Captain Aggravated

I’ve got an old Dell that has a blu-ray burner built in. Thing is OLD, it’s got a Core i7 processor with a 3 digit model number. But it runs Mint just fine. I beat the hell out of the poor thing ripping my whole DVD collection, and basically it’s my optical media authoring box now. I rarely crank it up but if I truly need optical media made it’s what I turn to.

And it’s getting harder to find decent optical drives. USB external ones are utter buttgarbage.

Pop!_OS’ Cosmic DE is a recent fork of Gnome. It’s the fourth “No, I’d rather put up with being a FOSS project manager for the rest of my life than keep using Gnome” DE I’m aware of, after:

• MATE is basically “No, we like how Gnome 2 was, so we’re keeping it.”
• Cinnamon is basically "GTK3 is cool but we’re not doing all this “almost nothing works because you HAVE to use it EXACTLY like this” crap. Linux Mint is basically a grievance distro; it’s defuckulated Ubuntu with defuckulated Gnome.
• Unity. Because Canonical was reinventing the wheel, the inclined plane, the lever, human speech, electromagnetism, fire, antiperspirant, package management, the display service and the init system, so why not the DE as well?
• Cosmic. I’m not sure why System76 bothered, other than Gnome wasn’t sparkly enough.

Onto your actual questions:

1. I don’t know if Manjaro is European or not, but I have given up on them. They’ve made a lot of rookie mistakes like letting security certificates expire, they dropped the ball pretty hard with the PinePhone IIRC, and every time I’ve attempted to use Manjaro it just didn’t work that well.

Pop!_OS is the in-house distro of System76, a for-profit computer vendor based in Colorado. It’s meant to work well on their hardware out of the box; the big claim to fame that I saw when they were the trendy distro of the week is they had a version that had Nvidia drivers baked into the install, so to the end user “If you have an Nvidia card, click the link on the website that says Nvidia and it works.”

Linux Mint, as previously mentioned, is mostly concerned with distancing itself from questionable decisions made by Ubuntu and Gnome. It maintains compatibility with Ubuntu, so Ubuntu install instructions for software pretty much always work with Mint, and yet the DE is more easily understood by Windows users.

Fedora is Decommercialized Red Hat, honestly I don’t really see them making much effort towards beginners besides maybe their immutable/atomic versions.

Customization of KDE is going to be pretty similar if you stick to things you can change via the settings menu, at some point during “customization” you’ll find the boundary between DE and distro. Yes, many people use KDE. Unlike Gnome, they haven’t pissed off four different groups over the ages resulting in forks. KDE is mighty popular.

“Is it really beginner friendly, snappy, stable?” Lots of things “it” could be, if you mean KDE…yeah? I personally prefer Cinnamon as a “give to grandma” OS because KDE tends to slop more crap on the screen, especially in that One Settings Menu To Rule Them All they have. This is a subjective experience but, if I ever found myself thinking “Is there a setting to change this?” I felt more able to find that setting in Cinnamon than in KDE.

2. I know very little about OpenSuSe, I’ve never once tried a SuSe-based distro.

3. Out of the three you listed, I’d go with Fedora. I’m typing this on a machine running Fedora KDE. I would personally recommend KDE Neon or Kubuntu before Manjaro or OpenSuSe. Manjaro because I’ve had bad luck with Manjaro, and I have no experience with SuSe. I might also steer you to EndeavourOS or vanilla Arch over Manjaro.

You’ve used the word “stable” a lot. Users typically mean “is it going to crash?” None of these are going to crash, you’re not going to crash Linux. What you might find, depending on the distro, is someone will push an update to a software package that breaks your workflow. Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, distros like those do point-in-time feature freezes to avoid that possibility. You might not get the newest features but your system will continue to work like it always has. Rolling release distros like Arch push updates as soon as their developers release them, so you get all the cutting edge features, bugs and breakages.

