Revisionist? I am old, I was there. But if you don’t believe me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian

(And while I didn’t own a Symbian phone myself, a good friend did. Oh, but what I owned was a tablet computer. Way back in 2002. And now you will likely call me a Revisionist again, because I owned a device before Apple invented it…)

It’s funny that you mention the iPhone - a device that had zero innovation compared to its competitors, and just managed to take the market because of marketing.

While Visual Novels are not my favourite genre, there are a few entries that I would like to highlight, because I enjoyed playing them quite a lot:

• Pyre: While it isn’t marketed as Visual Novel, it pretty much is one. To be precise, it is a Visual Novel with sports-game elements. The world-building in this one is excellent, as is the art. The visuals alone would make this game worth playing, but there is also the soundtrack, and the gameplay of the sports events is pretty fun too. Oh, and the story. This game really requires tough choices. It’s from the same studio that made Hades, Transistor and Bastion, and it shows.
• Griftlands: Again, not marketed as Visual Novel, despite very clearly being one. This one is a Visual Novel with card battles and deck-building. Just as with Pyre, the world-building in this one is outstanding. The card battles are well done. It’s no Slay the Spire, but it’s still pretty good. Also, it has some of the best jokes I have seen in games recently.
• Loren the Amazon Princess: Again a Visual Novel that is primarily marketed as something else - this time Role Playing Game. And to be honest, it has everything you would expect from an RPG: inventory management, character stats, JRPG-style turn-based battles, trading, a world map,… But it’s still pretty much a Visual Novel with RPG elements. It has a massive scope for an indie game, and is overall pretty well done. To be blatantly honest, I played this mainly for the RPG parts, but the story isn’t bad either, once one gets past the initial “I see your party has no rogue, mind if I join?” part. The setting is still being actively developed by the studio behind it, who have released several other visual novels (with and without RPG elements) set in the same world, with recurring characters.

Yes. That’s why I was utterly confused when big companies dug out hat dead horse (yet) again.

And they are still trying to ride it.

It’s not “either side”. One “side” is making games, the other is screaming slurs.

You have Debian experience? Then stick to it. It may be boring, but boring is good. That means it doesn’t need much maintenance, and that it just works.

They have done that already. It’s called Kylin.

Yep. And the worst part is the Fear-of-Missing-Out when disabling them.

Like, there is nothing stopping you from just not doing the kingdom management mini-game, except that nagging feeling that you might actually miss out on some content…

Currently? Potionomics. I just wanted something that I can finish quickly, because of the upcoming release of House of Light, but now I am still not done with my play-through, so I kinda cannot start House of Light just yet.

But in a couple of days, as soon as I am done with Potionomics?

House of Light. And that for quite some time, I expect.

And the predecessor, Pathfinder: Kingmaker is amazing too.

It depends on what kind of patent. I just googled the term I had used before, and it is indeed what I expected it to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

And yes, that name is stupid. That’s why I am happy that my native language, German, has a better distinction between “Patent” (what you described) and “Geschmacksmuster” (design patent).

About patents being public: They are. That’s because the idea behind patents is that after they expire, anyone can use them to build the technology they describe. The temporary exclusive usage rights that they offer are meant as an incentive for inventors to publish their findings. The only problem is that the legal situation did not keep up with the creativity of patent lawyers… (I will stop now, otherwise this will turn into an endless rant about how broken the patent system is.)

I’m not sure how the term “patent” is to be interpreted here. It could be used like back in the days when Apple sued Samsung because their phone had rounded edges too…

Like a “design patent” (sorry, I’m not a native English speaker, so I’m unsure if this is the correct translation).

A lot of the pals in the game look quite close to Pokémon. Not identical, of course, but so similar that one just has to wonder if the design has been “inspired” by Pokémon…

Amnesia.

Short answer: Whales.

Long answer: Watch the South Park episode on the topic. They explain it in detail. It’s titled “Freemium Isn’t Free”.

I don’t know if this applies to CLAW, but many games back then had their audio stored as CD Audio Tracks. If that is the case, you might want to actually emulate a CDROM drive instead of just extracting the files. There is a CDROM emulator for Linux, called CDEmu, which can read CUE/BIN CD Images.

Oh, and that game seems to have an ancient 16-bit installer, which might not work on modern systems. However, according to WineHQ Appdb one can just copy the files from the CD and it works.

In addition to LibreOffice I often use standalone tools.

If I want a high quality document, I use LaTeX. Same for presentation slides. However, writing stuff in LaTeX is only worth the effort if the quality is needed. For non-important stuff I just use LibreOffice.

For calculations it depends on what I want to have in the end. If I just want to play with the data a bit, then LibreOffice Calc it is. However, if it is for something serious, I tend to write script files, or even full programs, that do the processing. That way computation and data is in separate files, and the used formulas are clearly visible and easy to debug.

I have been a user since the 90s. Back then it was still called StarOffice.

Its feature set differs from that of MS Office, and its performance could be (a lot!) better, but I strongly prefer the LibreOffice user interface, and the features that matter to me (like CSV import) are way better in LibreOffice. However, LibreOffice does not have all the features of MS Office, and some are notably worse (for instance auto-fill in spreadsheets, where Excel is way better at guessing the next value).

Sadly it’s not only a matter of preference, because file exchange between different office suites is not flawless. MS Office and LibreOffice don’t agree 100% on how to load each other’s files…

Yep, innoextract just unpacks the files, and I then place them into a folder in the home dir. Before I knew about innoextract I also just used WINE to run the installers, and then copied the installed files around. (btw, the apple pkg installers can also be unpacked by a combination of 7z and cpio - in case you just want to unpack one of the many GoG Dosbox games and don’t have innoextract or WINE available)

I have a folder named ~/Games - and the individual games in subfolders there. In Steam’s “add non-steam game” dialogue there’s a “browse” button, and in that one I then select the .exe file of the game. That adds it to the library, and allows selecting Proton as compatibility tool in the preferences.

I am pretty sure the Steam Client reports which games you play to Steam’s “presence” service, such that your Steam Friends can see what you are playing. I don’t know if Valve gathers that data for other purposes (but would assume they do unless told otherwise). Also, some games that ship with Steam integration in their GoG installer (e.g. Loop Hero) will even track as you playing the Steam version - even if you don’t own it there.

And yeah, there is no GoG Galaxy emulation in Steam of course, but I honestly don’t care much about achievements. The lack of cloud support in non-Steam games is annoying though, as I also have a Steam Deck and those saves don’t automatically synch…

I usually just download the installers from their website. It’s not like I would need to install or update games on a day to day basis…

If the installer is only available for Windows (or if I am using my ARM laptop) I use innoextract to extract the files without needing to run the installer.

For Windows games I found that the easiest way to deal with them is to add them to the Steam Library as a non-steam-game, and to force Proton on them…

Yeah. Super annoying…

AppImage: It solves the problem of too many dependencies by introducing more dependencies.