The way I went about it was putting Linux on a separate disk and then getting the bios to boot from it, leaving Windows untouched (though I can access the files from the Windows drives inside Linux if I need to).

Unless your machine is really old, it should have EFI boot so the Linux installation just registers itself with the bios as a boot possibility but doesn’t actually force anything or change the Windows boot. Then on the bios you have a menu where you can chose were to boot from, and Linux will appear with the name of the distribution you used (because that’s how a distro normally registers itself with the EFI boot during installation) whilst probably your Windows 7 can be booted by choosing the drive were Windows is (because it’s still using the old style of boot process which is based on putting a boot partition at the start of the drive were it’s installed).

My Windows is still there, totally unaware of there being a Linux on the same machine.

The way I suggest you go about it is to check how to get into the bios (if you don’t know already) and the booting stuff in your bios to see if works as I said and you get it, and to see how Windows has its boot set-up there (as I said, for Windows 7 the bios should be booting a disk rather than an EFI entry). Download a Linux distro and put it on a USB flash disk or even an external HD and then try and boot from there (if you can get your bios to boot from the USB Flash disk or external HD then you understood the principle of the thing) - you can even just play around with that Linux distribution you booted from an external source and see if you’re ok with using it (i.e. if the UI is not confusing).

Then if you want to go ahead with it, get yourself a separate SSD (256GB is fine), install it and then you can install a Linux distribution from a USB Flash disk or external disk into it. Just install that Linux entirely in the new drive (since the drive is all for it you can let it just do the automated method of “install on drive”). Don’t tell it to do anything with the Windows drive (if the new drive is not empty - i.e. you got it second hand or were using it for something else - MAKE SURE YOU KNOW FOR SURE WHICH ONE HAS Windows so that you mistakenly install into that one, if the new drive is empty it will show as empty in the installation UI so you know it’s not the Windows one) and Windows will still be there and you can still boot from it if you need to (the point of checking out of how booting worked in the bios beforehand is exactly to make sure you know were is the boot menu on the bios, how to use it and which entry in the boot menu is the one that boots Windows).

In my case I actually had an old Linux in there which I overwrote with the new one that I now use and an old complicated boot mechanism were booting went via the Windows booting stuff which was the one showing me a boot menu, all of which going via a WIndows Boot partition in the same disk as the Linux installation so working around all so that Windows still booted was quite a headache and included some pretty nervous moments, but in your case if you just use a new empty drive for Linux and just chose in the Bios what to boot, it should be pretty straightforward.

Worst case you just have to go back to using that Windows 7.

I went with Pop! OS because it was recommended as being good for gaming and it has out of the box support for Nvidia Graphics cards, which is what I have.

It just worked, no fuss and a quick check on my personal Linux management and gaming on Linux notes folder shows no actual notes for my Pop! OS desktop system (for the games in it I do have a couple of notes, but no for the OS), which means I’ve had zero problems with the actual system so far (I write the notes down if I get a problem I need to figure out how to fix, just in case I get the same problem again and have to fix it again).

Mind you I haven’t mucked about with things like replacing my windows manager or using Wayland instead of X-windows since I don’t see the point in changing what’s not broken and works fine in a system which is supposed to be for relaxing, not experimentation.

The good old “Hey! Look over here!” never fails to distract the masses from what really matters.

I was doing the same thing (I too run my computers into the ground, though I also didn’t want to move to Windows 10 because of all the analytics at the OS level sending data to them MS added to that version, plus and frankly, it worked so I couldn’t be arsed).

I also switched some time ago, pushed by Steam’s impending end of support plus more and more stuff coming out without Windows 7 support.

However I took the dive and switched to Linux rather than Windows 11, to a great extent prompted by people here reporting good experiences gaming on it (since I already have quite a lot of expertise in it and I mainly just use my PC for gaming) plus it’s part of a broader set of changes to avoid enshittification (such as replacing my TV-Box with a Mini-PC with Linux) I’m doing at home and am very happy with the result.

