At the moment, I am trying to clear ascension 20.

My chance of winning the game up to ascension 5 is > 50%.

IMHO StS gives the player bad habits in the lower difficulties (and the difficult spike when reaching the heart is not that great).

Some tips stolen from better players than me:

• You really have to play optimal and think about every card to minimize life loss (This could also mean taking a hit early and kill off an enemy faster vs. blocking an early hit and taking massive damage later.)
• The bosses especially can be seen as problem to solve. Look ahead, do you have the right card(s) in the deck to solve the problem?
• The first hall is mostly about about up front damage, in the second you will need some area of effect damage etc.
• Before adding a card to your deck, answer the following questions:
  • How high is the chance I can even play this card? (Example: You have 3 energy and a card costs 2 Energy. If you have another 2 Energy card, you know increase your chance of a dead draw, because you can not play both if they appear in the same hand)
  • Does this card has any synergy with the cards I already have in my deck or with any artifacts?
  • Does this card solve a problem (e.g. boss or enemy) I have? IMHO all the generic advice is not wrong (like having as little cards as is possible), but the point about playing the higher ascensions is really more seeing ‘the whole’ instead of focusing on one aspect. For example, if you have Corruption in a bottle and Dark Embrace, all of a sudden you want to have as many skills a possible… OTOH, if you have two Dropkicks, you want everything which destroys cards to have an endless Dropkick-Engine as soon as possible.
• Take care of immediate problems you know you will face (like the boss of the current hall), instead of speculating on card combinations which might or might not show up in the future. (Exception to the speculation rule: Iron Clad has Limit Break, and it is total reasonable to expect to find some strength boost as an Iron Clad, so LimitBreak is usually the one card which I never think about picking up)

tldr: Picking your strategy and adding/removing of cards must be seen in the context of artifacts, energy and the bosses you will see. Optimize for your next known problem, instead of betting in cards to become available. You can have 1-2 cards for special situations or as speculation, but adding for example another attack card if you already have enough of attack, simply doesn’t solve a problem or makes your deck stronger.

Yes, I didn’t thing too much about food/calories in the past, so when I read about the connection it is in hindsight obvious, but I didn’t get the idea by myself.

Thanks a lot! Great write up, and the energy-stored view of calories makes a lot of sense and is very intuitive!

Thank you for your answer!

Thanks a lot! To the point and on an abstraction level that is very clear!

Same for me. I put an unholy amount of time in StS on all platforms and haven’t all achievements yet! :-) OTOH, there are worse ways to waste your lifetime. ;-)

Ninja Gaiden Ragebound: Not finished yet, but having a total blast playing it. Great/responsive controls, level design is great and enemies telegraph their attacks properly, like it should be in an action game

Street Fighter 6: Gave Sagat a try

Slay the Spire: Acension level 18, want to make it to 20 before the 2nd part gets into early access

Not sure if it is applicable, but wouldn’t it be an option to use the Fedora Workstation Live CD, mount your swap partition into the live system and send it to sleep via SystemD?

This should give you feedback with a fairly recent kernel and Gnome has (at least for me) been the desktop option with the least amount of bugs I encountered.

Before asking for another distro, you should figure out, what is the root cause of the trouble you observe. Usually sleep/wake up under Linux are highly hardware dependent. Even the SteamDeck, which has payed first level hardware support by Valve, has sometimes trouble waking up properly after sleep, at least in desktop mode. Good luck!

Thanks, but could you clarify which extension to move for Gnome? native window placement is AFAIK just for the overview.

Which extensions do I need?

Ah, sorry to read - I like the idea of Bcachefs and would have been happy to have it ready for production eventually.

OTOH it seems the recent years I read more about the drama about Bcachefs commits to the kernel, than about any technical parts of Bcachefs.

Welcome to Linux.

Concerning your questions:

How to keep your system clean?

