Auster

As I like to source my own ROMs, those 4 tend to be my primary places to look:

• https://www.gog.com/forum/general/roms_obtainable_on_gog_compendium/page1

• https://itch.io/games/ (can filter by platform-specific tags for the homebrew ROMs)

• https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/10918/where-to-legally-acquire-content-to-play-on-retropie/1?lang=en-US

• https://github.com/farmerbb/RED-Project/wiki/

Also other places, but most way smaller and mainly found through the 4 above.

Maybe also cross-post in data-hoarding and archival communities? Seen some in the time I’ve been here on the fediverse.

But about how they would work, I think you can compare any to caffeine:

Caffeine is a drug with stimulant effect that people use to circumvent tiredness. But the stimulus is not lasting, so the person needs to drink again after some hours. And as the body grows resistant to it, and the brain associates the product to the effect, you need to take in more and more, at the risk of getting abstinence otherwise.

Besides the legal issue, there’s also the problem of such drugs being highly addictive, highly damaging, and those who distribute such drugs not caring much for laws overall. So even if such drugs indeed trigger a part of the person ADHD would hinder, the risks far outweigh the benefits.

Something pretty simple but that I think works very well, at the end credits, at the very end, when there’s something in the lines of “…and a special thanks, To You”.

Phone systems can be somewhat volatile (is that the word?), so while the process isn’t as hard as tutorials paint it to be, if you’re worried about bricking your device for tinkering, I’d suggest leaving it aside for now.

Or, stretching a bit, if you have the money to at least get the cheapest phone you can find (usually old/used ones), you can use it as a burner/throway phone to test and get familiarized with the process first.

I’m still trying to figure out how all of this fits together.

A suggestion I give, if you feel you hit a roadblock, give it some time to digest the information. Stress/exhaustion can hinder the capacity to absorb all the info.

And from my experience, a lot of Linux’s workings either are related to each other, or at least the knownledge you get from one thing can be applied retroactively. So, from what I went through back when I was new to Linux, doing that, putting a given project aside for some days while sticking to the overall environment, allowed both things, to digest the information and to learn stuff I could then use back in such projects.

Any sources you can remember

Sadly no specific one. I dig a lot and try to sift pieces and bits that are useful.

Though, in retrospect, Stack Exchange’s subforums, which often appear in researches, often also were sources for several of my solutions, even among some of the super old replies.

(Also sorry if I’m not very direct in my answers; am bit of a rambler and I have the habit of constructing essay-like answers, intro/development/conclusion)

Nowadays, I only talk more frequently to a handful of people I found through such niches, but some of those, I’ve been talking for some 10 years now. So I’d say yes, I think so.

without all the garbage

Yes, that.

You can make a permanent install, yeah. In that previous computer I had, I kept a dual boot with Win10 and Ubuntu for about 2 years, each taking about half the internal HD’s size. And during install of Linux systems (Android x86-based ones included), usually you can install Grub which lets you choose during boot which system to boot, or if you don’t touch anything, to automatically boot a given system (you can configure which is picked automatically within the OS).

Would flashing a vanilla ROM be an option?

Ventoy on USB sticks is good as an installation media, not a boot media, unless you want to use your ISOs as temporary systems due to their respective live boots.

For creating a dual boot, some systems have in-built tools during installation for that, usually named along the lines of “install besides/along another system”, though worth noting you must have unalocated space for that. If you still have Windows on your machine, its partition manager is pretty straight forward for freeing space, in case you don’t want to tinker with GParted for whatever reason.

About special configs, maybe you need to disable secure boot in the BIOS menu to run Ventoy sticks, though I may be getting VMs confused with dual booting, so take with a grain of salt that. And answering also the secure boot question, you enter the BIOS menu usually by turning off the computer, and as you turn it back on, spam F2 until the BIOS screen appears.

About making the switch, alternativeto.net is a great resource, and Wine + VMs can help too, though the dual boot may make those two a bit redundant.

About physical risks to your device, afaik there aren’t any likely to happen. At most you’d need wipe the original memory, but usually installation ISOs have the function for that, including GParted within the liveboot.

Questions I skipped are the ones I don’t know what to answer.

Maybe not an ADHD community, but rather joining communities for niches you like? I have a gut feeling it’s easier to find potential friends if the person narrows down to that.

Linux Mint Xfce

Mint because it doesn’t break often and usually fixes are simple enough, and Xfce because, though I don’t know how well it fares compared to others nowadays, it was the variant that would run the lightest in a previous computer I had some years ago, so I grew attached to it.

Also besides Steam, Heroic (for GOG, EGS and Amazon Prime) and Mitch (for Itchio) work fine on it.

Hadn’t noticed. Thanks!

Oooooooh

Thanks for the explanation, and now I’m interested in trying - hopefully I can find recipes easily

Trying to remember what oatmeal is, but maybe those chocolate balls can be compared to Brazilian “brigadeiro” candies?

Another point, if protecting children online is indeed a legitimate argument, and not an scapegoat to make passing the law easier, shouldn’t be the parents to decide what the children see online?

Unsure on the creator side of things, but besides PeerTube, which uses ActivityPub like Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed, looking at Grayjay’s sources list, there are some others, like Rumble, Odysee, BiliBili (Chinese), Nico Nico (Japanese), Dailymotion and Bitchute. Maybe a start to check?

Python and other programming languages can do that too, if the person also wants everything offline, and/or can’t focus while waiting for webpages to load.

Been using that myself and though not ideal since too many concurrent interests, it helps a bunch.