Astaroth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

Ignoring unauthorized copying

... Bill Gates said "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

The practice allowed Microsoft to gain some dominance over the Chinese market and only then taking measures against unauthorized copies. In 2008, by means of the Windows update mechanism, a verification program called "Windows Genuine Advantage" (WGA) was downloaded and installed. When WGA detects that the copy of Windows is not genuine, it periodically turns the user's screen black. This behavior angered users and generated complaints in China with a lawyer stating that "Microsoft uses its monopoly to bundle its updates with the validation programs and forces its users to verify the genuineness of their software".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

... the documents identified open-source software, and in particular the Linux operating system, as a major threat to Microsoft's domination of the software industry, and suggested tactics Microsoft could use to disrupt the progress of open-source software.

Secondly, the purchase UI seems to have been designed to ensure that a new player can never understand it. I’m sure like all things it becomes clear over time but jeez, did a professional team really work on that thing?

Yes it's professionally designed, like all microtransaction games the shop is the most important feature and they're always designed to be confusing by forcing the user to jump through hoops and use multiple currencies to make it less obvious how much money you end up spending on the game if you're a "whale".

They don't want you to be able to have a direct association between how much money or time anything costs, that's why these games are so predatory and you should not be playing them, regardless of what you think of the actual game itself.

Well, I will say, for a "free" to play game League isn't that bad (especially not when compared to mobile games), or at least not last I played (3~4 years ago) but they still use the same methods.

Also as others have mentioned, the game's reputation in terms of it's community isn't exactly stellar. Being very "toxic".

But what I think is even worse than the language, which you at least can mute, is that the most popular streamer for the game "Tyler1" constantly rages, shouts, screams, destroys equipment and punches furniture etc.

Let's just say if your son starts doing those kinds of things then it's not (only) because they're going through a teenage phase it's probably also because of bad influences from the game and its community.

why not use underscores?

Neovim

same reason why people buy games even though they can pirate them to get them for free

Already saw this a year or two ago, it's a great watch and would highly recommend anyone who hasn't seen it yet does watch it

End of Windows 7

Doesn't it already? At least when it comes to games

Google Search is way worse than it used to but still beats DDG by a mile.

I've tried SearX and it was meh, maybe there's some better instance than the one I tried though.

Yandex is good for reverse image search and when the American government makes western search engines block certain search results, but not that useful in general. Also for a period Yandex just kept bombarding me with endless captchas and was completely unusuable

Bing search is just DDG, or well DDG is just Bing.

Baidu search, tbh haven't tried it much, but even for chinese I had better search results on google search so yeah

yay -Syu

you don't use yay do you

Edit: typing yay without any other argument defaults to yay -Syu so there's no reason to type it out

I used to use Firefox before Chrome, and it was working great. Then at some point Firefox just started sucking and so I ended up switching to Chrome.

Around the same time I stopped using hotmail in favor of gmail as well

Now, probably almost 20 years later I'm back at Firefox

I haven't escaped gmail yet though

It wasn’t removed because of the pronouns though. It was removed because the mod description violated their community policies.

There are plenty of mods just like it that the site keeps up. Dozens of mods even remove black characters from games, which is way worse. The difference is, those mods don’t write long rants about how much they hate minorities and liberals in their descriptions.

if that's true then it makes sense

Edit: I just found out about the spider man pride flag removal mod debacle and read the official statement by Nexus Mods: https://www.nexusmods.com/news/14733

In regards to the replacement of Pride flags in this game, or any game, our policy is thus: we are for inclusivity, we are for diversity. If we think someone is uploading a mod on our site with the intent to deliberately be against inclusivity and/or diversity then we will take action against it. The same goes for people attempting to troll other users with mods deliberately to cause a rise. For our part, we will endeavour to do a better job of moderating our website to this ethos ourselves.