It’s less heavy than Windows, even booting faster and seems to have extended how long I can keep going before that computer is totally run to the ground, though for that it also helps that once I started upgrading by changing the OS, I also went and did a few partial upgrades of the hardware, like replacing my old CPU with an equally old one but twice as powerfull - which used to cost 200 bucks but now was 17 bucks second hand - a more powerful graphics card and a more modern SSD disk for the games partition (it’s actually a modern M.2 SATA on a 2.5 inch housing adaptor, and that’s as fast as SATA ever got and to get better than that you need a PCIx M.2) - basically I did the upgrades I could do on the cheap without changing motherboard and everything else that depends on it (like memory and a newer generation CPU) and which would still be compatible with the Windows 7 boot partition I still have around (though I haven’t actually been booting it). Since I went from Windows 7 to Linux rather than Windows 11, none of the hardware upgrades was wasted in just making up for the extra bloat on Windows 11 and the machine definitelly feels a lot more performant.

As for games, most just work, about 1/3 need extra tweaking to work well or work at all and only 1 or 2 so far I couldn’t get to work at all.

Curiously at least one game - Borderlands 2 from Steam - that didn’t work on Windows 7, works on Linux. Also I can now run games whose minimum Windows version is 10 which I couldn’t before.

Also since all non-Linux games are running on the Wine compatibility layer, Linux is actually better backwards compatible with older Windows and DOS than Windows itself, which is nice for Patient Gamer types like me.

I think that with Linux in it my PC is actually compatible with more games than it was with Windows 7.

I seriously think it’s one of my best decisions in years.

There’s a whole different angle to game fun which is exploring game mechanics and the complexity that emerges from their combinations and interaction with the game space and the behaviour of independent game entities.

For example (and highly simplified), in Terraria the player has to balance the location of resources, their search and extraction of them, the actual movement, location and needs of the game monsters and NPCs, and their own progression up the “research ladder” (only in Terraria the “research ladder” is implicit and based on which resources have you managed to get your hands on and what have you built with them).

Whilst some of the fun in that game is in exploring a procedurally generated world, the drive to do so and the main fun in the game is to solve the complex problems that emerge from the interaction of those things: you explore to find resources that let you make equipment that allows you to explore more dangerous or harder to reach places to find more complex resources to make more complex equipment and so on and meanwhile the more advanced equipment also lets you do no stuff (IMHO, just merelly “shovel +1 level” equipment improvements are nowhere as satisfying as getting access to new kinds of stuff that let you do new stuff).

Examine games like for example Factorio, Minecraft or Rimworld and you find the same kind of global game loop: do stuff to get stuff to be able do more difficult stuff to get more advanced stuff and so on and all the while the complexity of your choices increases because the combination of options you have goes up as, often, also does the complexity of the World you now have de facto access to.

The AAA world however went down the path of story-like games which have one core linear story (the main quest) and then a bunch of mini-stories (side quests) and were game progression comes from advancing the core story and gaining levels (which themselves are generally just the mathematical result of doing stuff and advancing the core store and doing side stories) that let you do the same things only better and maybe a few news things, ultimatelly to help story progression. Stories “officially” drive the player’s exploration (though some players also self driven to just explore just because of liking to explore) and it seems to be impossible to get good stories working well in procedurally generated worlds (as No Man’s Sky has proven, IMHO). There is often some amount of the same mechanics as I describe above for open world indie games, but they’re not the core of the game and what drives the player.

And yeah, if your game is story driven and you can’t procedurally generate the game space with good stories, you’re going to hit limits in the size of the thing, either on the size of the game space that has to be handcrafted to work well with the stories or in the amount of stories being insufficient for the game space leading to lots of boring game space that feels empty like it’s just filler.

In my experience, how many people vote tactically massivelly depends on the voting system and whether it’s a presidential system or not.

The kind of utilitarian votes that sees one vote for somebody one does not like is not quite an Americanism because it doesn’t happen only in the US (for example, the UK, even though it doesn’t have a Presidential system, has a lot of tactical vote because they use First Past The Post for Parliament so each parliamentary seat is like a mini-presidential election where thare can only be one winner), but it’s not really common in other countries.

As I said, I was involved in Politics in two countries, including canvassing and leafletting, and from talking to people (as well as observing how my family, friends and party colleagues did their “politics”) voting it’s far more often an affair of the hearth than of the head, starting by how people chose which politicians to trust given that they all promise nice things to them.