Of the three you listed, Manjaro will be the least “stable” by that definition; it’s a fork of Arch. Fedora and OpenSuSe are both forks of commercial distros so you get that less, but I can attest on Fedora it does happen, they broke the lock screen last month. You want to never reboot your computer to find something suddenly doesn’t work, go with Debian Stable.

Don’t the Japanese have to stab themselves in the liver with a sword if they resign from one of their soul crushing 18 hour a day office jobs?

That was my take.

Before the Krafton acquisition, Unknown Worlds Entertainment has produced Natural Selection 2 (the first was a Half Life mod, not sure it counts), which sold 300,000 copies, Subanutica sold “over five million” at a $30 price point, and I can’t find any sales numbers for Below Zero, but for back of the napkin math let’s say it sold about as well as Subnautica at ~5 million copies, again at $30.

So both Subnautica and Below Zero grossed $150 million. Subtract the 30% that Steam takes, and you’re left with $100 million, so $200 million between those two games would have been the net take.

Meanwhile, Moonbreaker happened, and I have no sales figures for that.

Everybody talks about what a massive hit Subnautica is, and while it is a successful game, Stardew Valley sold 40 million copies. Subnautica 2 stood a good chance of being a solid commercial success with tons of 2 hour Youtube video essays about how it compares to the original. It was never going to make $750 million. Even if it outsold Subnautica and Below Zero combined at double the price. Add in merch, Peeper plushies, T-shirts, ball caps, they were talking about a movie…Subnautica 2 was going to make a good chunk of that but wasn’t going to make it all.

As far as I can tell, they never intended to pay that $250 million bonus, it was probably offered in bad faith as incentive to sell the studio, and when it looked like they were actually going to pull off the conditions Krafton broke the contract in order to break the contract.

If I get my way, Krafton will never do business in the United States again, and since I’m a vengeful asshole that likes doing brain surgery with a backhoe, I’d probably ban Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, Toyota, Sony, Nintendo and Honda, and half of those aren’t even Korean.

Error message: This why ZathrOS not have nice things.

My current main machine uses Fedora KDE because at the time I built the machine and installed the OS, Mint Cinnamon did not have particularly good Wayland support, and I needed Wayland to access certain features of my GPU and monitor combo.

I used Mint Cinnamon for ten solid years on my older machines, Cinnamon is still my favorite distro, I tried a couple early on, Cinnamon just felt like home and I stayed there for a decade. But it was kind of jank on my new machine so I went with KDE.

Zathras, holding up a thumb drive with a Windows Installer ISO:

“No, never use this.”

Okay, they spent $750 million for a studio that has barely made $250 million in its history. I still don’t think the math mathulates here.

I mean, the publisher seems to be pretty stupid, because…how did they figure that $250 million?

There are two entries in the Subnautica series, Subnautica and Below Zero. Subnautica has sold “over 5 million copies” at a retail price point of $30. So that’s $150 million in gross revenue. For this back of the napkin math I’ll assume that the “over five million” and the number of copies sold at a discount come out in the wash. 30% of that gross revenue is going to immediatley go to Steam or whatever other platform, so the company got $100 million in net revenue before their own expenses like rent and power bills gets at it.

I cannot find sales figures for Below Zero, but it sells for the same price point and I don’t think it could have possibly sold more than Subnautica did, so let’s figure another $150 million gross, $100 million net.

Subnautica as a franchise netted its studio ~$200 million across the launch of two games selling ~10 million copies.

And Krafton had agreed to pay out a $250 million bonus for reaching a certain revenue target in 2025, which they were on track to do given the announced early access launch.

Just to put them in the black for that bonus, Subnautica 2 would have to sell better than both previous games put together at a higher price, and that doesn’t touch the purchase of the studio, operating expenses, or the dump truck of cocaine that must have been involved in these financial decisions.

Or is it a “mode” of KDE? Like can you use a distro of KDE and then put it into Bigscreen mode?

I find KDE’s settings app isn’t always easy to find settings in, especially when you have no idea what to call a feature.