We aren't the authority on what users can and cannot mod. Us removing a mod only means it cannot be found at Nexus Mods, nothing more, nothing less. We also note that we are not the only site that has removed this mod from their platform. As a private business, we have a right to choose what content we do and do not want to host on our platform. Respect this right the same way you want respect for your rights.

By Nexus Mods' own words they will take action against anti diversity/inclusivity mods and actively take a stance on what kinds of mods are allowed on Nexus Mods.

So regardless of what the mod descriptions may or may not have said, it seems Nexus Mods would've deleted this pronoun removal mod as well.

These aren't mods I would've bothered using (and I don't even play these games either) but Nexus Mods trying to police what mods players are allowed to use is pretty shit.

The great thing about mods is they only affect the people who choose to get them and gives everyone more choices to change games to what they want, and I don't think anyone should try to force what kinds of mods are allowed or not.

The whole point of modding is that you find something you don't like or think could've been improved in some way, so you change it to your preference.

well if you're using a mono font (terminal) then there are no such thing as wider characters anyway, so for me that's not a drawback either

Just the other day I was looking into how to use a single shared WINE prefix for multiple users since it's not like any 2 users would ever use the same PC at the same time... TIL I was wrong

Unfortunately I don't really have anything helpful to add except it seems like Linux is more or less inherently built to support what you're looking for.

As a kid I had windows 98 (and later xp) dual booted with debian and at some point some version of suse. This was ~20 years ago

Well I used it just fine and I knew a bout the mysterious "root" and "sudo" that my dad would use but I was just playing some games and maybe using the web browser.

Using the GUI I never learned Linux and it wasn't until a few years ago that I started using Linux again, and it was only because I wouldn't be able to continue using Windows 7 anymore.

So I don't have any experience with teaching Linux and especially not to kids, but I think kids are actually really good at learning stuff if they need too, so give them a PC and the tools to figure things out, if they want to use it they've got to learn, and don't give them other options where they don't have to learn anything.

Maybe you should check some lets plays instead of watching tutorials. Just an episode or two to get an idea of what the game is and whether it seems to be up your alley or not.

The lets player will probably explain some mechanics as they come up while they're playing (at least in the beginning to help new viewers unfamiliar with the game) and that should be a lot easier to digest than someone purely explaining a bunch of game mechanics in one go.

From my understanding, at least one other necessary component is dxvk, and that wine is not enough.

dxvk is not necessary but it massively improves game performance on a lot of games, also keep in mind some games will actually not run if you use dxvk, so you sometimes (very rarely) have to use OpenGL instead and the only way I really found to do that was to have a wine prefix without dxvk. (I might've just been stupid though)

for the record only games that I had to use open GL for so far was Starcraft 2's Galaxy Editor (although the actual game itself runs fine with dxvk) and I had some problems with alt tabbing in really old versions of Warcraft 3 (1.27 and older)

Anyway, for a time I used Lutris a bit but now I always run wine through terminal because Lutris was great when it worked but there were seemingly no solutions for when it didn't (while running wine directly has never given me a problem).

And what's great with running wine directly through the terminal is that either it will run and you're good or you'll get some error messages saying that some .dll or whatever is missing (usually .net, visual studio, msvcr100+.dll, mscvcp100+.dll, ms*.dll, etc.) and you just use winetricks and go through the list until you find what you need.

One more thing that took a while for me to learn was that some games (if you're using mods) will need to be run along with WINEDLLOVERRIDES environment variable https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_User's_Guide#WINEDLLOVERRIDES.3DDLL_Overrides

for example when I play Need For Speed Most Wanted 2005 I start it with this command: WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8=n,b" wine speed.exe

another thing is sometimes you want to run games with some arguments, for instance before I got XCOM 2 on Steam and used AML I used to run it with this: wine XCom2.exe -noRedScreens -review

Now here's a pretty big caveat, which is that I use FISH instead of Bash which adds some big QoL improvements (in this case it's mainly about tab completion).

If I actually had to manually type in the commands or spend minutes going through history file every time I would never do it.

