Ace Combat. Seems rather dull on the face of it but goddamn are the geopolitics compelling.

Piss, I’m glad I live in a country where that’s illegal.

Circum-Pacific War. The Belkan War’s so overrated.

I’d like to submit my two favorite buddies from AC games for consideration.

Rusty from Armoured Core VI, especially the final fight against him in Breach The Karman Line. With that backdrop and his sweet ass AC sliding to a stop while you can hear the pure venom in his voice “Here we are… buddy…” as Steel Haze starts playing.

And then we have Ace Combat Zero, having just prevented the V2 launch, flying back to base when your wingman gets one shot by a fucking laser, and you see your former wingman, Pixy, in a hitherto unseen aircraft and hear the flamenco accompanied by that voice: “So, have you found a reason to fight yet… Buddy?”.

Similar themes across both, and both are absolutely iconic.

the end is never the end is never the end is never

I hadn’t considered it like that but yeah, if there was ever a game about nothing, the Stanley Parable is it.

The entire Ace Combat series, particularly from 4 onward are almost entirely comprised of the best music I’ve ever heard. I couldn’t reccomend all the specific tracks because i’d probably hit some sort of character limit but each game has a “flagship” track which I’ll highlight here:

• Rex Tremendae + Megalith -Agnus Dei-
• The Unsung War (special mention to First Flight)
• Zero
• The Liberation of Gracemeria
• Daredevil

Also will reccomend both the Metal Gear Saga (e.g. …Metal Gear Saga)

And the Boss themes from Metal Gear Rising

• Rules of Nature
• I’m My Own Master Now
• A Stranger I Remain
• The Stains of Time
• Red Sun
• The Only Thing I Know For Reap
• Collective Consciousness
• It Has To Be This Way

Never thought this’d be this relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69BMS6LIw8Q

I’m sorry, is this some sort of imperial joke I’m too metric to understand?

Working class Australia too. Dare, Ice Break, and Farmer’s Union flow through the blood of every tradie.

Hello friend. Just want to make sure you’re aware of our (admittedly tiny) community here: https://lemmy.zip/c/acecombat@lemmy.world

EndeavourOS. It’s the only one I tried that worked with my sound card out of the box strangely enough…

If that’s the actual splash screen that pops up when you try to access it (no, I’m not going to go to it and check, I don’t want to be on a new and exciting list) then kudos to the person who put that together. Shit goes hard. So do all the agency logos.

“Humane Treatment”, " Human rights", “I’m doing this for the good of humanity”. When there are heaps of non human species but the writers keep reffering to “human” traits everyone else clearly has.

Azetbur was right.

Understood, I will continue aware of that distinction.

Thank you kindly for the advice. I’ll look into cachy. I’m sure I can figure it out.

And here’s me using a 15m long HDMI whenever I go to the loungeroom.

It kinda looks to be perfect if I end up going with Fedora (It’s the most recommended so far).

I didn’t quite capture the intent of this sentence. My bad. Would you mind elaborating/clarifying/explaining? Apologies if I’m coming across as obtuse 😅.

Ah, sorry. Just wanted to express that Bazzite seems to fit my needs quite well and that fedora has been recommended to me more than any other repo so far. So if after my investigations I do end up choosing fedora, Bazzite seems to be a good flavor to try.

I think your response has so far been the most comprehensive. Thank you so much.

This is a thing of the past. With the excellent Distrobox, you can install any package from any distro on whatever distro you’re running.

I’d not heard of Distrobox sounds to me to be a perfect foil to the disparate package solutions out there. It gives me some peace of mind about not being locked into a package manager (Although as you point out, even without distrobox that wouldn’t be an issue).

Lastly, some distros and/or (so-called) desktop environments might collect telemetry to improve themselves. But this is done in a way that suits free and open source software. Thankfully, if you’ve got problems with this, you can always turn it off.

I’ve really not got any problems with telemetry so long as it’s just limited to the technicals and for OS improvement purposes. Sounds like I should be fine.

So, all distros allow you to tinker. My question is: What is it you’re tinkering with?

“Tinkering” in my case is pretty broad. You’re correct when you suppose that I like to mess with UI aesthetics and workflows. The other misc tinkering I more mentioned in case there’s some distros that are unsuited to working with strange or niche programs (such as the media encoding and physical media management stuff I mentioned). It sounds like that’s not really much of a problem though. Anyway what counts as “niche” is very subjective so probably wasn’t that helpful to mention.

Have you considered Bazzite?

I have not heard of Bazzite. It kinda looks to be perfect if I end up going with Fedora (It’s the most recommended so far). My only concern is longevity, It seems to be quite new and I don’t want to jump on just for it to be a flash in the pan. As I understand it though, even if it is, it’s easy enough to change distros. Others have said to not be worried about locking oneself in and to just jump in and try. Also not a fan of “Gaming Mode” style UI but I guess I can just not use it.

Out of everything, this could be a slight concern. You could make it work through Wine, and it seems to have decent results. If you’re not opposed to using Photoshop CC 2021, there’s this GitHub repo worth looking at as well.

Honestly, not married to Photoshop at all. That’s just what I use and I’m not any sort of power user by any measure.

Again, thank you very much for your detailed response.