I’m starting to think we need to reframe this a little. Stop referring to “artists”. It’s not just lone, artistic types that are getting screwed here, it’s literally everyone who has content that’s been exposed to the Internet. Artists, programmers, scientists, lawyers, individuals, companies… everyone. Stop framing this as “AI companies versus artists” and start talking about it as “AI companies versus intellectual property right holders”, because that’s what this is. The AI companies are choosing to ignore IP law because it benefits them. If anyone, in any other context, tried to use this as a legal defense they would be laughed out of the courtroom.

No way this kind of disconnected-from-the-users attitude will backfire. This game is sure to be a great experience! /s

Doing my second play-through of Stalker 2. Really enjoying the game (140 total hours), but it does still have quite a few bugs. Most of the bugs are minor, but a few have been pretty serious.

I haven’t used any Framework systems, so I can’t really give a proper comparison. I have owned two S76 laptops, a now-ancient Lemur Pro I bought back in 2017, and just recently, a Pangolin I just picked up a few weeks ago. I haven’t really had a chance to put the Pangolin through its paces, but it does have AMD-based 3-d acceleration built in. The old Lemur (and the new lemurs) only have basic Intel graphics.

I was able to use my old Lemur for some very light gaming. I think last time I was traveling, I was able to play Football Manager and Fallout Shelter quite successfully, but Lord of the Rings Online was just a bit beyond its capabilities. I would assume that Skyrim would definitely be beyond the Lemur’s reach.

It looks like the F13 does have some amount of built-in 3d acceleration, so just looking at specs I would expect it to do better than the Lemur. Lemur’s got a slightly larger display, but neither are very big. The rest of the specs look like they can vary quite broadly depending on your order so that makes the rest a bit hard to compare fairly.

Like I said, I’ve never even seen a Framework laptop in person, so I can’t give a hands-on comparison. I can say that I’ve been very pleased with my experience with System 76. If you’re looking at S76, consider the Pangolin. It’s only a little bit larger than the Lemur, the price is pretty close, and it comes with more capabilities.

edit-to-add: Whatever you pick, I hope you will come back and tell us how it turned out.

The first title that jumps to my mind, especially when you contextualize it around “restoring faith”, is Satisfactory. It’s been a very entertaining and challenging game, but also the development team has been exactly what one (typically) wants from a dev team. They’ve been very transparent about issues, their process, etc. Their interactions with the fan-base have been frequent and open throughout the years of development. Good game + good company. Worth consideration if you like a good factory builder.

That, as others have mentioned, is a moderately difficult question for us without knowing what you like or what the specs on your laptop are.

If you install Steam, they have a pretty generous return policy. You just need to act within 2 weeks of the purchase OR before you hit a total of two hours played in that game - whichever comes first. I like Steam because the Proton compatibility layer built in makes gaming on Linux so incredibly easy.

I’m hesitant to do so because you undoubtedly like different things, but here is a short list of some of the games I’ve played that I really enjoyed based on total time played.

Sid Meier’s Civilization (the whole series is good, but 5 is my favorite)
Stellaris
Battletech
Satisfactory
Valheim
Football Manager (think of this title as the complex strategy game to FIFA’s action game)

“we are all printers”

Well, this would explain why frequently just refuse to work.

Another vote being cast here for a both Brother and laser. The nice thing about laser is that you can go without printing for weeks, or even, months, and just pick up right where you left off. My old ink jets, if you left them that long, would have completely dried out and need to be replaced.

Clementine

If you liked Clementine, check out Strawberry. Clementine hasn’t been updated since 2016. Strawberry is a fork of the Clementine code base and essentially picks up where Clementine left off.

https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/

“continuing to push the boundaries of consent.”

If by “push the boundaries” you meant “completely ignore them”, then yes. This kind of behavior from MS, or any vendor, should always be considered strictly unacceptable.