Adding to sleepyTonia’s comment, many flash games have been preserved through Flashpoint Archive, which is like an epic DRM-free Steam client for flash games (as well as other web game technologies, like the shockwave player). However, Flashpoint uses old flash player binaries that, as stated, may one day stop working as hardware and operating systems evolve. If that happens, it’ll be great to have a replacement interpreter ready to go that can be compiled to run on newer tech.
Game and media preservation, for one. But I’m sure part of it is the technical challenge. There’s still websites where you can download those old flash games to run them locally, but one day Adobe Flash player will cease to work on modern operating systems.
Exactly. Flash was hugely popular, there’s a wealth of content, media, projects and entire websites made with Flash (not just games) that would otherwise be lost and this unbelievable effort brings all that content back to life.
Adobe Flash Player was deprecated some years ago, so there is no longer any functioning official software that can play Flash games. The modern equivalent are mobile games.
The reason why reimplementing it is a worthy thing to do is to preserve old software, same reason why console emulators exist.
From a technical point of view you are right. But commercially, I am pretty sure many companies and developers that used to make Flash games now make mobile games. There are many mobile games that are ports of old Flash games.
It was on its way out when smartphones and HTML5 became widely adopted. Smartphones didn’t support Flash and HTML5 made sure that the things you used to need Flash for were just implemented in web browsers. Maybe you remember something along those lines.
In November 2011, about a year after Jobs’ open letter, Adobe announced it would no longer be developing Flash and advised developers to switch to HTML5.
You can see why someone might think it was ten years ago based off this.
You’re going to get a million answers, mostly people saying to use which distro they’re currently using. In my experience, KDE works just fine on any distro that allows you to install it out of the box, so I would choose based on other attributes of the distro, such as:
Package manager: which are you used to?
Update cycle: KDE 6 is out soon, so you want something which updates often enough to get it fairly quickly (at least semiannual).
Stability: unless you want to have to manually maintain your system and learn how it works, avoid arch and arch-based distros. I have run it, its fine, but it’s not “normie”, and unless you really know what you’re doing, daily driving it can be stressful. Manjaro has the same issues, but takes away some ability of the user to fix them.
For instance, I personally like Debian and apt, but I would not recommend base Debian right now, since KDE 6 is about to come out and Debian will take a loooong time to get it. I have not personally used Kubuntu, but if it gets rid of any the bloat canonical has been adding to Ubuntu lately, it sounds pretty good to me.
Yeah, Kubuntu’s fine. It has some of the Snap stuff, but the “minimal install” greatly strips down unnecessary bullshit to the point where I even find vanilla Debian Plasma to be more bloated in comparison.
I used Kubuntu for most of my time on Linux before switching to Debian. Still fully recommend it as a basically “plug and play” distro with a quick installer that works OOTB.
There’s also a KDE-specific backports PPA which gets you new Plasma and Qt stuff fairly quickly, but that works best on regular releases rather than LTS releases. (The only issue is that, because it uses Launchpad, the Plasma updates can be super fucking slow to download, regardless of your network speed).
Then again, if someone’s going to be using LTS versions only, there’s not really that much of a difference between it and Debian Stable in terms of DE updates.
I do a lot of PDF work which requires edits, encryption, etc. Unfortunately the only solution I found that worked for me was a paid one. I use Code Industry’s Master PDF Editor.
I’ve been a user of Master PDF for years now. It’s my go-to for PDF markup in Linux. Their yearly renewal can be kinda wonky, but their customer service has been excellent.
realizing that 11 was only going to bring more ads, force-installed applications, background processes that were nigh-impossible to disable without a lot of tomfoolery, AI bullshit and general bloat,
I don’t get this kinds of comments.
I figured that I would try dual-booting Ubuntu,
So you ditched and unethical mega corp that runs ads for a wanna be unethical mega corp that also mines your data and you’re happy about it? Oh boy the illusion.
I feel so much more capable as a computer user with Linux than I ever did on Window
I just hope you don’t require “professional” software such as MS Office, Adobe Apps, Autodesk, NI Circuit Design and whatnot Linux isn’t a viable options. The alternatives wont cut it if you require serious collaboration… virtualization, emulation (wine) may work but won’t be nice. Going for Linux kinda adds the same pains of going macOS but 10x. Once you open the virtualization door your productivity suffers greatly, your CPU/RAM requirements are higher and suddenly you’ve to deal with issues in two operating systems instead of just one. And… let’s face it, nothing with GPU acceleration will ever run decently unless big companies start fixing things - GPU passthroughs and getting video back into the main system are a pain and add delays.
Linux on servers is great, on the desktop if you’ve to collaborate with others who use those apps it’s game over.
So you ditched and unethical mega corp that runs ads for a wanna be unethical mega corp that also mines your data and you’re happy about it? Oh boy the illusion.
Don’t worry friend, I recognize that Ubuntu is not quite as far into the ethical FOSS universe as some other distros but at the very least it’s a soft landing for an uninformed new user. I plan on using it long enough to get my sea legs and use my backup PC to test other platforms.