Although I suppose you could make an alias for each game.

Oh yeah and always run the games from the same directory as their .exe file is located in, more often than not it won't work if you just do wine /path/to/directory/game.exe instead of cd /path/to/directory && wine game.exe

Edit: some typos, and I just want to note that the && aren't supposed to include the amp; parts

To be honest I don't remember the last time I finished a game.

Not counting Rogue-lite games where you replay them over and over like Slay the Spire I think the most "recent" game that I've finished might be Mass Effect 3, which is from 2012...

Oh actually I did finish The Banner Saga 1 a few years ago. It's pretty good except for being somewhat lacking in Quality of Life features. The main selling point are the art style and gameplay-story integration. The tactical combat gameplay is okay but very repetitive, although it got a lot better in BS2 (which I haven't finished) with more varied mission objectives than just "kill every enemy" over and over again.

Skyrim and Xcom 2 are probably in my top 3 or at least top 5 most played games but I have never completed them.

The games I've replayed and finished the most times are Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 1&2 (only completed ME3 2 times).

I've replayed DA:O more than 10 times and I would highly recommend it, although I would recommend getting mods and especially get the increased memory patch so it doesn't crash as often.

Advance Wars By Web

Advance Wars is an old turn based strategy game, for the GBA (Game Boy Advance), and AWBW is a fan site to play AW online.

I've gotten pretty into it ever since Advance Wars Reboot was announced, and being able to play it in the web browser means I frequently find time to play...

Ironically I don't play the actual AW Remake because in classic nintendo style the multiplayer is extremely lacking, only being able to play with players added to friends list, not being able to upload/download maps except to friends, and extremely limited map sizes for online maps

Skyrim but it's an MMORPG (and I don't mean some shitty WoW clone with an Elder Scrolls skin draped over it like ESO)

Lego games like Lego Starwars has already been mentioned and I will second those (especially the newer ones that have split screen).

Divinity Original Sin is also great.

Honestly most games I can think of have already been mentioned and those who have not seem like they might not be that great of an option since it seems your partner isn't normally into gaming. (RTS in particular might be too hard)

But I will suggest some anyway just in case

Starcraft 2 has free online multiplayer which includes a COOP vs AI mode.

There's also a 2 player campaign adaption of Warcraft 3's normally single player campaign. Although it might only be available for pre-Reforged.

Also I didn't know about it before now, I googled it just in case, but apparently SC2 also has COOP mods for its campaigns.

You mentioned having a Switch so I will recommend Advance Wars Reboot and Wargroove 1 & 2, although there are no COOP campaigns but you can play multiplayer maps.

Besides Advance Wars Reboot Camp on Switch (or the originals for Gameboy, which you could play with emulator), there's also an online fan site called Advance Wars By Web where you can play advance wars in the web browser, although there's no single player.

Wargroove is also on Steam and besides the campaign and regular game itself there are puzzles.

And speaking of Puzzles, card games tend to have Puzzles. I haven't actually played Magic, Yu Gi Oh, etc. so I can't say for sure whether they have any, but there's puzzles in Faeria. (I would've recommended Might and Magic Duel of Champions, it had some great puzzles, but Ubisoft shut that game down many years ago)

Finally someone that mentions an Enable Right Click extension. There's a few out there but I use "Absolute Enable Right Click & Copy" as well.

On top of return youtube dislike & sponsorblock I will highly recommend BlockTube, it optionally removes shorts, the video pause and & popup asking if you're still there, and a few other things. I've tried the "remove youtube loudness normalization" option but volume is just all over the place no matter what.

Of course these are specific to youtube and not essential for anyone who uses an alternative

While fandom sucks (although I think it used to be fine before the redesign many years ago) and game companies/publishers are cheap, I still think 3rd party wikis is going to better, even shitty ones like fandom, because guess what?

