Just the other day I was looking into how to use a single shared WINE prefix for multiple users since it's not like any 2 users would ever use the same PC at the same time... TIL I was wrong

Unfortunately I don't really have anything helpful to add except it seems like Linux is more or less inherently built to support what you're looking for.

Google Search is way worse than it used to but still beats DDG by a mile.

I've tried SearX and it was meh, maybe there's some better instance than the one I tried though.

Yandex is good for reverse image search and when the American government makes western search engines block certain search results, but not that useful in general. Also for a period Yandex just kept bombarding me with endless captchas and was completely unusuable

Bing search is just DDG, or well DDG is just Bing.

Baidu search, tbh haven't tried it much, but even for chinese I had better search results on google search so yeah

As a kid I had windows 98 (and later xp) dual booted with debian and at some point some version of suse. This was ~20 years ago

Well I used it just fine and I knew a bout the mysterious "root" and "sudo" that my dad would use but I was just playing some games and maybe using the web browser.

Using the GUI I never learned Linux and it wasn't until a few years ago that I started using Linux again, and it was only because I wouldn't be able to continue using Windows 7 anymore.

So I don't have any experience with teaching Linux and especially not to kids, but I think kids are actually really good at learning stuff if they need too, so give them a PC and the tools to figure things out, if they want to use it they've got to learn, and don't give them other options where they don't have to learn anything.

Finally someone that mentions an Enable Right Click extension. There's a few out there but I use "Absolute Enable Right Click & Copy" as well.

On top of return youtube dislike & sponsorblock I will highly recommend BlockTube, it optionally removes shorts, the video pause and & popup asking if you're still there, and a few other things. I've tried the "remove youtube loudness normalization" option but volume is just all over the place no matter what.

Of course these are specific to youtube and not essential for anyone who uses an alternative

Maybe you should check some lets plays instead of watching tutorials. Just an episode or two to get an idea of what the game is and whether it seems to be up your alley or not.

The lets player will probably explain some mechanics as they come up while they're playing (at least in the beginning to help new viewers unfamiliar with the game) and that should be a lot easier to digest than someone purely explaining a bunch of game mechanics in one go.

well if you're using a mono font (terminal) then there are no such thing as wider characters anyway, so for me that's not a drawback either

To be honest I don't remember the last time I finished a game.

Not counting Rogue-lite games where you replay them over and over like Slay the Spire I think the most "recent" game that I've finished might be Mass Effect 3, which is from 2012...

Oh actually I did finish The Banner Saga 1 a few years ago. It's pretty good except for being somewhat lacking in Quality of Life features. The main selling point are the art style and gameplay-story integration. The tactical combat gameplay is okay but very repetitive, although it got a lot better in BS2 (which I haven't finished) with more varied mission objectives than just "kill every enemy" over and over again.

Skyrim and Xcom 2 are probably in my top 3 or at least top 5 most played games but I have never completed them.

The games I've replayed and finished the most times are Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 1&2 (only completed ME3 2 times).

I've replayed DA:O more than 10 times and I would highly recommend it, although I would recommend getting mods and especially get the increased memory patch so it doesn't crash as often.

I used to use Firefox before Chrome, and it was working great. Then at some point Firefox just started sucking and so I ended up switching to Chrome.

Around the same time I stopped using hotmail in favor of gmail as well

Now, probably almost 20 years later I'm back at Firefox

I haven't escaped gmail yet though

Advance Wars By Web

Advance Wars is an old turn based strategy game, for the GBA (Game Boy Advance), and AWBW is a fan site to play AW online.

I've gotten pretty into it ever since Advance Wars Reboot was announced, and being able to play it in the web browser means I frequently find time to play...

Ironically I don't play the actual AW Remake because in classic nintendo style the multiplayer is extremely lacking, only being able to play with players added to friends list, not being able to upload/download maps except to friends, and extremely limited map sizes for online maps

Skyrim but it's an MMORPG (and I don't mean some shitty WoW clone with an Elder Scrolls skin draped over it like ESO)

From my understanding, at least one other necessary component is dxvk, and that wine is not enough.

dxvk is not necessary but it massively improves game performance on a lot of games, also keep in mind some games will actually not run if you use dxvk, so you sometimes (very rarely) have to use OpenGL instead and the only way I really found to do that was to have a wine prefix without dxvk. (I might've just been stupid though)

for the record only games that I had to use open GL for so far was Starcraft 2's Galaxy Editor (although the actual game itself runs fine with dxvk) and I had some problems with alt tabbing in really old versions of Warcraft 3 (1.27 and older)

Anyway, for a time I used Lutris a bit but now I always run wine through terminal because Lutris was great when it worked but there were seemingly no solutions for when it didn't (while running wine directly has never given me a problem).

And what's great with running wine directly through the terminal is that either it will run and you're good or you'll get some error messages saying that some .dll or whatever is missing (usually .net, visual studio, msvcr100+.dll, mscvcp100+.dll, ms*.dll, etc.) and you just use winetricks and go through the list until you find what you need.

One more thing that took a while for me to learn was that some games (if you're using mods) will need to be run along with WINEDLLOVERRIDES environment variable https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_User's_Guide#WINEDLLOVERRIDES.3DDLL_Overrides

for example when I play Need For Speed Most Wanted 2005 I start it with this command: WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8=n,b" wine speed.exe

another thing is sometimes you want to run games with some arguments, for instance before I got XCOM 2 on Steam and used AML I used to run it with this: wine XCom2.exe -noRedScreens -review

Now here's a pretty big caveat, which is that I use FISH instead of Bash which adds some big QoL improvements (in this case it's mainly about tab completion).

If I actually had to manually type in the commands or spend minutes going through history file every time I would never do it.

Although I suppose you could make an alias for each game.

Oh yeah and always run the games from the same directory as their .exe file is located in, more often than not it won't work if you just do wine /path/to/directory/game.exe instead of cd /path/to/directory && wine game.exe

Edit: some typos, and I just want to note that the && aren't supposed to include the amp; parts

Doesn't it already? At least when it comes to games