Grangle1

Yep, plenty of girls/women out there who don't really consider themselves "gamers" who will put multiple-digit hours into those management types of games. I personally know several like that. I would imagine a lot of women don't really get into direct PVP online gaming due to the online environment and lack of attempts to appeal to female gamers with the designs of such games, but would probably play a lot of single-player in a bunch of different genres and series. As the article implies, Nintendo IPs in particular would be appealing due to lack of pandering to either the common "gamer" demographic or to what many other publishers think women want in games (overly stereotypical "girl stuff").

I don't usually end up using a lot of bird Pokémon in playthroughs (Flying types I pick are usually flying dragons). That said I do really like the sleek design of Galarian Articuno, and I had a Fearow once that was a star team member of the one nuzlocke I ever attempted (Fire Red).

Which makes it even more strange considering Ubisoft is based in the EU.

Tears of the Kingdom. I did figure out where the tear in the Hebra geoglyph was and have gotten a bunch more since then. I went madlad and completed Gerudo second of the four areas despite Gerudo usually being the hardest area in these types of Zelda games, and honestly, the only really hard part of it was the temple boss, which took me a fair number of tries and a short detour from the temple for some cooking, but I eventually beat it when I discovered a trick for the second half of the fight. Now I'm just wandering the land filling the map some more and doing a bunch of side quests and shrines where I find them before I take on the Goron area third.

EDIT: I should note I'm not wandering without an objective, I wanted to make sure I visited Kakariko and Hateno villages at least. I actually spent almost my entire three-hour play session last night in and around Hateno doing side quests.

Both Flatpak and Snap are preinstalled but it defaults to debs/apt. Though through the command line they strongly recommend the pkcon command over apt itself.

Yep. I'm running Neon instead of Kubuntu for this reason. I didn't want the hassle of dealing with snap, and I wanted the latest KDE stuff, so it's perfect for me and I'm enjoying the experience. May not be for everyone, though.

So... it sounds like you're struggling with Snap. In addition to others' suggestion (try a different distro without Snap, perhaps one of those distros made by a different company such as Fedora (Red Hat), an OpenSUSE variety (SUSE), or even a corporate, less Snap-reliant Ubuntu-based distro like Pop_OS (System 76)), you could also try uninstalling Snap from Ubuntu or installing another binary option like Flatpak/Flathub and installing your software that way. Frankly, the amount of money these companies make working on Linux or Linux-based products has nothing to do with your struggles. Plus, the companies you mention do, in fact, make money working on the kernel itself because they contribute to the kernel as a project. Even Microsoft and Google do the same, though Microsoft does so for the sake of WSL and Google does for Chrome OS and Android. So plenty of people make money if the Linux kernel keeps having work done on it and keeps improving. I don't see what the problem is with the kernel itself. The lack of polish, as you call it, in Linux-based OSes is not a fault at all of the kernel but in all the various other parts that go into the OS. And that level of polish can vary quite widely. As you note, Snap has been holding Ubuntu back quite a bit due to lack and reluctance of community adoption. Even just trying a different Ubuntu-based OS such as Pop_OS, Linux Mint or Neon may change your view.

Yeah, designing games geared towards kids and younger audiences isn't just about story/aesthetics, it's also about difficulty. Most young kids don't have the attention span or critical thinking skills to sit there and try to beat an enemy or puzzle that older kids or adults would find genuinely challenging.

I could split Nintendo games (I've played) into three groups based on target audience:

Younger: cute art style, simple challenges, short game play for young children; Kirby, Yoshi

All Ages: easy-to-learn basics to get you through the main game, but there's more complex stuff and greater challenge if you want it; mostly pick-up-and-play but not TOO short; Mario, Pokemon, DK Country, Super Smash Bros.

Older Gamers: more (relatively) mature subject matter, challenge from the beginning, complex mechanics and/or puzzles or both to get teen/adult brains going; Metroid, Xenoblade, Fire Emblem, Zelda BotW and TotK (previous Zelda games would be in my All Ages tier)

If you use an IMAP email client the ProtonMail Bridge works great on Linux. VPN works well from the command line, though the GUI is still pretty clunky and RAM heavy and either way they really need to make Wireguard and Stealth available on Linux already.

Flathub is likely safer than most other places to get flatpaks from, certainly safer than just some random repo you find on some guy's website somewhere, but no software source is guaranteed to be 100% safe.

This week in TotK I cleared the first temple (Wind Temple) and have been working on mopping up everything I can in the Hebra region so I have to spend the least time there possible moving forward. It was my least favorite part of BotW and TotK didn't really change my opinion. One related question though: guides I've found say you don't need to do the geoglyphs in order, but I've found the one in the northern snowfield and have combed the entire thing multiple times, including where the guides say you find the tear, but the tear is nowhere to be found. I got the one just outside Rito Village, which is supposed to be second, right away, it was readily available. Are the guides wrong, are you forced to pick them up in order?

I just installed Neon on my PC a couple months ago and it's my daily driver. Yep, it's still a thing. 😁