Main desktop runs Arch but everything else runs Debian. It's the perfect "install and forget" system so long as you don't need the absolute bleeding edge packages.

Did the absynth goblins visit you yet?

SteamDeck plays the same version of the game as a regular PC. Any mods that work on PC will work on SteamDeck (in theory), but seeing as the deck runs Linux, you'll need to do some more tinkering with Wine and such.

This has always been my concern with relying on Flatpak. It is only as simple as your requirements are it seems.

These specs actually seem really solid for the price point, I'm glad to see decent alternative smartphones popping up that actually have some power.

What's bugging me is the lack of information about the software. Apparently this is Android with a layer like Hallium to run a Debian userspace on top? And yet they don't advertise that fact. It's just a little off putting that this product seems to be aimed at Linux/general tech enthusiasts, yet the company seemed to miss the fact that those customers tend to really like knowing what they're running under the hood.

(Not incredibly educated on Flatpaks, please educate me if I'm wrong) My main issue with Flatpak is the bundled dependancies. I really prefer packages to come bundled with the absolute bare minimum, as part of the main appeal of Linux for me is the shared system wide dependancies. Flatpak sort of seems to throw that ideology out the window.

Let me ask this (genuinely asking, I'm not a software developer and I'm curious why this isn't a common practice), why aren't "portable" builds of software more common? Ie, just a folder with the executable that you can run from anywhere? Would these in theory also need to come bundled with any needed dependancies? Or could they simply be told to seek out the ones already installed on the system? Or would this just depend on the software?

I ask this because in my mind, a portable build of a piece of software seems like the perfect middle ground between a native, distro specific build and a specialized universal packaging method like Flatpak.

I mean, I use maybe 3-4gb at any given time, without limiting myself. I personally don't need heaps of RAM, 6gb is enough to have some overhead for me.

I haven't looked at too many prices recently, I've had the same phone for a while, but this doesn't seem to unreasonable imo, especially considering this is the first product from a small, new company.

Apple literally scans your photo galleries for illegal photos.

Edit, looking into things, it seems like they might have backtracked on this one due to backlash when it was announced.

I'd agree with you, except Sony, another massive Japanese company operating in the same industry as Nintendo, doesn't lash out this aggressively at their own community that is just desperately trying to enjoy games in their own way.

Sony has left basically all emulation projects alone as well as modding projects like 60FPS patches (there was one emulator that they took to court in the 90s, Bleem, but Bleem was charging money for the emulator. Funnily enough, Bleem won the case and was allowed to continue existing, but the company went under due to the cost of the legal battle) .

Nintendo doesn't have to act out like this. They actively choose to stifle such products so that they themselves can offer tightly curated versions on their own schedule and at their own price. This isn't an IP protection strategy, it's an agressive cornering of their own market.

Everybody donate to Pine64 so they can get that open source printer off the ground someday.

Remember when telemetry/data collection across the internet was often optional and pretty minor?

The more shit we absentmindedly agree to because it's not really a big deal in the short term, the worse it gets in the long term.

If I play a game on Steam, then Playstation, EA, Ubisoft, etc should all fuck off. I already gave those companies my money, it's insulting that that isn't enough anymore.

Edit: great point I just saw someone else mention, the fact that Sony has allowed over 100 million users' data to be exposed due to various breaches by bad actors over the past 15 years. At least one of those times, the data was revealed to be nowhere near as secure as it should have been.

Man I've got really conflicted feelings about this game. I do think it's great, and will probably be picking up Phantom Liberty next sale, but I never know whether to appreciate the devs for sticking with it and making sure their work lived up to expectations, or to be frustrated that I basically had to wait a year for a full product after buying for $80 CAD on day one (my own mistake, I foolishly thought CD Project was immune to such blunders). I guess it's a bit of both. I do really appreciate all the hard work, I just wish that wasn't on top of a bunch of frustration and disappointment.

In an age where everyone rags on live service games that will inevitably lose support, a cheap, fun, well made, feature complete game (and was that way on release) that gets infrequent updates is "abandoned" and "insultingly barebones". Classic 2024 gamer moment right there

"They already stole your car, why call the police"

The only silver lining is that this will encourage the homebrew scene to take off. The same thing happened with the PS Vita as soon as support started to wane.

99% positive. Wayland works flawlessly. HDR didn't cause issues (all AMD hardware).

The only issues I have off the top of my head are

1: Some icons in the system tray and system settings menu (the 'Clipboard' icon on the dock and the 'Touchscreen' tab in settings, and a couple others) display as a blank rectangle sometimes. Other times, they display as they should. Haven't even bothered looking for a solution as it doesn't effect usability in the slightest.

2: Certain pop up menus for dock applets, ie the Bluetooth applet, display incorrectly. I actually saw a post of another user having this issue, where the window only shows as a small square, and can require a re-log to actually make it work.

Other than these minor glitches, nothing has given me any issues.

The reason no one is making HL3 is because no one wants to, at least not long term.

