It is an enjoyable way to contribute to the OSM project! I mostly use JOSM or the iD editor for mapping, but when I only have my phone I’ll pull out StreetComplete and do a few quests.

For beginners to mapping, it’s a very easy way to contribute without the worry of messing up something!

https://blissos.org/ is another one I just remembered as well.

https://www.android-x86.org/

Found some links:

Bans in March 2023

More bans Aug. 2023

Some bans reversed

If I remember right, about a year ago they were banning a lot of Linux players. It might be happening again.

I don’t play games to get in the mood for a season, but I’ve noticed the last couple of years that I’m likely to play some games a lot more in certain seasons!

• Spring: Stardew Valley
• Summer: I don’t have anything specific here.
• Fall: Farming Simulator
• Winter: XCOM/XCOM 2

I’m going to have to spend some more time playing it again! It worked fine on my desktop install previously, so I’m curious to know what they changed to bump it to verified. I’m guessing UI tweaks or something with the launcher.

You can (at least the last time I ran an install) get both 10 and 11 installed without a Microsoft account, 11 just requires this process to do it. If you have an old ISO of 11 around it should allow a local account if you don’t connect to the internet, but they apparently patched that out now.

Yep, I didn’t convert either of my accounts over as well.

I would just try it and see what you think of it! It’s completely free. Minetest is the program you install on your computer, and then there are lots of different games that you can download and try inside of Minetest. There’s more besides Minecraft-likes that you can try, and there are definitely mods available. I never modded Minecraft though, so I’m not sure how they compare.

As to system requirements, it could run pretty well on a six year old Android phone the last I tried. It might be worth a shot on your laptop! Be aware that it’ll probably be a somewhat different experience than Minecraft, but not necessarily in a bad way!

Yes, it often is!

Exactly! Better all around for me. The player base isn’t as big, but I’m not really an online player.

Yes, it’s certainly changed for the worse since I’ve played it. I quit fairly soon after they announced that I would need to eventually migrate to a Microsoft account. Seeing some of the things they’ve done since then doesn’t make me miss it!

I haven’t had the urge to play it recently, so I haven’t tried it since the name change. I heard they were diverging a bit from being a Minecraft clone, are there many large changes?

I primarily prefer it because it does pretty much all the Minecraft stuff I want it to do, and it’s got other games available as well. Plus, completely Linux compatible and no Microsoft account!

What pushed me over the edge was how much worse the user experience became with 8 & 10.

I really disliked the lack of control over updates, settings and defaults being reverted after minor updates, and the constant pushing of Microsoft accounts and services. The data collection and privacy issues certainly didn’t help either. I switched from 7 to 10 for a period of time, but eventually started using Linux for everything except for games. I started realizing just how good Linux gaming was getting, and I eventually had one too many issues with my Windows partition and just quit using it entirely.

I don’t remember having a lot of the frustrations I hear some talk about when switching, but I think that was because early on I realized I just needed to start figuring out the Linux way of doing things rather than bringing my Windows experience over.

I would just use Proton at this point. I haven’t tried Shadow on Proton, but for Rise it worked a lot better than on native unfortunately.

Interesting. I wonder if it’s an incompatible UEFI/BIOS? Both of the machines I put it on were fairly new, one was first boot on a server I built, the other was a recent laptop that I decided to run it on for a while.

It still works for installing the OS though, at least in the case of Nix. I’ve not tried Guix so far, but I’ve installed NixOS on two machines in the past year using Ventoy.

I know my use case isn’t the standard for everyone, but at this moment I have six different Linux distros in use. I keep my most commonly used ISOs on a Ventoy so I can easily install an OS on a machine I’m rehabilitating, or maybe just because I want a change of pace. I could write the ISO I want to the drive every time I want to change something, but it’s a waste of time when I can have 15 or 20 of them ready to go on one drive. It’s just my particular use case, I’m sure others have other reasons they prefer it.

Sounds like the regular way still works for you then! I’ve given away most of my smaller drives, I’m pretty sure I don’t have anything smaller than 32GB right now.