Just like every other 'live service' (or even just old games!?! if you're Ubisoft) everything will be fine and dandy until one day some suit decides to shut down the wiki to cut down on costs and all that information and community work gets flushed down the toilet.

With that said, instead of them making some wiki website, it's nice when games lets you look up information in the game itself, without having to open the web browser and going to some wiki.

Warcraft 3, Age Series (AoE, AoE2, AoM, AoE3), Need For Speed Most Wanted (2005)

I played the first age of empires when I was 6 or 7 y/o and I've played all of the games besides AoE4 (including Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds).

As a kid we had few crappy dell computers connected to just a hub (LAN without internet) and would play a lot of Age of Empires 2 and C&C Red Alert 1 & 2 multiplayer.

Age of Empires and Red Alert were also games I would frequently play at small LAN parties (although everyone was really bad)

I played a bit of online AoE2 when AoE2 HD came out on steam but it was pretty bad so I stopped playing it. When DE came out I started watching AoE2 content but I'll never play it because I've come to greatly dislike Microsoft over the years.

I've replayed Need for Speed Most Wanted (and also Carbon) tens of times over the years, and I still play it every now and then (with mods now)

But the game I've played the most is probably Warcraft 3. I've played a ton of custom games on Battle.net (RIP) and it's what got me a bit into programming since I liked making custom maps and making triggers eventually led me to learn JASS (Just Another Scripting Language)

If Blizzard didn't completely ruin Warcraft 3 with WC3 Reforged Refunded I'd probably still be playing it and making custom maps every so often.

I have played a bit on private servers but it's just not the same anymore.

There's a pretty cool Warcraft 3 open source project called Warsmash though so maybe one day I'll start playing again.

Removing the awful camera zoom and graphics around the border when using Witcher Sense

Happens to me all the time 😅

And since I'm already holding down ctrl I've formed a habit of using ctrl + shift + v even though just regular ctrl + v works. Although for me it's mostly positive as I usually just want the text without formatting anyway.

I love fish.

Sometimes I wonder why people think using the terminal is so hard, then every once in a while when I'm not on my home PC and have to use Bash I get reminded of why

I've been meaning to try zsh since it can supposedly do everything fish can while still being posix compliant, but I've never felt the need to not be using fish so I just never got around to it

(I also use Google when I need a word definition - I like the layout and ability to see synonyms quickly.)

yeah that's one thing I really miss from when I had google as default search engine, typing word/phrase + define and actually getting a useful result. DDGs version is barely even helpful at all

TWP is even better than just google translate because it lets you choose between Google, Bing, Yandex, and DeepL translations, if a translation looks sus you can take a look at what the other translation engines say.

At least on PC

I tried to get some JumpStart games to run with DOSBOX a few years ago on Windows 7. Iirc I managed to install but not run the game.

I recently tried a bit to try and get another 16bit game run on Arch Linux with WINE in win98 or 95 mode but that still didn't pan out.

Honestly it's probably doable in some way without one but next time I try I'll probably use a VM (Virtual Machine).

Honestly nothing will beat Warcraft 3 (pre reforged refunded) custom games for LAN parties.

Some of my favorite maps: Warlock (any 1.0X version), either teams or FFA, Uther Party, Battle Tanks, Archer Wars Legacy, Survival Chaos, Legion TD, Farmer vs Hunter, Founders of the North, Hungry Hungry Felhounds, The Predator (Version FINAL), etc.

Honestly there's just too many to count and even remember

the date-time in the top left corner looks weird. The numbers are all greyed out except for only a small section

I would recommend Arch and derivatives (supposedly EndeavourOS is Arch but better for beginners, I've never used it though) or NixOS, they're highly configurable & have good package managers.

I would not recommend debian or it's derivatives because apt package manager is way worse than pacman.

Also while Arch is a rolling release OS, it's not really unstable, it's not like it constantly breaks with updates.