The cold and rational pondering about who to vote is not actually that widespread and many of those who try are still being swayed by emotional factors (for example, via who they chose to trust and how much) and people tend instead to vote on who they like and trust (or dislike and distrust all of them hence refuse to vote).

Further, even the cold and rational pondering is often not that rational because when it comes to such complex subjects with such a high level of uncertainty and misinformation, most of what one choses to believe as informations and one’s own most favored forecast, is chosen based on less that scientific proof. (There is so much misinformation, disinformation and outright lying that chosing not to chose - i.e. not to vote - might be the most rational option of all).

What I’ve learned from decades of trying to go at things in a rational way is that we can never be fully Objective so it’s a good idea to be aware of and keep track of the Subjective elements in one’s decision making. Sure, it’s valid to try, just don’t decieve yourself that you have a perfectly logical decision making process and that everybody should be reaching the same conclusions as you.

From were I stand, your idea that you have a valid tactical approach and that it THE superior approach without question is just you misleading yourself about the nature of your information gathering and your thinking processes, hence you passing judgment on others for not going through the same obstacle course you do to end up making a decision which was de facto contaminated by subjective elements such as your choice of what information to trust and what forecasts you judged more likely, is like the blind criticing others for not seeing.

You really are not standing on top the moral high ground you think you’re standing on.

There are quite a lot of ways of making an open world game with infinite replayability without requiring massive maps, but they’re not in the style AAA gaming has been going for in the past decade, they’re more things like Oxygen Not Included, Factorio, Minecraft or Battle Brothers were the game space is procedurally generated, the fun is in conquering the challenges of a map, and once you exhaust it you stop yet end up coming back months later and try a new game with a new map, from scratch, because it’s again fun and there’s no “I know this map” to spoil it.

The handmade game spaces with custom made “adventures” do manage to have better experiences than those games that rely on procedural generation and naturally emerging situations for providing gamers with experiences, but they’re mainly once of and rely on sheer size to remain entertaining for long.

Soon Twitter will complete its transition to Nazi Bar of Social Media.

Well, the US turning into a banana republic will at least solve the problem for bananas.

Not just me. This is common in other countries. People most definitely do not treat their vote as an endorsement. You can believe me or not or say I am bad, but this is a matter of fact.

Being from an “other” country, having lived in another 3 of said “other” countries, an even having been involved in politics in 2 of them, what you wrote is complete total bullshit.

Plenty of people do indeed have an utilitarian view of their vote, but lots of people, maybe even most, treat their vote as an endorsement.

In fact from my own experience in various countries the utilitarian view is more common in countries with less Democratic voting systems with few actually electable choices, similar to the US (so, for example, Britain) whilst the endorsement view is more common in countries with highly Democratic voting systems with lots of choices (such as The Netherlands, which has Proportional Vote).

I’m sorry but whilst you having an utilitarian posture is perfectly valid, your idea that it’s the only valid posture and other people don’t have different postures is complete total mindless self-centred bollocks.

Israel is literally a “Nation for Jews” in its constitution were it says roughly that all Jews and only Jews are entitled to Israeli nationality, hence why any Jewish person can just land at Tel-Aviv, ask to get Israeli nationality and get it.

That said, Israel, pretty much uniquelly in the World, separates Citizenship from Nationality and assigns different rights to both, so non-Jews can get Israeli Citizenship but not Israeli Nationality.

Limitations on the rights that people get from having Israeli Citizenship without the Nationality include, for example, limits to where they can live.

Appartheid in Israel is already officially implement, since the very beginning, so even if the Palestinians were given Israeli Citizenship (highly unlikely given Israel’s track record on this: for example tens of thousands of Arab residents in Jerusalem have for decades been refused Israeli Citizienship even though they were born there and lived there their whole lives), they would still have less rights than Israeli Jews or in fact any Jew in the world if they came to Israel.

And for those on the other side of the Atlantic, there are several computer shops that will just put a computed together for you without an OS.

Here’s a random example “configure your own computer” from a computer shop in France. In this one the OS (Système d’exploitation) is not included and you have to pay extra for it.

