I thought the fairly new buttonless touchpads were a pain in the ****... but that's a whole new level of "What's even going on there?" Is it a touchpadless touchpad? Is it touchscreen & keyboard only? Does you need an external mouse to even use it, or is it somehow hidden? Does it light up to show you where it is, or is the entire frame of the laptop a touchpad... or do you just sort of guess where the touchpad is each time you use it?

Seriously, what was wrong, in any way whatsoever, with having a touchpad for moving, scrolling, zooming and having two or three clickable buttons beneath it for left/right/middle click?

Have I just reached the age where anything I don't understand looks like "new-fangled rubbish"?

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I'm glad it's picked up some popularity - and hopefully therefore sales and a bit of funding. It's the base for a great game, but it's been stuck in "half finished" for a decade.

I was very pleased to see them announce today they're finally working towards reintroducing the NPCs. I think I originally bought this about ten years ago, and they took NPCs out about 8 years ago. The various "Super Survivor NPC Mod" things have given me a good few playthroughs over the years at least, but they were always a bit glitchy.

I have to do too much "grown up stuff" these days to be able to play multiplayer things with any regularity.

Quoting: MicromegasDidn't they add multiplayer some weeks ago?

I'm pretty sure it's had multiplayer for more than 5 years - though they have been making continual improvements for years, and they did release a new "Stable" version recently though.

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I'm really looking forward to this one, and have backed it. I absolutely trust the dev (who did Bloody Rally Show) to achieve what he's aiming for.

What surprised me from the demo was how slick and well thought out almost everything was already, and as far as I could tell, bug-free. It already has good and well documented mod support, and ran perfectly happily on my slightly ageing computers.

If you play the full game Alpha at the moment, the content wears thin at 8-10 hours, and the later game colonist part is less fleshed out than the early game robots part, but that's really to be expected at this stage. I've bought finished games that lasted less than 10 hours of play time. There's some slightly clunky bits in the UI, but the dev seems completely open and welcoming of any and all feedback, so I feel it's a pretty solid one to back, if you like the whole Dwarf Fortress/Rimworld/Prison Architect/Space Haven sort of thing.

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Quote(...)and started D9VK as a personal project while I was in sixth-form(...)

That is seriously impressive. That's an easy time of life to get very distracted by certain things. This guy must only be in his 20s, but has already contributed so much. I'm very glad he decided he liked Linux!

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I'm definitely looking at getting one of these. Pay a deposit ASAP, then spend the next five months working out how to persuade my partner that "Well, you CAN play games on it, yes - but actually I need this for work" :)

My only concern really is knowing what the build quality/repairability is like, for that eventual cracked screen, weak battery or un-centre-able thumbstick.

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I think I bought this originally before Steam was on Linux - and at some point I've re-bought it for Steam or maybe activated the key there perhaps, but like others, I played it back with the "Kate and Baldspot" story stuff in there, almost ten years ago. They've added a lot of great stuff to it since, but I feel like I've been waiting for years and years for them to put the NPCs (back?) in, or continue with any sense of narrative to it.

I know a lot of people really go for the multiplayer stuff, but I feel it's a bit of a shame it's still at the expense of finishing the original single-player game. There's been NPC mods of varying success over the years, and I've got some good hours of fun with it, but it's always felt a bit pointless after a while. Despite that I'd say it's definitely worth a play, especially if you like Cataclysm DDA and the like. I'm glad it's still being developed.

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I picked it up today, but I'm getting stuck on the purple screen after the Unity logo (On Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu Gnome). Looking at their bugtracker, there's at least a handful of other people with the same problem. No clue how to fix it yet, and the logs are fairly unenlightening. I'm looking forward to playing it whenever it works, though :)

[Edit] Seems to run completely fine on my laptop though (Mint 20).

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I've been using Ubuntu since 7.04 - but my next, imminent upgrade will be Mint - and I'd probably recommend the same to anyone else looking for ease of use. Though I accept it is somewhat personal taste, to me it's a combination of things, but it's mostly UI changes and pushing towards things like Snaps.

If only considering gaming, if I'm honest, it does pretty much all work immediately, and I've had very few problems (still running 18.04 LTS) - but when you're trying to do other work on the machine as well, I feel like I'm increasingly fighting against the OS instead of working with it.

I casually support some older people in my town with "having a working computer", who have now been using Ubuntu for 4 or 5 years (which did cut my "help, I think it's broken" phone calls and visits down to 2 a year each, instead of 2 a week on Windows), but things with disappearing options, strange defaults and Snaps - "special versions of programs that can't, by default, see your fonts, printer, camera, external/network drives or USB sticks" have begun to make it a lot more of a problem.

I'd done an install of Mint for a friend a few months ago and it seemed to have all the positives without the negatives. It was a joy to set up and use - and running the Live USB on both my computers, appeared to work perfectly with my existing machines and equipment. I don't doubt I'll uncover some issues once I'm using it full time, but it looks a very strong contender for what I'll be recommending for the next few years.

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Instabuy for me. Absolutely great. Reminds me of Supercars II on the Amiga. It's surprisingly well formed and polished for an Indie title - campaign, leaderboards, car editor, map editor etc. Very low system requirements as well, it seems.

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I've chucked about 60 hours into it (somehow) in the last few month. It was definitely worth getting as a Steam Play purchase, which previously I've been very hesitant to do - but this is fully "click play and it works" for me. The fact they're actively trying to support Linux via Steam Play is very reassuring.

I'm tempted to try the experimental update and see if it improves performance further - but I also noted:

QuoteFixed an issue that caused incorrect unit costs to be used when purchasing Exosuit slot upgrades.

So I might go and upgrade my backpack slots a bit more whilst they're accidentally free...

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