sudotstar

I think their original intent back when Proton originally launched was to just show generic Linux compatibility on any titles if it worked with Proton and was approved by Valve. I’m not sure why they stopped doing that.

My hope, though I’m keeping my expectations low, is that since these supposed live-service games will be supposedly releasing alongside remakes of the original games the IP is based on, that if the remakes sell significantly better than the live service games it might hopefully inform better decision-making around them.

While they haven’t been controversy-free in terms of their monetization practices, Sega has released a slew of back-to-back AAA games: Persona 3 Reload, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Sonic Frontiers, that have generally been complete, single-purchase packages (with a few questionable omissions from base game moved to DLC that I’d consider “regular bad”, but not anywhere near the level of egregious monetization seen in most live-service games).

I can see the use case for someone who wants a single OS install on the Steam Deck that does gaming just about as well as SteamOS does, but has a more fleshed out desktop experience (or even just a different one). The linked article goes into detail on various desktop-focused developments within Bazzite that wouldn’t really make sense for Valve to prioritize in SteamOS itself.

This change is interesting. The process of creating parameterized blueprints looks a little tedious, but I’m pretty sure that’s just inherent to the idea in general and there isn’t much room to make it better, and I imagine the ease of using such blueprints that are e.g. downloaded from the internet is perfectly fine.

I play a lot of Factorio in multiplayer, with a group where not everyone has the same desire to make blueprints, and we in-general resist just downloading designs off the internet and try to do everything in-house. This leads to a lot of asymmetric gameplay, where e.g. I may design a blueprint and others will use them. I think this kind of change will work well overall for that (complex train systems are now a reality) but might come with the cost of the blueprint producer spending more time faffing around with the blueprint UI.

I was aesthetically a fan of the Fossil watches, and was using a Fossil Sport (1st gen) for quite a while. Unfortunately the layers of proprietary-Fossil required software/watchfaces on top of the layers of proprietary-Google WearOS hampered the software experience a tiny bit, and the frankly poor hardware quality marred the experience significantly. My charging band coil in the watch completely dislodged itself (it appeared to be held in with glue), rendering the watch unusable.

Fossil’s customer support was excellent, replacing the device fully when this happened, though that was when that model was still on store shelves. I recently inquired about getting a replacement battery and was told I can just trade it in for 50% off a current-gen model, which while being far more generous an offer than I expected, still leaves me hesitant to upgrade to another device that suffers from the same problems and is in danger of being outright discontinued.

At this point I don’t really need/want a WearOS device specifically, and would actually prefer something that’s less tied to Google’s whims, the hardware OEM’s whims, and whatever the interplay is between those two companies. I’ve been eyeing more hobby-oriented projects like bangle.js or the PineTime smartwatch, but the fact that I’m even looking in that space shows that it’s become a device I would get for tinkering, not one I strictly “need”.

I’m a big fan of the series and would consider it to be my favorite JRPG series, not just for the story but because I enjoy the gameplay it offers as well.

It’s a fairly “cheap” series to try out and see if you’re into it. The entire series is a singular, continuous story, so the recommended place to start is Trails in the Sky First Chapter, which can be picked up fairly cheaply on Steam, especially during Steam sales. It’s not as long as future games in the series, and is fairly representative of the pacing and storytelling format that later games will follow (though it is considered one of the slowest-paced games in the series). Basically if you’re not a fan of Sky FC, you’re not likely to be a fan of the future games in the series either (especially given that the substantial improvements to gameplay over the series’ 20 year history likely won’t have much appeal to you).

There are also demos available for some of the newer games in the series (e.g. Trails of Cold Steel III), and while I would not recommend actually playing through those games out-of-order, they may serve as a quick/cheap way to see if the format of the games is right for you.

I will say that while the combat of the games is rarely very difficult, and the game provides difficulty modifiers to make it even easier if you’d like, that the combat system is still fairly fleshed out and quite good casually IMO, but if you’re really not into doing it even at easy difficulties, one option (PC exclusive) may be to download completed game saves and play through the games on New Game+ and completely trivialize the combat.

In this case it’s referring to the fact that the OS is built upon the same containerization technology used on cloud platforms such as Kubernetes. As a marketing tool it’s a bit buzzwordy, but it’s not about running the core OS components outside of the physical machine here.

I’m curious to hear about yours and others’ experiences with containerizing Java applications in such environments. I used to work in a place that traditionally had such restrictions on JDK versions, but after the internal IT environment moved towards running applications within containers, either on Kubernetes or on public cloud platforms’ container runtimes, that restriction became unnecessary since the application would be shipped to production alongside its compatible JDK.

While there were still restrictions on exactly what JDK you could run for other reasons, such as security/stability, common developer experience, etc, it at least allowed teams to immediately adopt the newest LTS release (17 at the time I left) with little restriction.

I’d probably pick something esoteric and then just stop programming, tbh. I enjoy being a polyglot programmer, and learning many languages and learning from many ecosystems is incredibly interesting to me, far more than hyper-specializing in a single language would be.

I think logistics management issues are a classic example of “first world problems” in Factorio, but it did feel like a pain in the butt to manually manage personal trash slots, similar logistics requests across multiple similar objects, and whatnot.