Idk if you know much about how Valve is structured as a game studio, but it's a bit atypical. It's not like Gabe Newell comes in and says "today everybody starts working on HL3", projects get greenlit and then whichever employees want to work on them are free to do so, and if they decide they're uninterested, for whatever reason, they can leave the project.

What this means, is that if a project starts to pick up steam (no pun intended) within the company, more and more people join in, and this creates a passionate team. Various Half-Life projects since Ep2 have been started, none were finished (until Alyx), not because they were decisively axed for more corporate reasons like many other games, but because for one reason or another, the devs became uninterested or burned out, and went to work on other things they actually wanted to work on.

I think at this point, the only way we'll ever see HL3 is if a team comes up with something completely groundbreaking and is absolutely dedicated to getting it done. Apparently, there just hasn't been that winning combo yet. I can't blame them, because if they half assed any aspect of it, they'd never hear the end of it.

PinePhone

Multiple OS choices, hardware kill switches for connectivity/camera/microphone, expansion pins, etc. Modest specs but for enough functionality to be a daily driver, zero ads or spyware, and infinite customizability, $400 is a steal.

Because they're popular, and they're super easy to slap together (graphically at least. In theory, you could make a completely text based deck builder and it would function identically to one with fancy graphics).

This is the equivilant of zombie games in the shooter genre. Why program complex ai when you could make braindead (pun intended) bots walk in a straight line at the player and deal damage when they touch them.

Just a point to add: this backdoor was (likely) planned years in advance; it took ONE guy a couple weeks (after the malicious code was released) to find it because he had nothing else going on that evening.

I'm relatively confident that the FOSS community has enough of that type of person that if there are more incidents like this one, there's a decent chance it'll be found quickly, especially now that this has happened and gotten so much attention.

I love tactical shooters and, at its core, EFT is one of the best. By core, I mean the movement, gunplay, physics, sound design, etc. When the going is good, there is almost no experience as visceral as EFT.

What I personally think fucking sucks is basically everything else. Especially the tryhard, creatine-powder-snorting, sweatband wearing *community that has zero sympathy for people who actually have a life and want a really detailed tactical shooter, without dedicating 15 hours a week into researching bullet penetration and common camping spots. Couple that with devs who seem to show active distaste for a lot of their more casual fans, and casual gamers in general, and you end up with a really mixed bag.

I'm one of the people who had this game completely revived for me by the single player mod, SPT-AKI. I can play on my own, with progression, and slightly more laid back difficulty, while still enjoying challenging AI and some of the best gunfights in gaming. I would absolutely love to play an official pve mode, I absolutely refuse to pay $250 for it.

*edit: this only obviously describes a portion of the community. Should clarify that I know there are plenty of players that this doesn't describe.

This seems to imply that other operating systems don't have issues and don't require editing files.

Compared to Windows, I've had fewer frustrating issues on Linux. I think the reason you hear about these issues is because the Linux community naturally encourages sharing these issues. If I have a niche problem, I can share it, then the community will work together to solve it so it isn't an issue anymore. On Windows, you might run a troubleshooting wizard that might solve the problem, and if it doesn't you'll probably take it to MS support who'll walk you through it. If that doesn't fix it, you'll likely just wait for a bug fix in the next update. Point being, they get talked about less because the system doesn't encourage problem solving on the users end (as much as Linux does).

As for editing files, sure, you do a lot of that on Linux. On Windows, you use a settings menu to fiddle with things, but all that settings menu does is give you a button to press. Pressing that button is just a fancy visual way of editing a file somewhere. Linux just often forgoes the graphical interface and encourages you to get used to editing those files directly.

Since I switched to AMD about a month ago. Literally every naggling issue I had with NVidia is gone. Only complaint is that I didn't switch sooner.

Sounds like something an AI would post. Quick, what color are your eyes?

https://xyproblem.info/

People want to know because you're asking how to do something that (whether you like it or not) is unorthodox and can cause issues. People want to know if the ROOT of your issue is solvable via orthodox means that won't cause issues.

Even in your other post, you were asking how to run a program with sudo via a context menu, but you didn't say why you needed to. You aren't giving us info on the root of your problem OR end goal, only the means you want to use to get there. There could easily be a simple way to achieve your goal, but via different means. People want to help but it can be difficult for them to give directions when they don't have a point of origin or a destination.

Not trying to be an ass, just trying to give some insight as to why you may not be getting the answers you hoped for, and why some people might seem like they're actively avoiding giving them to you.

Eyes open for my countries petition. Been wanting to support this for a while

Exactly. It's like saying Linux isn't open source because some distros come with proprietary NVidia drivers.

A second remaster of the first game.

Serious question, genuinely curious; Beyond more recent package versions, why do people choose Ubuntu over plain Debian? Debian has been exceptionally stable for me, pushes no proprietary BS, and is as easy to intall and setup as any other distro I've used. Plus, for the average computer user, all the packages are recent enough that things should work as expected.

