In my experience, installing Linux Mint onto just about anything is trivial. IMO, the learning curve is more about using a different operating system than it being pre-installed.

That said, as long as you have a preconfigured distro like Linux Mint I think it’s about as easy to use as Windows or Mac. The main difference is that people are already used to how Windows or Macs work, and have forgotten there’s plenty of jank that they’ve learned to avoid. There are still things Linux could improve on w/r/t new user experience but I think the gap is getting smaller every year.

Feigned enthusiasm/friendliness. “Thanks for catching that problem!”

Whenever I have something to say, someone has already said it. People are always on the ball here.

Wow you weren’t kidding lol. I watched the 2.0 demo and at this timestamp there’s a CSAM-related room title that Matthew was invited to (at the top of the right window). Granted it’s probably someone stream-sniping, but it goes to show that there’s apparently active bad actors trying to interfere.

That’s great to hear. All I vaguely know is that the writer for TSR got kicked from the project a month ago so I wasn’t sure if TSR was going to just remain unfinished or not.

I’m planning on at least doing Arches. I don’t know if The Smoke Room will ever be finished but I’m down to try that at some point also. I’m still on the fence about Adastra; I’ll probably get around to it at some point but it looks so different to what I really liked about Echo so I don’t know if it will really grab me the same way. I’m not a furry but I did grow up gay in Hicktown, USA, so Echo’s story sort of knew right where to hit me to cause maximum emotional damage.

The OP immediately made me think about Echo since I just played all the routes on your sorta-recommendation and I haven’t stopped thinking about it ever since. I’m in the process of attempting to force my non-gay non-furry friends to play it so we can all live in the new upside-down world that it’s created for me. I haven’t done Arches yet, planning on it soon.

The angle-bracket spoilers also work on the eternity client, as it’s just forked from some older reddit client. I made a spoiler oopsy recently with it.

Moreso the supernatural stuff for me. The other stuff was dark but I wasn’t checking for Brian under my bed.

Ugh, I feel like there’s no way I could do Arches if it’s way scarier than Echo. Maybe if I only do it during the day. I’m fairly sure when I did Echo I played it into the night and regretted that. I do feel like dipping back into it all for the story though. I think I’ll try the let’s play series at some point to start with.

If you want more psychological horror emotional abuse, try Echo, which gets frequently compared to DDLC. It’s set up like a gay furry visual novel to start with, but it’s more like Night in the Woods where the paths are who you hang out with instead of who you explicitly want to “date”. As the story progresses it gets extremely dark. I could only do one of the paths before I had to look up the others because I’m too much of a chicken.

Fair warning that it’s a slow burn to get to the rough stuff, but the story is solid and it’s humorous on the way so it’s not boring.

Edit: I hadn’t played Echo in a few years so I went to the wiki to refresh myself on the story and it is a lot more tightly-written and lore-heavy than I realized. Each “path” has a different story with a subset of the lore, so you need to play all of them to begin to understand the full picture. There’s also a sequel, a prequel, and a prequel-prequel(?), which all presumably contribute to the lore. I see there’s a giant Let’s Play of most of it, which I think I now feel compelled to watch at some point. It would probably be less spooky to experience it with other people in control.

Edit 2: I strongly recommend you don’t play Carl’s first, solely on the basis of it not being a strong introduction to the game. Carl’s route takes a long time to get into the swing of things, and the story payoff doesn’t entirely make up for it (though I still really loved this path by the end). This was apparently the first path they wrote, and cynically I think that shows a bit. Leo’s path was much more of a page-turner for me throughout and I think it gives a much stronger sample of the unique Echo flavor. Leo’s is the one I played years ago and there’s maybe a dozen moments from this path which will never leave my brain.

I’ve seen people online say to do Carl->Leo->TJ->Jenna->Flynn, and with regards to Carl and Leo I’d say objectively that’s probably the correct order in terms of lore unfolding, but there’s only a couple of small references from Carl’s route that you can notice in Leo’s route, so if you’re on the fence about whether you’re even interested in the game at all I’d do Leo’s first so you can get a proper introduction to the game’s themes.

Yes, almost certainly.