• Subscribe to the security mailing list/blog etc. of your Linux distribution and for software that you use
• Update your system whenever there are updates available and reboot your system after applying the updates
• Activate the firewall of your system and block all incoming traffic which was not initiated by your own system
• Only install software which is distributed with your operating system or which is well known and you download from the official distribution page (for the sake of an example: If you use Google Chrome download the package/binary for your Linux from Googles Chrome page)
• Use an adblocker for your browser like ublock origin

What not to do:

• Never install software found on the internet or a forum
• Never run arbitrary script from the internet in your shell

Doing the above and applying some common sense should be fairly secure. As a rule of thump: Less software is always better and well known software will usually be better scrutinized and more secure. (YMMV)

As a normal desktop user your chances of getting your system infected when applying above rules are very low and they are your best line of defense.

Securing a Linux system, especially in depth, fills books, and detecting an infection is another topic for specialists. One way to improve your chances of having a non infected system is using an immutable Linux distribution like Fedora Silverblue, which should in theory be more resistant to infections and which should in theory allow to detect infections easily.

Unless you have a reason to expect being personally targeted (in which case: good luck to you ;-)), the answer to infections and similar is having regular full backups of all your data, so in case of an infection you can wipe your computer and recover everything. You should have regular full backups anyway, in case your SSD fails, your computer gets stolen and similar threats to your data.

Thanks for clarification!

… and I think you are point on, by now, the ship has sailed. I could use FreeBSD/OpenBSD on servers, but I’d rather run Debian everywhere. On desktops and for day to day usage, the BSDs are no viable options anymore, they simply lack support for common hardware (Wifi etc.) alone and the BSDs will realistically never be able to catch up the chasm anymore.

Not sure what you want to express. I actually used BSD a long time back, and the quality/documentation/coherence/beauty of the system are/were just on another level… Running Debian for nearly a decade now, because of compatibility (with hardware and software I need)… Linux improved a lot in the last nearly 3 decades and I am happy it exists, still I would be more happy if the BSDs would have stayed at least on an equal footing.

Fair point. :-)

At the end of the day, the OS has to run the software/applications one needs to get shit done… if it is macOS or Windows, that’s okay.

In my defense, I ran NetBSD for several years a long time back, and it was one of the best OS experiences I ever had. I am just old/pragmatic/flexible enough, to choose setups with less friction, if possible. ;-)

Still, I think it is a shame that Linux mostly took over the UNIX world and the BDS are left for hardcore nerds/embedding/game consoles and Solaris and co are not viable options anymore. Portable software and its stability benefited a lot from bugs detected on other platforms (OpenBSD was always a forerunner here).

Forced to use macOS at work, and for me it sucks (only slightly less than Windows):

• Slow UI (have to wait several seconds after login before spotlight is able to execute custom scripts)
• Finder is a PITA and one of the dumbest file managers I was ever forced to use
• No easy way to provision the system
• Annoying nagging to use all the Apple services/login with Apple ID
• Shitty software management (instead of a descent package manager, every fucking application has a popup for its own updates after opening, which breaks my flow)
• macOS only interacts decently with other Apple devices (iPhone etc.) and has its own ‘standards’, taking away my freedom to choose what I want to use.

Of course, your needs are your needs and if macOS fits your needs the best, all power to you.

Since you asked for OS and not Linux: OpenBSD and FreeBSD are beautiful systems w/o systemd. I would switch in a heartbeat if I wouldn’t need Linux for work reasons.

Fair point, I stand corrected: I didn’t know about their prior practices.

Still, I keep that Stellar Blade itself was one of the best recent game releases I experienced, and the game itself is fun!

Well, the fan service is a factor for sure… (Seriously, I find the discussion quite hypocritical: Sex sells, most actors/singers are quite good looking and most block buster movies have a cast of sexy/good locking people displaying status symbols. That is not even mentioning product placing and other shit going on in popular movies/TV shows.)

• A PS 5 original which is optimized well enough to run on the Steam Deck and some potatoes smoothly
• Responsive controls
• Great enemy design which telegraph their intentions clearly
• No in game purchases or other dark monetization schemes
• A complete game which seems mostly bug free (from what I heard so far)
• Shift Up Corporation seems like a company of gamer which create the games they want to play themselves

Stellar Blade and Shift Up Corporation fully deserve a great start, and I happily payed the full price of admission w/o feeling bad about it.