How to actually get games running:

Download steam, make an account, log in. Go to the settings, find "Steam Play" and enable for unsupported titles. This enables Proton, which is a customized version of Wine, a Windows-Linux translation layer, plus some extra tweaks specifically for gaming. This lets you play the vast majority of all Windows games on Steam on your Linux machine.

Check out protondb to find out how compatible your chosen game is. You'll see a rating, as well as user experiences on how well it worked, what issues they experienced, and the tweaks they made to mitigate them (take note that there is a section on each games page that is specific to the Steamdeck, Valves handheld. Not all info in this section is relevant to general PC users, so make sure you follow the more generic section).

If you look around and find a specific game that isn't on Steam, Heroic Launcher and Lutris are your friends.

Heroic is a very nicely polished launcher for Epic Games, Amazon and GOG. It allows you to pool all three into a single library. You can use tools like winetweaks directly in the launcher, pick different Wine/proton versions per-game, etc. I'd use this as a secondary option to Steam.

Lutris also allows you to pool your games from multiple storefronts into one (Steam, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, GOG, and manually installed). Lutris can be a little complex compared to Steam and Heroic. It's very powerful, but somewhat spartan and can also be a bit buggy in some specific instances. It's very well suited for older games that aren't on major storefronts, emulators, or old CD games, mainly thanks to its option to set games up via standard windows installers or add existing games by pointing lutris to their installation path.

TL;DR, Start with steam, try some cheaper/free games. A great starting point would be Valves own games, as they're cheap and heaps of fun (Portal, Half-Life, etc). They also usually have a Linux native version so you don't need proton (although, counterintuitively, I find Linux Native games often don't work as well as Windows games+proton). After you get your toes wet, go for some other storefronts and library apps. Have fun and good luck, don't be afraid to ask for help.

Worth mentioning that Helldivers is hugely and openly influenced by Starship troopers, which although not as big as something like D&D, is still pretty well known in pop-culture to this day, at least in the sci-fi circles.

I've always preferred to use OpenVPN configuration files for setting up VPNs on Linux, rather than using the VPN providers app.

Basically, you need to install a few packages: openvpn and networkmanager-openvpn. This second one is optional, but it allows you to simply pick a VPN connection from the same drop-down applet you connect to WiFi from.

Then, all you do is head to https://account.protonvpn.com/downloads, download the OpenVPN configuration files, extract them somewhere, then use the network manager menu to pick one of the servers. When you're adding the connection, it'll require your VPN login info. This isn't the same as your regular login though, to find that, head to https://account.protonvpn.com/account, and the credentials are listed under "OpenVPN/IKEv2 Username".

Once this is setup, connecting to a VPN is as simple as opening your network applet, then clicking on your VPN of choice. You can add as many VPN connections as you want to switch between servers easily. Really handy to not need a VPN providers' specific app just to connect to a server.

This is what I always wanted from The Crew. It's sense of scale is all off though

ReVanced still works fine, grayjay also works.

"Security guard" = US Marshall

"13 year old" = person on a crime spree who had a loaded firearm (deadly weapon)

"Steal a car" = steal a car with the US Marshall still inside, most likely while threatening them with previously mentioned firearm.

This person is the one who put the value of a car above a human life. If someone is willing to put a gun in my face for the sake of personal gain, I see no way how defending myself, even with deadly force, would be not justified.

Especially on PC. Also, people forget that Indie doesn't necessarily mean "made by a small team/low budget". It just means it was produced by a studio that isn't at the behest of some massive corperation/faceless number crunching shareholders. CD Projekt Red is an independant studio, as is Valve.

Also, some games are developed independently by small studios, but then marketed and published by a larger company. Devolver is an example of a publishing house with an excellent track record of just letting the indie dev teams they work with do whatever they want.

My biggest thing when switching to Linux was understanding why I didn't have permission to alter half of my file structure. I was trying to take ownership of my /usr directory as a user and had to have multiple people explain why that was a bad idea (and why simply making any changes as a super user via terminal was more than adequate for the results I wanted).

My mindset was a result of so many user files being spread across dozens of branches of the Windows file structure. Some very close to the root of the drive, some a few directories deeper. I didn't really understand the benefit of having all my stuff in /home (and am now a full convert. Just thinking about navigating a Windows drive makes my skin crawl now).

than usual?

I'm personally not a fan of any universal packaging solution. I've tried flatpaks, appimages, and snaps, and ran into weird, annoying issued that I just never have when I install via package manager, build from source or even just run a portable build of an app.

I see the appeal of a universal package, but imo a bigger emphasis on portable native builds would solve a lot of the issues these packaging solutions are aiming for, while not introducing many of the downsides

Wouldn't it be nice to not have your info spread across thosands of accounts that you yourself even implied you don't keep track of?

What sony pulled, and coporate moves like it, are at least in part a result of people saying "meh, what's one more account, I've already got thousands."

We as a community aren't an immaculate entity. Companies don't just make these moves out of nowhere, they analyze what we're willing to do so they can take advantage of those things to make money. That's not some sleazy secret scheme, thats basic market research. If we collectively show we do actually care about this stuff and won't supoort their business when they do it, it might not happen so often.