In my experience with custom assemblies like this the OS is never included.

When I live in the UK at some point I’ve even used of these kind of stores there to get a custom notebook.

It’s basically an “assemble your own computer” for people who don’t know how to do it and aren’t confident enough to try (understandable given that the parts value of a whole desktop PC adds up to at least €1000 so there generally is some fear of fucking it up if you’ve never done it before).

True, good point on Israel.

Liberal politicians are the ones who are “Relaxed about Genocidal ethno-Fascism”, whilst it makes sense that genuine Liberals (so, Liberal out of principle, not merely political followers), would also be against what’s going on in Israel if only because killing people is the ultimate reduction of their freedom.

I should have been more clear about meaning Liberal Politicians when I used the word “Liberal”.

I don’t actually think Identity Politics is Liberal, I think it’s something build on top of Liberalism by politicians, in the best cases out of convenience - it’s far easier to address certain things by reducing people to identity groups and then fighting for entire groups and/or passing measures that affect all of a group equally and it actually works up to a point - and in the worst cases just as pure hypocrisy and even greed - it makes for simple slogans that politically work well and are easy to sell, brings them votes and if a politician happens to be a member of an identity that person can advance their own personal upsides by claiming measures that benefit them are for the identity group (this by the way, is also how the Far-Right tends to use identity politics, only they use different identities).

That said you’re at the very least misreading my words on the whole “oppressed becoming the oppressor” - what I wrote is that all groups contain people who will do bad things when they have the power and no accountability. At no point did I claimed they were oppressed, oppressors or one of them who had become the other, much less part of “THE oppressed” or “THE oppressor”.

Sure, sometimes the tables turn and people who are themselves oppressed and members of a group containing mainly oppressed get power and then become themselves oppressors, but that’s not related to any identity and it’s not even needed that the whole group stops being oppressed, just that individual: it’s simply that assholes who are powerless usually risk a lot by acting as assholes, whilst people in positions of power can often act as assholes if they so wish and get away with it, so assholes will do it.

Further, there is no need for those people to be in a grand category called “THE oppressed” or “THE oppressors” - often assholes who behave meekly when faced with somebody with more power will behave as assholes towards those with less power: such double-face is a pretty common dynamic in schoolyard bullies or even company bullies (look to middle and lower level management to find those). Such people are both oppressed and oppressors - in other words, even at this level the trying to tag people as something isn’t helpful: both the oppression done to that person in the middle and the oppression that person themself does are wrong and should be stopped, and an “oppressor” tag here just muddles a situation were there are two wrong actions going on and the victim of one happens to be the perpetrator of the other.

Just to add a little bit to it:

“The greatest good for the greatest number”, a basic leftwing principle, sometimes collides with “everybody should be free to do what they want with their own things and willing adults”, a basic liberal principle, for example when it comes to some people excessivelly hoarding resources or using their ownership of an exclusive resource to extract rents from others, because it goes against the “greatest good for the greatest number” even whilst it is aligned with the whole freedom to do what they want with their own things.

At other times both are perfectly aligned: for example when it comes to the freedom from discrimination for those with a different sexual orientation than the majority, since that freedom both fulfills the “the greatest good” principle and the “freedom to do what they want” one.

Now, if one really digs down on it, maximum freedom turns out to actually require different ownership laws (if exclusive resources have owners rather than being shared, then the freedom of the non-owners is being restricted), but in decades of following and even being involved in politics, I have yet to hear a single Liberal (even those who supposedly are not Neoliberal) even mention that specific form (probably the most widespread and highest impact one) of restriction on the Freedom of most people, much less suggest changing it.

Sometimes a point is well made even if I disagree with it, the conclusion in it or disagree with the path it suggests whilst agreeing with the objectives.

It’s like how in Politics in better times (or less adversarial countries) one might respect a political oponent whilst disagreeing with them.

There’s also a trait in some cultures were people tend to try and poke holes on other people’s ideas and point out the bits they find incorrect, not because they’re against it, in disagreement with it or to put down that other person, but to try and help improve that idea even further - in other words, genuine constructive criticism. A downvote isn’t constructive, and sometimes people deserve an upvote for trying or for how far they got, even if the end result could be better.

