netherlands have already banned loot boxes and gacha systems

Did they really? I certainly know that the lootboxes aren't allowed here (rip my TF2 weapon paints), but I still could spend 10 euros on Genshin Impact, even if I had to use MasterCard.

I'm very intrigued. Could you please explain it? Even if you abandoned it, you still learned valuable knowledge.

Our teacher pulled up a video to demonstrate a certain gravity experiment. The whole class got to watch two consecutive, loud, annoying and UNSKIPPABLE 20 second ads.

Needless to say, it totally justified all of the time that I spent switching Invidous instances and updating NewPipe (or Tubular).

Ew wojaks /s

However, the rest of the video is great! Personally, I never really pondered much about my threat model, but I apparently follow the "privacy conscious" caricature to the dot. Not to be all "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear", but I doubt that my local three letter agency would be very interested in my Steam games and schoolwork. If I were to think otherwise, I wouldn't have my stuff in digital form, let alone connect it all to the internet. That's why I don't bother myself about my digital privacy more than that.

neal.fun will never not bring a smile to my face.

wheresyoured.at is a great newsletter written by a great journalist.

Thanks, Steve.

That would make sense if the PCIe or SATA traces would interfere with the GPU.

If it's just YouTube that's an issue, have you searched for vaapi in about:config? That ancient CPU probably can't handle the video with software decoding.

I myself have a Quest 3. I use Air Light VR as a streamer, which only worked after I added something to do with a vrmonitor.sh to the SteamVR command line. Half Life: Alyx runs natively and works just as well, but I've had bad luck with most other games, primarily because Steam Cloud didn't synchronize the Windows saves to my Linux machine. VR even on Windows is already a PITA to set up, and I just don't have the willpower to get it working properly on Linux. This is the only reason why I even keep the waste of space that is my Windows partition.

1. Depends on how much crap you're willing to put up with. It'll all be worth it in the end! (Pro tip: disable secure boot in BIOS)

2. I wrote a whole guide on the two options, but then accidentally deleted my comment. You can either install Linux on another drive, or shrink your NTFS partition and install Linux alongside it. You can always access NTFS from Linux, but not the other way around (by default). If you don't understand what I'm talking about, you should really look it all up. I would personally just backup and wipe, you can always reinstall Windows if you want to.

3. Have you heard of Valve's Steam Deck? It's a handheld gaming device that can play nearly every PC game, and it runs Linux! Valve made gaming on Linux an absolute breeze thanks to Proton. There are some popular games that don't work, either because Tim Sweeney hates Linux (yes, really) or because the anti-cheat won't accept Linux, but I only know about Destiny 2 and Rust that have that problem. Easy Anticheat works just fine, I play Apex Legends and Deep Rock Galactic with no issues!

4. If you have AMD, you don't even have to think about it. Their drivers are part of the Linux kernel. Nvidia is not impossible to use, but you might have some issues. I experience random desktop environment crashes that I can only attribute to their drivers, but it only happens on startup sometimes, which is the least annoying it could be. If you choose a distro that doesn't mind automatically installing non-free software, you probably won't need to think about it either. The open source driver, Nouveau, works fine but performs awfully in games (or at least it did a year ago).

If you just want some clear instructions: backup your files, wipe your disk and install Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. It's easy peasy to use and getting the proprietary graphics drivers is only a few clicks away. Just configure your Steam games to run through Proton and you might not even tell the difference.

It is, but you must be invited to playtest it.