GOG for offline games, Steam games that are online multiplayer or can benefit from cloud saves.

Noita, Slay the Spire, Children of Morta, Brotato…

Donwside to 2: Your VM becomes harder to move between hardware, you lose snapshotting capabilities from a copy-on-write image.

5 is flexible, but has limitations. For example you wouldn’t want to run databases on NFS volumes.

If initialization time is the only problem with 4, you could create several smaller images on the disk. Create the first one, initialize the VM and set up an LVM volume on it, then start creating more volumes and extend the LVM volume.

There’s a long list of caveats when running VS Code over SSH. By comparison, text editors:

• Work on Alpine remotes
• Work on older distributions, and other *NIX systems
• Have no problems with SSH key passphrases or security keys
• Only require a few MB of memory
• When run in tmux are largely resilient to SSH connection issues

If you frequently work on remote systems you frequently only get command line access, where you can still use vim/nano/emacs but not a full IDE like VS Code. In that case you might find it more convenient to learn one text editor well and forgo the IDE.

The alternative would be a non-standard diaper app that, rather than hiding the incoming call, would pick it up and drop it. I don’t know if such software exists.

I assume you meant dialer app 😆 . But anyway, for some Android phones you can use call screening.

Both are concerning, but as a former academic to me neither of them are as insidious as the harm that LLMs are already doing to training data. A lot of corpora depend on collecting public online data to construct data sets for research, and the assumption is that it’s largely human-generated. This balance is about to shift, and it’s going to cause significant damage to future research. Even if everyone agreed to make a change right now, the well is already poisoned. We’re talking the equivalent of the burning of Alexandria for linguistics research.

Any “survivors” type game - Brotato, Vampire/Soulstone Survivors, Nordic Ashes, etc.

Roguelikes (I like Noita these days).

Card based games - Slay the Spire, Monster Train, Guild of Dungeoneering, …

Darkest Dungeon.