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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Generally you should be considering which desktop environment(DE) you want to use as well, cause it’s the main thing you’ll be looking at.

    Mint is a good beginner, no fuss distro that runs the Cinnamon DE by default. It’s also based on Ubuntu, built on top of the normal version of Ubuntu.

    Ubuntu has several different options for DEs distributed as ‘flavors’ - Ubuntu itself comes with GNOME, but there’s also Kubuntu which has KDE, and multiple other options available.

    If you’ve got the time and a free USB drive, I’d recommend making bootable media for a few options to try them out - both Mint and Ubuntu(as well as many other different distros) have live environments to play around in when you go to install them, and it’s worth trying out a few different DEs to see which one you like.









  • Inefficient/unoptimized would be an accurate description. I think it’s important to add, for bethsoft games specifically, that the save includes all changes to objects, even if the player themselves didn’t interact with them(e.g. Physics interactions, explosions moving things, npcs bumping stuff around), and also includes all NPC changes. Master files(ESMs) get loaded, then the save loads the changes it has baked in to the databases. So, when you load up a save that has traveled the world and loaded a lot of things into save memory, the engine has to sit there and reconcile all the changes with the ESMs, which can add up quick if you’re playing modded.


  • Save bloat is more often related to excess values not being properly discarded by the engine, if I remember right. So it’s not that the objects themselves take up a lot of space, but the leftover data gets baked into the save and can end up multiplying if the same scripts/references/functions get called frequently.

    It was a lot worse with Skyrim’s original engine, and got better in Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE. The worst bloat happens with heavy modlists, of course, as they’re most likely to have poor data management in some mod.