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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Seconding other’s comments for: Signalis and Soma

    Some unorthodox / overlooked suggestions:

    • Project Zomboid (PC).
      • Imagine the Sims 1, but it’s during a zombie apocalypse with a GTA sized massive map. The situation is so dire that the game outright tells when you start that your character dies, and the actual gameplay is just you finding out how your character died.
      • The survival: is needing to move to scavenge for resources and trying to build a safe place to sleep.
      • The horror: is trying to escape the literal hordes of zombies.
      • Sidenote: This is a great grindy multiplayer game.

    • Metroid Fusion (GBA).
      • It’s a platforming game, but it’s legitimately terrifying.
      • The survival: revolves being trapped on a space station going around fighting and fleeing difficult enemies
      • The horror: revolves around the antagonist: [redacted for story spoiler reasons]
      • Sidenote: This is a great game to show people who haven’t yet realized that you can make horror without being an FPS.

    • Frostpunk (PC).
      • It’s a city-builder game with survival resource management gameplay and with non-lovecraftian cosmic horror themes.
      • The survival: You are the last city on Earth. If you run out of resources: you die. There isn’t enough resources to save everyone and you have to make hard decisions. If the people lose hope from your decisions: you die.
      • The horror: The world’s climate dropped another 3 degrees today. There are 100 of us left. Only 5 people from yesterday’s expedition made it back with food. We need to send 20 survivors out to look for scrap metal to repair the heating system or everyone will freeze. We need to put our children to work in the coal mine, it doesn’t matter how many die, if they don’t mine, we all die. The next day: things get worse. The day after: things get worse. etc… Will you survive?
      • Sidenote: This has one of the best soundtracks in all of gaming. I’d put it up there with Halo, Skyrim, Homeworld.


  • Disappointed at linux directly? No.

    Disappointed at linux indirectly? Absolutely.

    • Nvidia’s linux support: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ
    • Ubuntu
      • Unity (at least it’s gone from main installs now)
      • Snaps
    • KDE
      • Version 4 (at least it’s good now)
    • Fedora
      • Forcing their own broken version of OBS that didn’t work (they finally removed it)
    • Wayland
      • Not supporting screenshare (fixed with portals)
      • Not supporting global shortcuts (currently being investigated)
      • Accessibility (currently being investigated)
    • Gnome
      • Not supporting system trays
        • Most people don’t want their background apps (discord, teams, docker/podman, OBS, etc…) to be filling up the foreground.
      • Not supporting server side decorations
        • Literally the stupidest decision ever made
        • Not supporting it forces all other developers to spend their time integrating their own client side decorations just so users can move/close a window in someone else’s desktop environment. (example: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-408#%3A~%3Atext=Client-side+window+decorations)
        • Not supporting it means every developer has to deal with issues being reported to them that aren’t their fault.
        • Not supporting it means every developer now has less time to work on their own applications.
        • Not supporting it means that humanity has wasted a stupid amount of time reimplementing the same thing over and over again instead of just once.
        • Gnome saying that: “it’s not part of the standard”
          • Buddy, you’re the only one holding it back from being standardised.
            • Cosmic: Supported
            • Hyprland: Supported
            • KDE (Kwin): Supported
            • Unity (Mir): Supported
            • Niri: Supported
            • Sway: Supported
            • etc…: Supported
            • Gnome (Mutter, and those downstream like Muffin): Not Supported
            • It has… by all metrics… become… THE defacto standard.
          • “It’s not in the official wayland standard”
            • Buddy, wayland needs to support more than just the desktop metaphor. It also needs to support things like phones, handhelds, kiosk machines, car infotainment systems, etc… where having a window on a screen doesn’t make sense. You are a desktop environment using the desktop metaphor, you need to support the basic functionality of moving windows that pop up on the screen, and you are the only one failing, and not only failing but failing so hard you’re negatively affecting all those around you, and not only that but not being accountable to how your actions are negatively affecting others.


  • It’s Phoronix, the articles are good but the comments on every article are unbearable.

    It’s basically a meme at this point.

    There’s a bunch of people in the forum with poor awareness and emotional control throwing tantrums, typically over any project with a code of conduct (even something as simple as “Don’t be an asshole”) because they believe it infringes on their right to be inconsiderate.

    New projects want to avoid the drama and issues of projects from decades past, so naturally they add codes of conduct which causes those folks above to have hissyfits everywhere about those projects anytime they or something adjacent to them is mentioned.

    Most places warn then kick those users out, and then there’s Phoronix.




  • It’s scanning your computer by default to check what programs are you using or what games are you playing

    This is exactly why I like Discord.

    If I’m online and not playing a game, I want my friends to see that I’m online so they can message me.

    If I’m playing a game, I want my friends to know I am playing that game.

    If it’s a multiplayer game, they can join in.

    If it’s a single player campaign focused game, they know I won’t be keen to play a multiplayer game right now, but they can still message me if something big and spontaneous is happening.

    If I don’t want to be contacted at all, I close discord.



  • It depends:

    The traditional DEs (KDE, Gnome and Cinnamon) already have their own screensavers.

    The newer ones have coalesced around an extension to wayland called “ext-session-lock-v1”:

    This protocol allows for a privileged Wayland client to lock the session and display arbitrary graphics while the session is locked.

    You can see support for it here: https://wayland.app/protocols/ext-session-lock-v1#compositor-support

    It’s on basically all the new ones except where it doesn’t make sense, such as:

    • Gamescope (designed to keep a game fullscreen at all times)
    • Cage (for kiosk machines, basically gamescope but for interactive maps in shopping malls)
    • Weston (the reference wayland compositor which should have protocols that everything uses, I’m not sure how useful it would be to add screensaver support to the reference implementation then have it popping up on in-car-displays when you’re trying to follow a map while driving)

    Everyone who needs it has it already.

    There will probably be an ext-session-lock-v2 and get pulled into the traditional DEs at some point, but probably after a whole bunch of getting everyone around the table and in agreement on some security questions: how do we prevent malicious software setting themselves as a screensaver for a screenjacking attack?, what happens when the screensaver crashes?, that kind of stuff…






  • Gotos being bad falls in the it depends category.

    Bad:

    • When you think you’re going to do something clever (when you should probably be reaching for a different tool that you may or may not know exists)

    Good:

    • When in the form of a jump that’s was written by a sound compiler
    • When learning how assembly works
    • When working on codecs and you’re actually going to spend the many hours to get everything right.
    • Labelled breaks in nested for loops
    • Embedded systems when resources are constrained
    • When writing debuggers
    • When writing anti-cheat systems
    • And finally, when you actually need to because you’re manually managing things (e.g. you’re writing a kernel)


  • I’m more interested in what the Oil shell has been doing, it has a higher potential roof while keeping backwards compatibility rather than the current standard of affairs 10ish year development cycle of a new shell with slight improvements.

    Switching shells can be a massive pain in the ass, so if we’re making a change, it has to be worth it.

    Oil looks like it could be worth it and then some.