–some-- free users. unless I have to upgrade - free for a month and then $19.99 a month after that. nope.

Even with experimental it hangs…

Ok, currently, Timberborn will launch but will hang hard after a short time. I used the wrong engine (?) so I will try “Experimental” and report back.

btw, I am a he/him : ^ ) But thanks for being inclusive.

the i7 was originally mean to be a my take away bridge over tailscale when I am away from home, and a programming machine (or perhaps a look up machine while I program on the i5 desktop)

I have loaded the laptop i7 laptop up with Debian 12, next is Steam so I will try it there. The machine I was going to run it on would not complete a launch and just sat there with the fans going full blast and a black screen…

The issue so far is that I bought the Windows version of Timberborn on Steam, so it won’t install on my Linux box. Do you suppose since I own the Windows version, the makers of Timberborn would allow me to download the appropriate files for Linux? I thought I had gotten it working last night, but instead I was just streaming it from the windows box.

Ok I finally bit the bullet - Windows is blown away. I have not played Timberborn in over 2 months and having a windows machine on my network has always kinda made me feel like I had a spy in the house. Unfortunatly the wife works from home so there are still two windows machines I can’t do anything about. My ASUS Vivobook i7 15" laptop is getting Debian but no GUI installed. I don’t need a GUI to setup tailscale do I? Anyone know of a good settlement or city building game that is free and runs under Linux?

I really just want small and light, and Cheap. 11" is fine. I have a 15" right now. If I decide to give up on Timberborn (I rarely play it and it is the only thing that keeps a windows machine on hand) then this could get re-installed with probably debian with no GUI… I play it rarely, but I still play it. I wish I could get it to run under Debian 12 on my main machine.

too small, no keyboard - I tried using my phone with a USB keyboard and a OTG adapter and most keys work but for some reason escape did not.

I would not be running a gui - this is strictly for text stuff unless I can do pixel/plot graphics in some BASIC or other language (a framebuffer?)

Is coreboot that system where the machine basically boots into a FORTH interpreter that has vocabulary words to read and boot from various media. That would be sweet - Forth is a hoot once you get used to it.

Yeah, This sounds like the thing… I really have to limit the cost to “Recycle cans and bottles” money because we (wife and I) recently bought me parts for a mini-ATX workstation ~$500.00 i5 8gb memory and an SSD I already had.

The hard part is tiny: 10" diagonal screen and really cheap: like milk money cheap - - Perhaps a netbook would work, some of them were Linux based right?

We are not talking Daylight Savings Time are we? It would be great if we would just stick to one time and not change from savings to not savings. Japan, I think, split the difference, they went 1/2 hour and stayed there.

Good. Thanks! It just seemed to spring up overnight-like.

I am learning fdupes right now - I also know I have some big .iso files that I have transferred to my ventoy so they can go.

Doing it ourselves might have the same effect though - “oh well, they have their own driver they are happy with”

I wasn’t around that early, was ndiswrapper, bad?

Could the kernel makers create some sort of sandbox to run Windows drivers in - so we ride on Windows coat tails until true Linux drivers are available? Or is the Windows, um DPI (driver program interface) just too different to allow that?

Edit: Then we use the Windows drivers an make loud noises to the hardware mfg that we would really rather have a Linux driver and that they would sell many more of their $hardware if they make one.