loopgru

Came here to say this. The new player experience is an awesome upgrade in terms of getting people into the world and narrative, but you’re still thrown into an ocean of systems and content without a map. If you’re not following a guide or piecing things together from the wiki it’s very easy to get totally overwhelmed.

Always nice to meet another dad.

I would look at some of the tech demos for Unreal Engine 5 and its capabilities. We’re at the point now where the engine itself, with sufficient art assets, can look photorealistic more or less out of the box.

Where this is still hardest- and likely always will be- is in faces, because our brains are so thoroughly wired to spot micro-expressions and subtle facial and body language as social animals.

That said, for a game like Doom or Path of Exile, sure, I think we’re way past the point of diminishing returns. But for games where you’re actually experiencing a story and interested in the relationships and characters involved? Things like Death Stranding, RDR, Cyberpunk 2077, or more recently BG3? All of those same nuances of expression can definitely add to the experience- it’s the difference between a mediocre actor and a good or great one.

This is 100% the way.

Pine hides their hobby-grade hardware behind in-development software. I owned both a PBP and PPP and much as I’d like to say otherwise, really can’t say anything to recommend either.

Did FW ever solve the issue with battery drain during sleep? I owned one of the original batch and sold it because I couldn’t effectively use it as a laptop. Other than that it was awesome, great build quality, loved the ethics of it and the form factor, but being unable to use it as a portable computer was a deal breaker.

All things you mentioned are hardware issues. […] Because no one will buy an expensive GNU/Linux phone.

There’s a difference between budget or low end components and flawed implementation or design. I didn’t go in expecting a newer Snapdragon and a 144hz display- but neither did I go in expecting that it couldn’t charge when dead. I didn’t go to Denny’s expecting filet mignon, but neither was I expecting a dirty tennis shoe on a plate. That was the whole point of my comment. The last thing mobile Linux needs is for people’s first experience of it to be a semi-functional piece of hacked-together hardware- even if someone’s willing to deal with in-dev software, when the thing straight up won’t work it’s not a good look.

I owned a Pine Phone Pro for a while and it was a disaster. The software is still coming together, which is expected, but the hardware was also hobby project grade. As the previous poster mentioned, battery, camera, and screen were all bad, and on top of that the phone would refuse to charge with most chargers and could not charge at all while not booted, so once the battery was dead you had zero recourse beyond an external charger. The clamshell keyboard also wouldn’t work without shimming the pogo pin connectors forward, and even then it was hit or miss. The company was terrible to deal with and only finally accepted a return after escalating a dispute with Paypal. I hate dumping on a company providing hardware for mobile Linux, but these guys seriously do more harm than good.

This is it for me, too. Back before I got into Linux I was forever tinkering with third party stuff to try to make the UI more efficient with things like Enso and Docker, and make it prettier with other stuff, but it was always a ramshackle cludged together mess. GNOME just resolves all of those issues neatly for me, runs faster, and isn’t crammed full of bloatware ad crap like modern versions of Windows. And it’s more secure, free, and ethically satisfying as a cooperative, trans-national project.