I think their double standard on media manipulation is derived from them being absolutelly fine with some people mass-manipulating others but not with other people doing it, which if you think about it is another aspect of the same kind of take that Trumpist muppets have: such an such should be done to “them”, but when it’s being done to “us” it shouldn’t happen.

People whose thinking is based on Principles and who at least try to not be tribalist, tend conclude that it’s the act itself - the manipulation - that is the morally and ethically wrong thing quite independently of who are the perpetrators or the victims.

The funny thing specifically with US libs is that it’s exactly the turning of their media into Propaganda Outlets, which they themselves supported and used, that sewed the fields for the harvest that Trump is harvesting: it destroyed people’s confidence in the traditional media opening the path for manipulation via social media and for the kind of populism that Trump uses - “strong man” saying whatever he thinks people want to hear quite independently of it being true or not, in a very assured way and using everyday language (even rufian language) which massivelly contrasts with the style of deceit prefered by liberals.

One Frankenstein can make many monsters but one Frankenstein Monster is just the one monster and being a monster wasn’t even his choice.

Logically, Frankenstein is the one who ethically and morally can be deemed Bad, not the monster.

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Maybe they’re premium ads because the advertisers pay extra for access to a pool of self-selected suckers.

Well, White Supremacy is also the politics of identy, i.e. Identity Politics.

The Racism is the seeing of other human beings as defined above all by the genetics they were born with (i.e. race, gender, sexual orientation), the religious affiliation they got from their parents or the geographical location they were born in and then presuming things about them based on that (which is quite literally Prejudice), it’s not in which specific race/gender/sexual-orientation/religion/nationality you see as good/victims or bad/oppressors.

One is not any less Racist when, for example, the race whose people one presumes are “good people” is not White - the Racism is the making presumptions about people based on their race, so the specific races such a prejudiced person thinks are “good” or “bad” are entirelly relevant in determining if the one making presumptions is a Racist or not.

Ultimatelly, all such “identity” groups have good people and bad people, and when they’re in a situation with power and no accountability, bad people do bad things independently of their “identity”.

This Racism of the modern self-identified Identity Politics practicioners was made painfully obvious by how the Liberals in places like the US and Germany reacted to the Israeli Genocide in Gaza - for years they’ve been prejudiced about people based on their ethnicity whilst passing that shit as anti-racism because their list of “good ethnicities” and “bad ethnicities” was different from that of the traditional racists, and one of the “good ethnicities” in their worldview was Jews and when it turned out that the self-proclaimed representatives of all Jews - Israel - was led by some trully horrible people who were mass murdering people based on their ethnicity, out came the Liberals in its defense because of the ethnicity it claimed to represent (and often being very overt about how it was all due to ethnicity, such as how Scholz in Germany and Biden in the US very overtly stating their “unwavering support for the Jewish Nation”), and further making their prejudices and racism obvious with the ultra-racist claim that Israel represented the Jewish Religion even when many Jews said it did not, and the even more extreme racist accusations of anti-semitism against those demonstrating against the Israeli Genocide (imagine how extremelly racist you have to be to claim that being against Genocide is being against the Jewish Religion, which logically is the same as saying Genocide is a Jewish thing). These self-proclaimed anti-racists didn’t drop their support for Israel as anybody driven by principles would have done based on their actions, they doubled down on it and did it very overtly based solely on the ethnicity that country claims to represent, exactly like all the other Racists act.

This shit is no less Racists than supporting the government of Appartheid South Africa because of them being though of as White.

Anyways, the fairest and real Leftie take on unfairness and suffering is to correct the unfairness and suffering and go at it by descending order of intensity (i.e. start by going after the biggest ones), quite independently of the genetics the victims and perpetrators were born with or the “reasons” why some assholes - the tradition racists - go around inflicting pain on others: the action is that is wrong and must be punished and the hurt and harm to the victimed corrected and grabing the “logic” of the aggressor and twisting it around keeps the agressor’s way of thinking alive and hence the unfairness of treatment, and just moves the unfairness around rather than stop it.