I've used Linux Mint a bit at a relative's house so they can have an easier & more "stable" GUI experience, but there weren't all the packages I needed on the GUI software manager, and even some packages that existed didn't want to install until I used the terminal anyway.

And as I mentioned earlier apt is just a worse package manager than pacman so it's a pain to use.

Especially since I was using plain Bash without good tab completion unlike Fish or Zsh, which makes the much longer apt commands that much more annoying to type in compared to just -Syu -S -Ss -Qs -Rns.

And it's not just that the commands and package names are better and shorter on pacman compared to apt, but there's more packages (and I'm not even counting AUR).

For example, on Linux Mint I were going to install wine-mono and wine-gecko, which you're going to want if you plan to play windows games outside steam proton, but they didn't exist and I had to follow the https://wiki.winehq.org/Mono and https://wiki.winehq.org/Gecko installation guides instead of just downloading 2 binaries through pacman.

And tbh I eventually gave up on wine-mono and just got the .net runtimes I needed through winetricks.

If you're really supper worried and paranoid then instead of Arch you can use NixOS, it's whole shtick is that you can have multiple versions and always roll back to before anything broke.

Thank you for the correction. It was 2 years ago + I was really inexperienced so I could be misremembering things and/or just have been doing things incorrectly

At the moment, I don’t have the hardware to run games… Will try it out next year…

There's plenty of great old games and also newer games that don't require high specs.

For example indie games like Slay the Spire & Hades

And there's always Nintendo games like Pokemon that you can play through emulators (Bsnes, Mgba, MelonDS, Dolphin, Citra, Yuzu, etc.)

Does windows add an extra character at the end that gets converted to new line on linux? Because the other day I were copying a script and after pasting it an extra line was added after every single line, even the empty lines.

how it looked when I copied it:

bla
bla

bla

what it turned into:

bla

bla



bla
 

If you're going to be using a DE and mostly do stuff through the GUI instead of terminal/command-line then make sure you can go admin mode (Root/Sudo).

Besides small annoyances I had with KDE Plasma 5's UX the main reason I didn't like it was that often enough I would have to use admin privileges but I couldn't do it through the GUI File Manager (Dolphin) so I frequently had to use the terminal.

It should be possible to have admin privileges in Dolphin but I was a noob and didn't know how (and still don't even now).

If you end up facing that issue then either be a bit smarter than me and look up how to do that or use Nemo, another file manager, which is more or less the same thing as Dolphin except when I ended up using it on Linux Mint a while back it let me use it as Root as a feature out of the box.

And for the record I don't like Linux Mint, apt package manager sucks (package managers are basically app stores where you get all your stuff), but at least it was super easy to install and Nemo was a good file manager.

If you don't mind tinkering and have a secondary device with an internet connection in case you break something then I would recommend Arch Linux. Or you could try it in a Virtual Machine I guess.

Pacman (Arch's package manager) is a hundred times better than Apt, and then there's the AUR on top.

Also while I've never used it I hear a lot of good things about EndeavorOS, Arch Linux but supposedly easier

Steam has proton which lets you play Windows games on Linux.

You can use Lutris, Heroic Launcher, Bottles, or just plain WINE as well but for a lot of people the easiest way they know is to just add a non-steam game to steam.

I felt an urge to play Skyrim again, had a lot of fun for a day or two, but eventually after I added some more mods I started getting frequent CTDs and have been trying to figure out what the problem is (and how to fix it) through the crash logs.

I might just have to remove Immersive Citizens from the load order but I really don't want to because it really makes the NPCs feel so much more "alive".

Have you seen the video? The shooter getting "pranked" had both hands occupied carrying a paper bag and was being followed and harassed for over 10 seconds while repeatedly telling the prankster to stop.

It does seem like an overreaction to shoot immediately instead of trying to threaten first but I'm not sure.

I would've fully sided with the shooter if they're weren't in a mall with other people around and probably security right around the corner, because then he would've been much more at risk if he doesn't shoot and the prankster tries to rob him or w/e.