So one thing I've started getting worried about is whether youtube/google will eventually block/delete youtube/google accounts who use adblockers.

I don't really care about my youtube account but I have several gmail accounts and losing those would be awful.

I assume they won't ever go that far, but just the possibility is scary.

So is there an easy way to migrate all your stuff to some other email service and what are some good ones?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

Ignoring unauthorized copying

... Bill Gates said "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

The practice allowed Microsoft to gain some dominance over the Chinese market and only then taking measures against unauthorized copies. In 2008, by means of the Windows update mechanism, a verification program called "Windows Genuine Advantage" (WGA) was downloaded and installed. When WGA detects that the copy of Windows is not genuine, it periodically turns the user's screen black. This behavior angered users and generated complaints in China with a lawyer stating that "Microsoft uses its monopoly to bundle its updates with the validation programs and forces its users to verify the genuineness of their software".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

... the documents identified open-source software, and in particular the Linux operating system, as a major threat to Microsoft's domination of the software industry, and suggested tactics Microsoft could use to disrupt the progress of open-source software.

why not use underscores?

Neovim

NEXON...

Well just look at the youtube sub on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1792um0/let_that_sink_in_before_you_defend_a_billion/

99% of comments are youtube apologists

Hopefully most of those are bot comments & the mods are probably youtube employees

Already saw this a year or two ago, it's a great watch and would highly recommend anyone who hasn't seen it yet does watch it

End of Windows 7

Doesn't it already? At least when it comes to games

yay -Syu

you don't use yay do you

Edit: typing yay without any other argument defaults to yay -Syu so there's no reason to type it out

It wasn’t removed because of the pronouns though. It was removed because the mod description violated their community policies.

There are plenty of mods just like it that the site keeps up. Dozens of mods even remove black characters from games, which is way worse. The difference is, those mods don’t write long rants about how much they hate minorities and liberals in their descriptions.

if that's true then it makes sense

Edit: I just found out about the spider man pride flag removal mod debacle and read the official statement by Nexus Mods: https://www.nexusmods.com/news/14733

In regards to the replacement of Pride flags in this game, or any game, our policy is thus: we are for inclusivity, we are for diversity. If we think someone is uploading a mod on our site with the intent to deliberately be against inclusivity and/or diversity then we will take action against it. The same goes for people attempting to troll other users with mods deliberately to cause a rise. For our part, we will endeavour to do a better job of moderating our website to this ethos ourselves.

We aren't the authority on what users can and cannot mod. Us removing a mod only means it cannot be found at Nexus Mods, nothing more, nothing less. We also note that we are not the only site that has removed this mod from their platform. As a private business, we have a right to choose what content we do and do not want to host on our platform. Respect this right the same way you want respect for your rights.

By Nexus Mods' own words they will take action against anti diversity/inclusivity mods and actively take a stance on what kinds of mods are allowed on Nexus Mods.

So regardless of what the mod descriptions may or may not have said, it seems Nexus Mods would've deleted this pronoun removal mod as well.

These aren't mods I would've bothered using (and I don't even play these games either) but Nexus Mods trying to police what mods players are allowed to use is pretty shit.

The great thing about mods is they only affect the people who choose to get them and gives everyone more choices to change games to what they want, and I don't think anyone should try to force what kinds of mods are allowed or not.

The whole point of modding is that you find something you don't like or think could've been improved in some way, so you change it to your preference.

Google Search is way worse than it used to but still beats DDG by a mile.

I've tried SearX and it was meh, maybe there's some better instance than the one I tried though.

Yandex is good for reverse image search and when the American government makes western search engines block certain search results, but not that useful in general. Also for a period Yandex just kept bombarding me with endless captchas and was completely unusuable

Bing search is just DDG, or well DDG is just Bing.

Baidu search, tbh haven't tried it much, but even for chinese I had better search results on google search so yeah

Just the other day I was looking into how to use a single shared WINE prefix for multiple users since it's not like any 2 users would ever use the same PC at the same time... TIL I was wrong

Unfortunately I don't really have anything helpful to add except it seems like Linux is more or less inherently built to support what you're looking for.

Advance Wars By Web

Advance Wars is an old turn based strategy game, for the GBA (Game Boy Advance), and AWBW is a fan site to play AW online.

I've gotten pretty into it ever since Advance Wars Reboot was announced, and being able to play it in the web browser means I frequently find time to play...

Ironically I don't play the actual AW Remake because in classic nintendo style the multiplayer is extremely lacking, only being able to play with players added to friends list, not being able to upload/download maps except to friends, and extremely limited map sizes for online maps

I used to use Firefox before Chrome, and it was working great. Then at some point Firefox just started sucking and so I ended up switching to Chrome.

Around the same time I stopped using hotmail in favor of gmail as well

Now, probably almost 20 years later I'm back at Firefox

I haven't escaped gmail yet though

Lego games like Lego Starwars has already been mentioned and I will second those (especially the newer ones that have split screen).

Divinity Original Sin is also great.

