You absolutely can start with 4. The worst thing that can happen is that you love it and are slightly disappointed when you try the first 3 games after 4. It could be worse.

Do you need a DE? I use sway and a few kde apps (konsole, okular, gwenview, dolphin) + firefox and thunderbird, I wouldn’t call that a DE…

• Pikmin 3 Deluxe
• Pikmin 4
• Super Smash Bros Ultimate
• Monster Hunter Rise
• Splatoon 3

if you want i3 but on wayland, you could try sway. It is exactly that, you can even reuse most of your i3 config file.

When I used it, I mostly switched between the 9 apps in my favorites/dock with the Meta+digit shortcuts. I rarely used anything besides those 9, and then I just used alt tab. It worked really well, no complaining.

Today it’s mostly the same, but with a tiling window manager and the same numbers: 3 is thunderbird, 5 is file browser for instance. It’s muscle memory at this point, feels great.

Oh. Here in France, even online banks still have web apps.

Anyway the assumption that every user has a smartphone is now very prevalent and it’s going to get harder and harder to not have one, but I really want to go against the trend.

Can’t you set it back to sending you a text with a code to input back? That’s what I’m doing with my bank, my dumbphone is on its way.

Oh God, I remember the monthly format C and reinstall windows xp, followed by the dreaded service packs installation. That was how I fixed problems.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply and the links.

When you spent time tinkering on your linux box, at least you usually learn some piece of knowledge that can be applied later on.

When you tinker and debug something on windows, you usually have little idea of what went wrong and can derive very little from the experience. At least that was the case back when I still used windows, in the XP and vista days.

We might have some silent letters, vestigial remnant of ancient forms, but English has basically no rule for pronunciation. It’s so funny watching English speakers debate among themselves how a name should be pronounced.

• Bear, pear, tear, tear, near.
• Rough, tough, though
• To read, read, read (your very best one, guys, believe me)

As a Mastodon instance admin that did the blocking properly only yesterday, I can tell you this list appears to be automated and accurate.

I’m French. I’m not aware of any other language that radically modifies the meaning of verbs with propositions in such a way.

As a foreigner, you might expect that break up and break down have opposite meanings because up and down do, but nope.

I use debian at work, but for various reasons I use my own laptop for work. Couldn’t stand the old MacBook they had for me.

So no, I never switch back to being a normal user.

My biggest gripe as a non native speaker is phrasal verbs.

Unless you know exactly what they mean, you are screwed. You can’t decypher them, there’s no link between the meaning of the component parts and the phrasal verb.

As my English teacher used to tell us jokingly: you should never say: “I get on with my brother, but I get off with my sister”.

• PS1 : Little Big Adventure (action adventure with the first voice acting I heard in a game)
• DS : ghost trick (it’s getting a remake!)
• 3DS : 1001 spikes (tough 2d platformer)
• Modern era : Slay the Spire (best card drafting and rogue lite game).

Well he’s on his last term, and his political party will not survive him. Who knows how the next presidential elections will go?

The French state is a bad actor already.

Correct. It’s hard to give generalities and be correct on all the details, as you know.

What could happen is what did happen to XMPP / jabber.
Google embraced it for its instant messaging app, then after it had become the provider with the largest user base of said standard, it simply changed the underlying tech it used and stopped using the standard. To google users, their weird contacts that were not on the google ecosystem simply vanished, but they were a small number of people. To the users of xmpp servers, many of their contacts on the google side of things became unreachable again.

Now that’s a thing that can happen if threads.net becomes the largest fediverse instance over time and loosing access to these users is a big detriment to users of other instances.

However, I couldn’t care less if I lose access to the posts of threads.net users. I don’t intend to interact with them at all. I don’t use any mainstream social media at the moment, and I don’t miss the ads, the drama, and the “normie” users, for lack of a better term.