As someone who doesn’t generally play with children’s toys, i still say the answer is never.
As Randall Munroe said way back in XKCD #150, we’re the grownups now, and we get to decide what that means. Life is too short not to spend as much of it as you can doing what you want. So long as it doesn’t interfere with others, go wild.
I don’t have unpopular UI opinions, but I do have opinions that I don’t see people echo much, yet.
One of the worst things about UI in 2025 is that almost everything most people use on a computer relies on it, more than ever, and yet it’s also at its worst point since the days before mouse driven interfaces. Companies used to be much stricter about their interfaces, how they worked and looked. Now there are tons of bespoke interfaces where everyone decides for themselves how they work, and assumptions made by one program work the opposite way in a different one.
Switches have become way to obvious to what “on” and “off” is. Even when they state something like an option is enabled or not in text, it often isn’t clear whether it’s saying this is what the state is now, or this is what it will be when clicked.
Icons have become way too vague and arbitrary as to what they mean. The Hamburger menu was bad enough, but some of the icons have gotten way too abstract. At least the floppy disk for saving was a convention.
Web pages likewise could use a lot more consistency and visibility. The new Digg, for instance, hides its user block function behind a light-gray three-dots button on a white background. The only options on that menu are to Report or Block that user! Why is it three dots, and why is it so hard to see?
Microsoft’s “Ribbon” interface remains a terrible idea. At least with menu bars you know all the functions are there, somewhere, all represented by text. With the Ribbon, everything’s a toolbar button, and with many of them being different sizes it’s harder to scan through them to find the option you’re looking for.
24 is the highest number.
24 is the highest number.
Do you know how hard it is to shop for bras when you’re a giant spider?
Not consuming more than 10MB of RAM
City Trial is terrific, if’s among the best multiplayer games on Gamecube. There’s a channel on Youtube, Kirby Air Ride Online, where people use it as an eSport.
The premise is, from 2 to 4 players (including possible CPU players) roam a big city space (but not too big) on fast vehicles for from 3 to 7 minutes. Throughout that space powerups are constantly appearing. Some are weapons or health refills, but the most common ones are Patches, each of which is a small but significant improvement in one of a vehicle’s stats. Players vie to collect these patches, and also to change their weak initial vehicle for a better one, which also can be found randomly around the city. Random events occur, which provide various opportunities and difficulties.
Players can attack each other by colliding, using “quick spins,” or those weapons. If a player’s vehicle runs out of health it’s destroyed, causing it to drop lots of its patches (around half) and leaving that player to find another vehicle. Patches cannot be collected without a vehicle, so the attacking player can quickly score a lot of powerups that way.
After time runs out, all the players are thrown into a randomly-selected event. Many are races, but some have you attacking enemies or each other for points. A few involve flying. One’s an outright boss battle. The winner of this event is the winner of the whole match. You’ve been collecting patches and selected your vehicle for this moment, but you don’t find out the event ahead of time. You might get a hint as to the event during the city portion, but the game is known to lie 10% of the time.
With all that randomness, City Trial can be very chaotic, and never plays the same way twice. Kirby Air Riders is unquestionably the Switch 2 game I’m most looking forward to!
Same here. Nothing could convince me to go back to Reddit or Twitter at this point.
What will probably happen is a one or two term slump. What’s different between then and now is the internet and social media, which fills most people’s brains with a deluge of noise. In addition to the effects of misinformation daily telling people that the moon is the sun, most algorithms prioritize novelty, and nothing’s more novel than the most stupidly wrong-headed take. We constantly hear the opinions of people who should be laughed out of the room! We sit and chuckle, but there’s tens of millions of people who have poor media skills who it can actually influence.
There are so many weird things about GIMP, and it feels like they add more over time. I’ve moved a layer and then tried to draw on it and had nothing happen. Why? Because the layer was created as an array of pixels the size of the image, and when I move it there’s now a dead zone where there’s no pixels in the visible image. It turns out there’s a special command to expand moved layers to fill the image: https://docs.gimp.org/3.0/en/gimp-layer-resize-to-image.html
There are times using it that it feels like a maze to navigate to just get my changes reflected in the document.
Back in the day there was Hardware Wars.
I handle this, as do most poor people, by not asking ourselves this question, not even fantasizing about it, for why torture yourself with something you never can do?
The secret of Linux is, if all your hardware works, it’s actually easier to use for casual users. Most people nowadays use computers for web browsing and maybe playing media and light office tasks. A Linux Mint setup will have everything you need for that either preinstalled or ready to get fun the software store. If you don’t need anything else, then it gets it of your way and just works. No viruses, little danger of malware, no crud to uninstall, no Microsoft account, no nagging apps, no ads, no attempts to upsell to paid cloud services or Pro, and no AI.
The problem arises when you want to go beyond that, and there’s no obvious path ahead,v then people not used to the Linux way of doing things may run into trouble. But 90% of users, if someone sets it up for them, will do fine.
Along these lines, I have several important memory locations memorized. POKE 53280 and 1 to change the border and background colors. 828 is the cassette buffer, and 49152 the free memory above BASIC ROM. SYS 64738 resets the machine.
I also can recite the powers of 2 up to 65536.
Way back in Sunday School at the church we went to when I was growing up, they taught them to us in a song. I still remember the whole thing.
Recently, McDonalds announced an initiative to remove all instances of Ronald McDonald from their stores.
So, Ronald McDonald removed all instances of McDonalds from around him.
I used to work at a Dominos, and their side items have been ludicrously priced for a good while. There’s usually a “coupon” in their app with a substantial discount on pizza, it’s the only way I’d order from them.
If you’re new to Linux: Mint. Use Mint, with Cinnamon. Or MATE, if you’re hardware is older. It works just how you’d expect.
There’s many other distros for other purposes. Bazzite has a lot of people who like it for games. If you really want to control EVERYTHING about your machine there’s Arch. If you want bleeding edge software and don’t mind/can fix the occasional problem caused by rolling releases then I suggest Manjaro.
But most Windows refugees will be looking for something familiar that works and stays out of their face, and for that the simple answer is Mint.