Wow you weren't kidding lol. I watched the 2.0 demo and at this timestamp there's a CSAM-related room title that Matthew was invited to (at the top of the right window). Granted it's probably someone stream-sniping, but it goes to show that there's apparently active bad actors trying to interfere.
Whenever I have something to say, someone has already said it. People are always on the ball here.
This is a contender for one of the worst things I've ever read. I'm sure this happens more often than we realize but that is just brutal. Someone's making money off this and it makes me sick. RIP Dragoneer. I've not visited FA much but it's always felt like "Old Internet" to me and I appreciate that.
Gaming has been the only pathway to mainstream desktop since forever. I've been around for a hot minute and I remember that consistently, the "real Linux users" for years repeated "we don't need gaming this is an adult OS go back to Windows and play with your toys" and then turned around and whined that no one wanted to use desktop Linux. Valve stepped in and casually created the year of the Linux desktop as a side-effect of just wanting an escape hatch for their business model. Now the casuals and elitists alike will have a better experience via the magic of Marketshare, and all it really took is not listening to people that don't know what's good for them.
"Escape hatch" specifically refers to the speculation that Valve is positioning themselves in a way that they can't be forced into paying fees for existing on the Windows platform, and that if push comes to shove they can say they only support Linux now. This hasn't happened yet, but it's a strategic stance which will likely prevent it from even beginning to happen. This doesn't have to do with the Steam Deck specifically; it was also part of their intentions with the Steam Machine and etc.
Their rough new user experience is concerning though. From what they described I suspect many of their "problems" are not actually "real", but it doesn't really matter because they still ended up in a scenario where they thought there were problems. How did they end up thinking that everything must be done with terminal while using Ubuntu? I know in the last ~10 years there's been a big focus on the new user experience, so what more can be done to prevent this? My gut says there are too many online resources that are confusing new users when they try to onboard themselves - especially resources that are old, written for other distros, or written for people who just want to find the command they can copy-paste to do something.
There's an unnerving lack of substance over on reddit. Recently I decided to look at reddit for the first time since last June, and every post's comments had 1k people saying absolutely nothing worth reading. It feels like I'm reading AI-written posts that are in the uncanny valley of almost making sense and almost being on-topic. News articles have people that literally only talk about the exact words that were in the headline. Every single post's top comments must be lame "jokes" or one-liners, and those must have several replies that riff off the joke in decreasingly-funny ways.
I've picked up a strong habit of immediately looking in comment sections for good discussion and TL;DR's on Lemmy posts and it took me a while to realize that I wasn't actually reading anything in reddit comment sections. The words pass through my brain and nothing of value is absorbed, over and over. It feels like low-hanging fruit to say "reddit is all bots now" but there's something seriously wrong about how it feels over there. You only really need ~10-20 top-level replies on a post to get a broad spectrum of answers, and Lemmy comment sections feel solid for the content that's here. I wish there were more communities here (especially niche ones), but I'm grateful for what we have.
Yes, almost certainly.
On a related note, I've found Dockge to be powerful enough for my usecases. Worth a try if you don't like the adversarial relationship of Portainer.
For normal desktop users, yeah Debian Stable + Flatpaks is a winning combo for picking the software that you want to be cutting-edge and leaving the rest to rock-solid stability. Normally Linux distros keep a full ecosystem of packages that interop and depend on each other, but solutions like Flatpak have their own little microcosm of dependencies that can be used independently of the host distro. There are also Debian Backports for when you want native Debian packages that are more cutting-edge but still compiled to work with your older base system. Backports are not available for most packages but sometimes the important ones are available, like the Linux kernel itself. You can also try to compile your own backports, but you'll be responsible for updating it.
Maybe it needs to be more obvious that there are many ways to do things in Linux, and give new users a short "learning to learn" primer on how things operate differently in Linux-land, and where/how to look online for help. There are always first-boot popups but I imagine most people are conditioned to click out of them without even reading; forcing people to confirm a couple times that they want to skip "very helpful reading" may cut down on people that play the search engine lottery on what information they use for their first steps.
Also semi-related, I hope that mainstream Linux eventually "un-stupids" computers for regular people again. I get the distinct feeling that Microsoft and Apple have, at least somewhat intentionally, imposed 'learned helplessness' onto average computer users. "Oh computers are magic no one knows how they work. We are the only wizards that could possibly understand them and we will sell you the solution." Windows/OSX/iOS/etc are so locked down that people have rightfully learned over time that if they run into a problem, there really is no solution. I suspect that's permeating into the new user experience on Linux where people will encounter one problem and throw their hands up and say "fucking computers" instead of using basic problem solving to try another approach.
I recommend a dead man's switch like Healthchecks.io, which can be selfhosted for free. Whenever you have something that's regularly occurring, add an extra callout to your unique Healthchecks callout UUID as part of the automation, and Healthchecks will send you a notification if something misses its callout schedule. You can also attach whatever data (e.g. a log) to the callout so you can look back through the run history. IIRC Borg will give you a non-zero return code if it detects problems, so you can send e.g. https://hc-ping.com/your-uuid-here/$? and a non-zero code will signal a notification as well (more examples here).
Also, Borgmatic is really easy to use for managing Borg repos. There's a lot of configuration options (including Healthchecks.io integration) but you can delete like 90% of it for normal usecases.
