I don’t mind adding forks to the list, or distros based on other distros, as long as the distro they’re based on is a community distro and not a corporate distro. Like you point out though, there aren’t a lot of those.

I used to use Mandrake back in the day. Those Mandrake descendants, as long as they’re actively being maintained, could be interesting.

The issue isn’t if something is a fork or not, the issue is if something is a fork of a corporate distro. For instance, there are forks of Arch that still meet the criteria because Arch is a base community distro, whereas OpenSuse is a fork of a corporate distro.

The problem with OpenSuse is it’s based on a corporate product, not an original community base.

But how many of those meet the criteria of not being based on corporate distros and are also user friendly? For instance, I wouldn’t exactly classify Gentoo as user friendly.

Musk is a moron that’s about as smart as any moron that’s a moron that’s been given vast sums for cash from their father’s African emerald mine.

No, the game I’m thinking of isn’t an action game, it’s an adventure game similar to Myst where you navigate by moving from room to room.

I’ll be honest. WarGames. I’m a big fan of 80s movies, but when I saw WarGames, it was very much meh.

My first experience with the Fediverse was Mastodon, and my second was PeerTube. Having interconnectedness between the different platforms, like Mastodon and Lemmy, is interesting, but also a little confusing with how it all works, so I just use the individual platforms directly instead.

I think people naturally tend toward the servers of the people that started the project and also the servers that have the most people on them. As the federated technology continues to smooth out I think more people might be more comfortable spreading out to other servers.

Personally I started out on the Beehaw server but they had some rules I didn’t like so then I found another server.

The way I would handle things is first I would look for a native Linux version, and if that wasn’t available, then I’d try to use Wine / Proton, and if it didn’t work that way either, then I’d look at streaming it through a service like GeForce Now. It would be easiest to have a separate drive with Windows on it but now that Microsoft is turning Windows into ad-filled spyware more than ever before, especially with Windows 11, I’d rather use one of the above options instead.

I’d even be tempted to get a Mac Mini to handle the software that wouldn’t work with one of the above options rather than use Windows.

These days I mostly use Manjaro, though I’ve been thinking of giving the Suse rolling release a try.

You might be looking for a KDE desktop. Many of Windows’s better more modern desktop features are copied from it, and KDE is very customizable out of the box without needing to install a bunch of extensions like you do with Gnome. KDE can be customized to fit many different desktop paradigms, with the default being like Windows 10.

I think this is just evidence that federated message boards are still very much a developing technology. Things like this are a little smoother on Mastodon, but Mastodon has been around longer.

This is a good way of framing the concept.

What counts as a cheap VPS these days?

That’s possible with Lemmy too. Just make sure you select the “All” filter when browsing instead of just the “Local” filter and it should show you all the federated posts.

What’s the point of federation then?

There’s not just one server or one entity that controls everything. If one server shuts down it doesn’t shut down the entire service. And even though having multiple communities on multiple servers named the same might not be ideal, it’s also a feature. If you really don’t like the mods of one community on one server, you can join a similar community on a different server. You can think of the servers like cities. Every city has a game store, and this way you can access all the game stores at once. You might have a favorite community on a favorite server and that might be where you create your new posts, but you can still read and participate in the discussions going on in similar communities on all the different servers.