They absolutely did exist in the 20th century, but they were much heavier and bulky, used resistive touch screens, had awful battery life, and were understandably very primitive compared to modern tablets.

I’m a big fan of automating as much as I can.

• Lights automatically turn on when someone enters the room, but only if it’s dark enough to need lights in that room at that moment. Turn them off automatically when presence is no longer detected (not just IR based motion detection).
• My old washer and dryer alert me when they’re done thanks to vibration sensors.
• Media downloads when added to a watchlist.
• Regular backups locally and to the cloud.
• My phone enables/disables rotation lock based on the app I’m currently using.
• Phone also opens various playlists when connecting to my car stereo based on date/time.
• Various “scenes” to turn devices on and off, control brightness, volume levels, etc. This includes controlling devices that are IR, RF, Bluetooth, and Zigbee based.
• Game servers that update when new versions are released, but only when no players are connected. If anyone is connected, sends a message to a discord server (that is also connected to Matrix) alerting everyone to the available update and asking players to log off at their earliest convenience. Players can also check on game server status with bot commands in the game’s channel on that server.

Everything runs locally and has a manual backup so I can still control everything the old fashioned way if my phone is dead or if my non tech savvy parents are over and need to operate any of it.

Put the cookie down!

Yippie Ki-Yay Mr. Falcon.

I’ve had it with these monkey fighting snakes on this Monday to Friday plane!

“Let’s go eat, huh?”

Or for one that has more or less pierced the cultural zeitgeist:

“Oh hi Mark”

As others have said, there isn’t much story for most of the game outside of subtle, environmental story that can only be inferred. The biggest story beats happen at the very beginning and very end of the game.

Those callbacks that are annoying rehashes for you are intended to be nostalgic for players of the first game. Keep in mind that there was an 8 year gap between console metroid games.

If you aren’t having fun playing the game, then it’s failing at its primary goal. Feel free to skip the rest of the game, but please be sure to at least watch an online video of the ending, before, during, and after the final boss. The opening of Fusion and other future games in the series reference that ending, and it’s absolutely an iconic piece of gaming history.

Edit: I couldn’t find any examples on PeerTube, but this video of the ending from YouTube is fantastic (should you choose to skip the game).

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rAoVPsjEcNg

I currently get 2.3Gb/s down and 360Mb/s up on my DOCSIS connection. It’s advertised as 2000/300, but I’m consistently able to get above those speeds regardless of the day or time. It’s about $120/mo for those speeds.

Cable companies are absolutely still bastards though.

Episode 25 of Death Note would have been a dark, but logical place to end the series. After that point the entire dynamic of the show changes. There are some good and interesting moments, but it doesn’t really feel like the same show.

I currently run it with Keycloak for Auth and previously had it behind a Nginx Proxy Manager reverse proxy, but have since switched to using a Cloudflare tunnel.

It works great and allows me to provision limited and controlled access over various game servers to admins of those servers. They can access what they need and nothing more, and only on the servers that they have been granted access.

I use Apache Guacamole, which works great for just about any kind of remote access and has a dead simple to use Docker Container.

It supports folders, copy/paste, uploading/downloading files, multiple open connections at once, and alternative mouse modes for touch screens. Best of all, it’s completely free and open source.

The simplest answer is no. Making fun of someone because of neurodivergence is the action of a bully, not someone who is nervous and unsure of how to express their attraction.

I’m not in your shoes, and I only have a limited view into the situation. As an outside observer, I would recommend at the very least establishing boundaries against screaming and belittling your neurodivergence (i.e. Saying plainly that behavior is not OK), or cutting off all contact entirely if possible.

Things will likely only further degrade otherwise, and his behavior will only continue to be hurtful and manipulative.

It sounds like Karl still has a lot of internal struggles and identity issues. I would recommend not getting too close to him until he can work through those things, especially in light of what it sounds like is rather poor treatment towards you.

You deserve someone who unambiguously cares for you and treats you well. He likely doesn’t even know how he feels about you, but because he is comfortable with you, feels like he can safely use you as his punching bag while he works through his internal emotions.

If he’s able to put in the work and overcome his struggles, he won’t make you feel like garbage and it will be infinitely easier to ask if he has romantic feelings towards you. If he continues to act like a jerk, or flip flop between friendly and hostile, there are far too many people in this world that are more worthy of your time and energy.

I also don’t use Mint personally, but based on their releases page, it looks like they follow the Ubuntu LTS releases. The latest LTS version of Ubuntu is already being used for Mint 22.1, so I wouldn’t expect to see Gimp 3 until the next LTS release in April of 2026.

Debian based distros are notorious for using old, but known stable packages. That’s kind of their whole thing. If you want the latest and greatest, look for a rolling release based distro.

Sorry for the late reply. The optiplex is absolutely sold as a desktop, but I’ve been using it as a server for a couple of years. Very small, quiet, and it sips power, but it only has support for 2 2.5" SATA drives (though it does have plenty of USB 3 ports if you don’t mind using external storage). TrueNAS installed on it would be similar to your Synology setup (without the vendor lock in), though not nearly as convenient as the front bays you’re used to.

It’s yours if you want it, but no worries otherwise.

That would be awesome. I have a Dell Optiplex 7040 Micro that might be better suited for your needs after you play around with the big server. Maybe we could trade?

Depending on where you’re located I would happily pay for shipping.

If you don’t want it, I’ll take it off your hands. I have a rack designed for that kind of hardware and all of the infrastructure to fully support it.

I would recommend editing your fstab and use the USB drive’s UUID to mount it to a consistent location. That way, even if you reboot or disconnect the drive and the reconnect it to, say, a different USB port, it will always mount to the same mountpoint.

See this page from the arch wiki for more info.

is there a Linux… idk what to call it, type? OS? Thing??? that runs out of the box without me having to install additional software manually or at least automatic setup wizards

The word you are looking for is called a distribution, or distro for short.

I’m surprised no one else has mentioned Bazzite, which should be exactly what you’re looking for.

is there any specific hardware that works easier with Linux

An AMD GPU for sure. Nvidia drivers have come a long way, but they don’t generally behave as well out of the box like AMD.