Honestly most games I can think of have already been mentioned and those who have not seem like they might not be that great of an option since it seems your partner isn't normally into gaming. (RTS in particular might be too hard)

But I will suggest some anyway just in case

Starcraft 2 has free online multiplayer which includes a COOP vs AI mode.

There's also a 2 player campaign adaption of Warcraft 3's normally single player campaign. Although it might only be available for pre-Reforged.

Also I didn't know about it before now, I googled it just in case, but apparently SC2 also has COOP mods for its campaigns.

You mentioned having a Switch so I will recommend Advance Wars Reboot and Wargroove 1 & 2, although there are no COOP campaigns but you can play multiplayer maps.

Besides Advance Wars Reboot Camp on Switch (or the originals for Gameboy, which you could play with emulator), there's also an online fan site called Advance Wars By Web where you can play advance wars in the web browser, although there's no single player.

Wargroove is also on Steam and besides the campaign and regular game itself there are puzzles.

And speaking of Puzzles, card games tend to have Puzzles. I haven't actually played Magic, Yu Gi Oh, etc. so I can't say for sure whether they have any, but there's puzzles in Faeria. (I would've recommended Might and Magic Duel of Champions, it had some great puzzles, but Ubisoft shut that game down many years ago)

well if you're using a mono font (terminal) then there are no such thing as wider characters anyway, so for me that's not a drawback either

To be honest I don't remember the last time I finished a game.

Not counting Rogue-lite games where you replay them over and over like Slay the Spire I think the most "recent" game that I've finished might be Mass Effect 3, which is from 2012...

Oh actually I did finish The Banner Saga 1 a few years ago. It's pretty good except for being somewhat lacking in Quality of Life features. The main selling point are the art style and gameplay-story integration. The tactical combat gameplay is okay but very repetitive, although it got a lot better in BS2 (which I haven't finished) with more varied mission objectives than just "kill every enemy" over and over again.

Skyrim and Xcom 2 are probably in my top 3 or at least top 5 most played games but I have never completed them.

The games I've replayed and finished the most times are Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 1&2 (only completed ME3 2 times).

I've replayed DA:O more than 10 times and I would highly recommend it, although I would recommend getting mods and especially get the increased memory patch so it doesn't crash as often.

From my understanding, at least one other necessary component is dxvk, and that wine is not enough.

dxvk is not necessary but it massively improves game performance on a lot of games, also keep in mind some games will actually not run if you use dxvk, so you sometimes (very rarely) have to use OpenGL instead and the only way I really found to do that was to have a wine prefix without dxvk. (I might've just been stupid though)

for the record only games that I had to use open GL for so far was Starcraft 2's Galaxy Editor (although the actual game itself runs fine with dxvk) and I had some problems with alt tabbing in really old versions of Warcraft 3 (1.27 and older)

Anyway, for a time I used Lutris a bit but now I always run wine through terminal because Lutris was great when it worked but there were seemingly no solutions for when it didn't (while running wine directly has never given me a problem).

And what's great with running wine directly through the terminal is that either it will run and you're good or you'll get some error messages saying that some .dll or whatever is missing (usually .net, visual studio, msvcr100+.dll, mscvcp100+.dll, ms*.dll, etc.) and you just use winetricks and go through the list until you find what you need.

One more thing that took a while for me to learn was that some games (if you're using mods) will need to be run along with WINEDLLOVERRIDES environment variable https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_User's_Guide#WINEDLLOVERRIDES.3DDLL_Overrides

for example when I play Need For Speed Most Wanted 2005 I start it with this command: WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8=n,b" wine speed.exe

another thing is sometimes you want to run games with some arguments, for instance before I got XCOM 2 on Steam and used AML I used to run it with this: wine XCom2.exe -noRedScreens -review

Now here's a pretty big caveat, which is that I use FISH instead of Bash which adds some big QoL improvements (in this case it's mainly about tab completion).

If I actually had to manually type in the commands or spend minutes going through history file every time I would never do it.

Although I suppose you could make an alias for each game.

Oh yeah and always run the games from the same directory as their .exe file is located in, more often than not it won't work if you just do wine /path/to/directory/game.exe instead of cd /path/to/directory && wine game.exe

Edit: some typos, and I just want to note that the && aren't supposed to include the amp; parts

I call bullshit on this post. Since Windows 10 you can just double click a zip file and it opens up like any other directory (even if it isn’t) and shows you the files.

Just the other day I had to tell someone to unzip first before they could patch the rom (they were going to play some romhack on an emulator); I don't know how old they were but clearly there can be scenarios where someone has a zip file and don't know what to do with it or use it.

I don't even know what the rom was or which emulator they were using, because I just told them if they google Rom Patcher JS that's going to work for whatever file type it is, because according to them the problem was that the patcher they had didn't work...

But as it turns out they were trying to use the .zip archive as the patch file, so I then had to explain to them that they need to extract it first.

And afterwards the patcher they had did work so I don't think they even used Rom Patcher JS in the end.