Thank you for the write-up!!

Notes while I’m watching:

1. The “vibe” is different - in my head I translated this to “he likes the GUI more”
2. Minetest has zero “story” / progression (so no Ender Dragon to gear up for & fight) - it’s purely a sandbox experience.
3. better performance, apparently runs on potato laptops pretty well
4. Mods are built-in, and don’t require tools like Forge or whatever to tweak a jar file ⬅️ THIS is cool!
5. Customization via the Settings menu

The “built-in support for mods” caught my eye. That’s pretty slick, and a headache with MC.

tl;dr - it runs on just about everything, and focuses on giving the player an easy-to-mod “sandbox” to play in.

Is this some European thing I’m too American to understand?

Super Mario 64 - a launch title, iirc? - murdered my control stick. Spinning that around to swing Bowser was a great game design idea, but yeah they didn’t build those controllers to withstand it for long.

I don’t get NixOS

It’s not for everyone. The idea is to have your entire system reproducible with a few configuration files, which you’d then ideally store in a VCS like git.

I haven’t messed with it, but there is something appealing about the ability to reboot to an older snapshot of the system if an update breaks something, or being able to use a config file to restore your system to the exact OS version and exact versions of whatever apps you use.

The marketing spin calling LLMs “Artificial Intelligence” doesn’t help.

The LEGO Skywalker Saga did a better job of telling the story than the movies. One of the few games I 100% completed. Just a fun, chill way to unwind.

First, it robs the creator of their income

… you mean the creators that are currently striking because massive companies Disney, Netflix, and Co don’t want to pay them a living wage?