I used Proxmox for a couple years and it's good if you run a lot of VMs or LXCs, but I found that I'm not really the target audience. I ended up only running one Debian VM for my Docker containers. It was fine, but I eventually felt that Proxmox added no value for me, and the end result was sacrificing some memory and performance from using virtio emulations for CPU/GPU/RAM/filesystems. If your machines only have 8-16GB of RAM I don't think it would be a good idea, as I've seen the rule of thumb is to dedicate 2GB for Proxmox's usage, which is in addition to any guest OS's requirements. Meanwhile I have a Debian install on a VPS that takes about 450MB of RAM.
For me, pros:
Cons:
If you want more psychological horror emotional abuse, try Echo, which gets frequently compared to DDLC. It's set up like a gay furry visual novel to start with, but it's more like Night in the Woods where the paths are who you hang out with instead of who you explicitly want to "date". As the story progresses it gets extremely dark. I could only do one of the paths before I had to look up the others because I'm too much of a chicken.
Fair warning that it's a slow burn to get to the rough stuff, but the story is solid and it's humorous on the way so it's not boring.
Edit: I hadn't played Echo in a few years so I went to the wiki to refresh myself on the story and it is a lot more tightly-written and lore-heavy than I realized. Each "path" has a different story with a subset of the lore, so you need to play all of them to begin to understand the full picture. There's also a sequel, a prequel, and a prequel-prequel(?), which all presumably contribute to the lore. I see there's a giant Let's Play of most of it, which I think I now feel compelled to watch at some point. It would probably be less spooky to experience it with other people in control.
Edit 2: I strongly recommend you don't play Carl's first, solely on the basis of it not being a strong introduction to the game. Carl's route takes a long time to get into the swing of things, and the story payoff doesn't entirely make up for it (though I still really loved this path by the end). This was apparently the first path they wrote, and cynically I think that shows a bit. Leo's path was much more of a page-turner for me throughout and I think it gives a much stronger sample of the unique Echo flavor. Leo's is the one I played years ago and there's maybe a dozen moments from this path which will never leave my brain.
I've seen people online say to do Carl->Leo->TJ->Jenna->Flynn, and with regards to Carl and Leo I'd say objectively that's probably the correct order in terms of lore unfolding, but there's only a couple of small references from Carl's route that you can notice in Leo's route, so if you're on the fence about whether you're even interested in the game at all I'd do Leo's first so you can get a proper introduction to the game's themes.
The Ladybird browser, which is highly related to this project, just did a PR event yesterday. That's why it's coming up years later, right after people were alerted to the project and it got more scrutiny. I appreciate knowing about this, as opposed to not knowing about it. It gives me the chance to evaluate whether I want to dedicate energy into supporting a browser primarily being developed by a sexist who thinks not being a cis male == politics.
From last time. TL;DR real weird vibes. This is a PR where you say "oops, that makes sense", click merge, and go on living your life. Not whatever this ended up being.
They've more or less already done that with Proton and DXVK. Nearly all Windows games "just work" on Linux without developers needing to change anything. TBH whenever big studios develop Linux versions of games they're usually not well-done anyway; for now it's better if people develop with their comfy Windows tools and let compatibility tools take care of the translation. When the balance shifts to Linux dominance we can start pressing on them to learn how to use Linux SDKs.
For me personally, this is just the straw that broke the camel's back. I'm not a fan of the languages it's written in, its license, its immaturity, and that it's mostly being developed by one person. Additional minor strike for communicating through discord. Now we learn that the most influential person on the project has some real bad vibes and it's probably best to give this a pass as a whole.
In my eyes the whole selling point of the browser is being an independent underdog with a clean slate, but what's the point if we're starting with a list of IOUs for things that are already bad out of the gate.
The previous person was worried that Valve wouldn't be able to convince "a sizable chunk of users" to move to Linux because all of the software they sell is written for Windows. If we apply a little bit of critical thinking, we realize that Valve has actually already thought of this(!) and applied a different(!) solution that solves the same problem(!) without requiring "everyone to write software for something that's not the platform nearly all users are running". If you want to see Valve's attempt at getting everyone to switch to Linux without using compatibility tools you should look into how successful their Steam Machine campaign was.
Ugh, I feel like there's no way I could do Arches if it's way scarier than Echo. Maybe if I only do it during the day. I'm fairly sure when I did Echo I played it into the night and regretted that. I do feel like dipping back into it all for the story though. I think I'll try the let's play series at some point to start with.
So doesn't that still mean that they think gender-neutral pronouns are political, i.e. they don't accept them? I've also noticed the dev in question is Swedish, so I'm not sure where German language quirks came from?
Moreso the supernatural stuff for me. The other stuff was dark but I wasn't checking for Brian under my bed. ::: spoiler spoiler Although after reading some of the wiki today I'm a bit more reassured that a lot of the supernatural stuff in Echo seems to be neutral/benevolent, or at least misunderstood. :::
I don't understand how a German grammar situation would elicit the response from the PR. Are gender neutral pronouns "political" in Germany? Why did the dev say "personal politics" specifically?
Yeah it's €110/year here: https://shop.proxmox.com/index.php?rp=/store/proxmox-ve-community
I remember evaluating the price a long time ago and thinking it was too much for disabling a pop-up, and on writing my post I navigated to their site and saw the standard subscription and thought that's what I had looked at a few years back: https://shop.proxmox.com/index.php?rp=/store/proxmox-ve-standard
That's why I didn't say "transphobia" anywhere in my comment. Real weird vibes is what I'm personally sticking with until I see more. The 'transphobic' and 'misogynist' claims are a leap without further evidence, but there's a very strong clue about the type of person someone is when they say pronouns are "political".
Feigned enthusiasm/friendliness. "Thanks for catching that problem!"