I didn’t know I needed a solution to that problem, and I didn’t expect it to be specifically in this format, but I really like what I see. I especially think the named groups will go a long way in e.g. a multiplayer Factorio session where some people but not everyone is into setting up complex logistics systems, allowing everyone else to at least understand and use the system and its benefits even if setting things up is left to the experts.

It’s unfortunate, but it’s understandable if effort needs to be focused on a single good UI widget ecosystem fully under Mozilla’s control, rather than living by the whims of the three major desktop UI toolkits they have to support, as well as the hundreds of thousands of web pages that are exclusively designed and tested against Chrome which already has been using non-native widgets across desktop platforms for a very long time. I’m not in the web dev space anymore, but I’d constantly see sites built that were incredibly dependent on the exact pixel sizes of widgets as they would render in Chrome, and would visually fall apart on Firefox, or with other zoom/text size settings.

UI design across Windows, macOS, and Linux GNOME/KDE have converged enough that it’s probably good-enough if Firefox continues down the path of just theming their own widgets with the OS/user’s color scheme where applicable, and calling it a day.

If I’m not literally touching the content I’m trying to scroll, I’ll stick to the default orientation (scrolling down moves content down). Wayland touchscreen input handling seems to handle this just fine and not couple touchscreen scroll direction to trackpad/mousewheel scroll direction.

We haven’t seen what actual game progression will look like within the expansion, but I feel like if progression ends up looking similar to vanilla with the vast majority of resources going towards science production, the quality mechanic will not even be a large part of the game if science itself has no benefits from increased quality, so I hope that there’s more news to come on how quality will impact progression. It feels like this information about this was intentionally left out in today’s update, likely to allow diving in deeper in future updates.

I think most “casual” progression around building more “factory parts” in vanilla usually looks like a single assembler slowly churning out items to fill up a single chest (or a few slots within a single chest), and just letting that run while focusing on other active tasks. I think quality will help make that specific part of progression a little more interesting, with needing to recycle lower-quality products back into the manufacturing chain, and/or tiering your outputs and prioritizing putting the best machines in certain areas while saving the mid-tier ones for other use cases. The randomness factor is concerning on the surface, but at least based on the numbers presented, it looks like the ability to produce items of a specific quality is very much intended to be a consistent factor, and not something akin to like hunting for rare drops in an RPG that tend to be tedious.

“Nerfing” Speed Modules by cutting their quality seems a bit reactive to the traditional/overused “assembler w/ Prod3 modules surrounded by beacons with Speed3 modules” setup, and I’m not sure if this is intended to shake that up so that there isn’t a single “right answer” for every type of product being manufactured, but given that current Factorio is what a factory with all “worst” quality manufacturing would look like, this feels more like unlocking new ways to grow the factory that aren’t just scaling out the same patterns from before, so I think this might be okay.

Overall I’m pretty excited about this within the context of the expansion. I think this is a good way of producing a different and fresh new experience to building the factory, while not invalidating the way Factorio has worked before, and I expect that future FFFs will be showing more about progression within the expansion and other new mechanics that play off of quality to provide similarly different experiences from the base game.

IMO this isn’t a real “solution” to the problem here, but this article states Android 14 also allows Google to manage device CAs remotely and push updates via Google Play, and goes into detail about how that mechanism is poorly documented publicly and is basically only an option for Google themselves, not any third party device administrators.

Google can easily claim that all security concerns are handled by their own management while continuing to deny access to all third parties to actually handle that responsibility themselves if desired.

I haven’t adopted this kind of setup, mainly because Proton just does such a good job I have almost zero need for Windows, but my plan for eventually doing something like this was to also maintain a passthrough Linux VM for any GPU-intensive work on that side.

When I realized that the practical end-state of my system would mean I’d just be running things from within the Linux VM 98% of the time (games that can run on Linux) I kind of dropped the idea.

For me it’s always been after I tried to resize a partition.

I recommend using whatever is the “least hands-on” option for your boot drive, a.k.a your distro default (ext4 for Debian). In my admittedly incompetent experience, the most likely cause for filesystem corruption is trying to mess with things, like resizing partitions. If you use your distro installer to set up your boot drive and then don’t mess with it, I think you’ll be fine with whatever the default is. You should still take backups through whatever medium(s) and format(s) make sense for your use case, as random mishaps are still a thing no matter what filesystem you use.

Are you planning on dualbooting Windows for games? I use https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs to mount a shared BTRFS drive that contains my Proton-based Steam library in case I need to run one of those games on Windows for whatever reason. I’ve personally experienced BTRFS corruption a few times due to the aforementioned incompetence, but I try to avoid keeping anything important on my games drive to limit the fallout when that does occur. Additionally if you’re looking to keep non-game content on the storage drive (likely if you’re doing 3D modeling work) this may not be as safe.

I think moving the folder under ~/.local before splitting the cache folders out is a bad idea. Many people will have specific backup or sync solutions in place that want to include config, recreate data, and exclude cache, so the XDG spec has separate locations for them.

Windows’s dedicated Saved Gamed folder is within the same user-specific directories that Documents and AppData are in, and would still allow for game saves to be user-specific.

Being incredibly car-centric is probably our biggest issue in my opinion. If you’re expecting to be able to use public transit or even walk to basic necessities, and are looking to purchase a house, you’d likely be looking at areas outside of your price range, generally within highly urbanized city centers. Owning a car is very much the norm here, even within those urban environments.