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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • For a while, maybe… But the two distinctions I’d want to make is that, one, that’s also mostly the time you’ll spend learning what you need to set up as part of your system, and two, things that might be out of your control on many distros. I’d also say that by calling it a “meme distro” you’re lumping it together with Hannah Montana Linux and similar.

    I will certainly say, however, that I’m rather annoyed by all the people saying “Bro you can set up arch in a few minutes just run archinstal it’s easy”… Not only do I not believe it’s that easy when you don’t know what you’re doing and need to actually use the system, but that also seems to run counter to the point of arch. I think there’s at least two popular arch derivatives meant to remove the enthusiast aspect and provide a streamlined experience, so why recommend arch to new people if not as a learning experience?


  • Calling Arch a meme distro is unnecessarily insulting. I imagine the same applies to Gentoo, but I haven’t used it myself. It’s an enthusiast distro, for people who want to have control over how their system is set up while accepting the responsibility of having to set everything up.

    I absolutely agree with recommending against it for somebody’s first experience - but if you’re willing to read through the guides and troubleshoot issues, you can learn a lot about how things work on Linux. It’s the kind of distro where you will have issues, and they will usually be due to your own mistakes.




  • I like Valve, but I will point out what’s been said before - Valve has a stake in making Linux gaming better, since it enables the Steam Deck to exist and prosper. They could’ve chosen other options that don’t help the community, but they didn’t choose this entirely selflessly, since they reap the benefits from not just their own work, but also that of the open source developers.





  • I generally agree, but I’m not gonna continue buying on steam just because they’re developing new tech - I happily buy games on steam because of the features steam provides.

    That said, DRM-free games is something steam does not and probably will not provide - it’s a niche GOG is comfortable with, so many people who value freedom on software will choose it as their first platform of choice.

    In that sense, the hardware is completely unrelated - it does nothing towards the goal of DRM-free games, and in case of the index, locks more games behind a platform.


  • What take even is that? I can understand some complaints about Linux support for how much people praise the deck, but why would they make their own handheld… And VR headset? I feel like hardware shouldn’t be locked to specific platforms, and I would rather blame Valve for not releasing steam-independent software for their headset.



  • Hold up, how is proton leveraging open source to avoid dev costs? Are you referring to steam using and contributing to existing projects instead of reinventing the wheel? Or to game developers that use it as a reason for not making native Linux versions, which wouldn’t be Valve’s workforce in the first place?

    I can see how the things Valve does contribute to their business model - steam input giving their controller compatibility with games, proton letting them launch a Linux-based handheld, and the new recording feature probably there for the steam deck… But the thing is, Valve is still providing all those things to customers for no extra charge, and they keep adding new stuff.


  • Sure, you can probably clone it - I’m not 100% sure, but I think laws protect that as long as it’s private use.

    You can also fork it on GitHub, that’s something you agree to in the GitHub ToS - though I think you’re not allowed to push any modifications if the license doesn’t allow it?

    Straight up taking the content from GitHub, uploading it to your own servers, and letting people grab a copy from there? That’s redistribution, and is something that needs to be permitted by the license. It doesn’t matter if it’s git or something else, in the end that’s just a way to host potentially copyrighted material.

    Though if you have some reference on why this is not the case, I’d love to see it - but I’m not gonna take a claim that “that’s very much a part of most git flows”.




  • The good thing is, on Android you can get an APK without root or anything like that, same for installing it, and you can use an emulator (or something like waydroid) to run it on a computer. For cases where the game doesn’t use any more specialized servers, and just uses the app store for authentication, DRM, etc. the situation is no different from PC games with DRM - it’s bypassable, and if done right, will work for all games, not just one.

    That said though, it’s very true for multiplayer/always online games, and those are very common on mobile. While it’s possible to reverse engineer and rewrite the servers, for most of them nobody is going to bother. And in the world of aggressively monetized games, developers have an incentive to keep it that way - they can’t make money from players who are still enjoying a game they’ve already squeezed every penny out of.



  • PDFs are… Not an image format? It’s a document format that is difficult to edit, and thus mostly meant to be read-only, but a document nonetheless.

    An image viewer can’t open a pdf, unless for some ungodly reason it also has a whole pdf reader built into it, which just sounds inane. Defaulting to a browser is icky, and I think stems from browsers having gotten good PDF support before Microsoft could figure it out. This is something that ideally belongs to a reader, either dedicated to PDF, or supporting similar formats, be it documents or ebooks.

    That’s like saying that a 3D project file is basically an image format, if it’s built to be rendered out from a viewpoint into an image.