I burned a Blu-ray a few years back just to supplement some of our encrypted Google Drive backups with copies that would be more accessible in case of my demise, or physically grabbable in case of disaster. I know they won’t last forever, but if Drive shut down on the same day my local copies failed at least I have an option.

Otherwise, I haven’t used physical media in years. I got the 4K LOTR set when it came out and tried to use it, but it ended up being easier to just pirate the rips like anything else.

To be clear, I just mean release as in B42 becoming available as default. Their long term plans are great though, I look forward to playing them in 2030 haha.

I haven’t played multiplayer, but Build 42 is really shaping up. Game is getting more survival-y in that you can make a lot more stuff from components (ore, clay etc.) and there is real wildlife/ livestock to make more food craftable from renewable post-apocalyptic sources. The lighting has been overhauled, some older areas have been revamped to be more realistic, buildings can be much taller. They even added a bit of randomness to the map with random basements. I’m really hopeful this patch gets guns right too, they’ve improved previously but still take way too long to become viable IMO.

They must be pretty close to official release, it’s really getting there.

Definitely agree. Had a couple of them and loved some of the ideas (touchpad sticks, gyro to mouse aim, all of the Steam Input flexibility) but they never really eclipsed my rechargeable Dualshocks in terms of feeling right. Taking some of the Deck’s refinements and giving it another spin is welcome.

In a weird way this makes Linux a microkernel. They’re “macro” but isolated and cooperative. Coolest patch set I’ve read about in a while.

You are getting this from Xwayland, so you’re running a rootless X server in the background. It’s nice that it works seamlessly, but it’s not really Wayland doing anything but managing the X window.

Agreed. It’s one thing if it’s climate change or something where we at least need to put a plan out there even if there’s zero chance of it happening, but for basic common sense stuff like this don’t bother. If we ever get back to trying to make average American lives better with the government, this is low hanging fruit.

I don’t have experience with MSI recently, but I’d be really surprised if you couldn’t flash a new BIOS off the system partition or FAT32 USB. You may not be able to update from Linux directly, but almost all motherboards I’ve seen support doing it from the BIOS interface.

Intel has been struggling overall, and lately has been letting some of its Linux engineers go. Nothing absolutely fundamental has been affected yet (AFAICT) but I guess Clear Linux didn’t make the cut.

I never had an issue with Lutris + a pirated copy. It’s trivial to find the anadius rip around in a torrent. Fuck the EA launcher.

It would allow SSH if the desktop is locked, they’re separate. If you can get in via SSH then you can poke around logs like dmesg and see what’s up. There will probably be some messages to give you something more specific to search with.

Also, does anyone seriously think they’d do this without some sort of carve out for Steam to work? I can’t imagine a worse idea at this time than for a desktop oriented distro to break the gaming use case that hard.

It’s more of an issue with torrent seeding. You need to be able to accept incoming connections to seed, so you need a VPN/router to allow incoming traffic to a certain port to reach your torrent client.

So, not a problem for leeching, but if you are trying to meet ratio requirements, could be a big problem.

Sports gambling is just terrible for everyone except the bloodsuckers that run it. Sports teams don’t want it because it incentivizes cheating / rigging games. Personal bankruptcy and domestic abuse skyrocket when people lose money they can’t afford to lose. Now the apps feed an unstable addiction literally all day long.

Thanks to the Supreme Court for pulling a bullshit ruling out of their collective asses in 2018 that makes everything worse for average Americans.

Shit, I don’t even gamble and I’m just sick of their logos and ads all over every thing when I watch a game. Used to be they had “Gambling Prohibited” up around the stadium, now they may as well own the teams.

Pace makers keep you from dying so they’re sort of on a different level of need. Also, if corps did planned obsolescence on one, you’re probably not around to buy another.

If they were invented today, they would definitely have a predatory subscription model for “monitoring” your heart, or require occasional maintenance at cost to the end user.

The prequels were redeemed? That’s news to me.

I’m with you on 1 and 2, but “reduced lingual skills” I think is a bit of a stretch. Becoming fluent in another language takes a lot of effort and people only do it if they have a good long term reason.

I think it’s more likely this would cover the vacation / short term business case that is already covered by human interpreters (or apps already) instead.

Yeah, I was part of those arguments too. In a perfect world Linux would have enough market share to warrant native ports, but Proton getting Wine one-click integrated into Steam and easily targetable is a more realistic bridge to that scenario than holding out on principle. As it is Linux gaming is in the best shape it’s ever been in thanks to Proton.

I also think the argument held more weight 20 years ago, before we started packaging up end user apps in giant self-contained images regularly.

This is a non-issue. If you’re a gaming company in the era of Proton, it makes more sense to just focus on Windows issues than to open yourself to support requests from people running any brand of Linux. Proton is just so much easier to target than standalone Linux and you can serve the Linux community / Steam Deck users without needing any actual expertise.

I agree. I have become more amenable to things like Flatpak or Podman/Docker to keep the base system from being cluttered up with weird dependencies, but for the most part it doesn’t seem like there’s a huge upside to going full atomic if you’re already comfortable.