I don’t get this kinds of comments.
Yeah, I’ve never understood people making poorly written snide comments with absolutely zero clarification, either.
professional software
I use what I want and I’m happy with the pickings. I mostly use word processors for journaling and note taking, and the professional software I use (music notation and DAWS) work just fine for my purposes. I say, if I’m content with what I’m using, why do you have to be an ass about it? I don’t care what you use and I wouldn’t land in the comments just to put you on blast for your personal choices.
I don’t care what you use and I wouldn’t land in the comments just to put you on blast for your personal choices.
The thing is that this isn’t “personal choices”, I don’t even use most of the solutions I cited, but I happen to know a lot of people who do in different industries and that tried Linux countless times and showed me how poorly things are. I’m talking about managers, designers, engineers, architects - a lot of people with a lot of different needs that would love to be on Linux as much as you do but can’t because it simply doesn’t work out.
Yeah, I’ve never understood people making poorly written snide comments with absolutely zero clarification, either.
Do you really want a properly written comment? It looks like you don’t but I’ll give you one anyways. Just don’t complain like you did when I bluntly said what’s the reality of Linux desktop and professional software.
realizing that 11 was only going to bring more ads, force-installed applications, background processes that were nigh-impossible to disable without a lot of tomfoolery, AI bullshit and general bloat,
Microsoft has multiple versions of Windows and if you are smart enough to install Ubuntu you might as well be smart enough to read about them for five minutes and understand that you if you pick Windows 11 Pro you’ll be moderately clean and Windows 11 Enterprise will be very clean. You’ll also find out that with ANY version you can pick English (World) for a cleaner experience:
Selecting the “English (World)” locale during Windows Setup means you’ll receive fewer advertised tiles in your Start menu once Windows is installed, but it doesn’t change the preinstalled apps that come with Windows (also known as bloatware).
The remaining or all ads and spyware can also be disabled via group policy. When it comes to disabling crap Windows offers way better control than Ubuntu and macOS because it was made for that. There are countess companies and government agencies that force Microsoft to have group policy settings to disable all the “special features” otherwise they couldn’t use it.
Microsoft also has very detailed documentation into this (…microsoft.com/…/manage-connections-from-windows-…) that you can follow to disable what you don’t want. Meanwhile Canonical, Apple and others don’t give shit about users disabling the spyware and the systems sometimes break if you block connections.
So before you say unfounded and dumb things such as “impossible”, “forced” and whatnot go teach yourself about how things really work and what can and can’t be done.
Even Oracle, a company that funds OpenOffice and has its own proprietary fork of it, doesn’t use it internally. Oracle internal laptops come with libre office installed.
I was playing around with Pygame of all things, and it wasn’t behaving as the (apparently out of date) documentation was saying it should, so I figured I’d just uninstall and reinstall Python.
I started this way today but kept coming up with an error with rsync during install. I tried in Virtual Box and had the same error. I gave up and just installed Fedora in the end.
No clue what rsync would be doing. Maybe there’s an issue with the current ISO, but I’ve installed it on a few systems in the last couple months with no issues.
I mean, it’s one dropdown/checkbox click, to enable codecs sources. I get your point though, having to remember to enable that.
I’d used Nobara if I knew it was being supported by more than just one (great/special; I’m aware of his contribution to gaming on Linux) guy (please correct me if this is no longer the case?), since it would be installed on my daily driver box, and it’s important for me to have a high level of reliability, even though I do more gaming tasks than non-gaming tasks on it.
I’m aware that Nobara is based from Fedora, but am nervous about having a single point of failure, support wise.
I run Kubuntu on my desktop and laptop machines but I’m seriously considering switching to Debian (which I run on my server). Any reason I wouldn’t want to do that on my desktop or laptop?
(Previously I ran Slackware on everything, so both of them feel like gliding softly on a cloud to me.)
Yeah it seems to work very well on my server. I’ve always just wondered why I don’t see more people recommending it when they’re switching from Ubuntu/Kubuntu. From what I’ve seen on the server (which I mostly access remotely), it seems decent.
You probably will not notice that you are in other distro when you start using Debian. They are the same in most things, but without Snaps and most propietary stuff (by default. But if you really need propietary things, you may see the official non-free sourcelist)
I really do not know. But what I can say for sure is that during the installation of Debian, it allows you to choose the desktop environment at installation time, so you can have your Debian with KDE at minute 0 after installing it.
On the other hand, remember that Kubuntu is derived from Ubuntu. I don’t see Ubuntu fans very enthusiastic about creating another Debian-based distro with KDE preinstalled when they even offer it (live images) to you here.
Weird. I’ve been trying to find a distro I’m happy with and was setting Fedora KDE up today. Ran though my bookmarks and found no videos played on Twitch. Had to install codecs to get it to work. I hadn’t seen this in previous distros. Is this specific to Fedora? Other than this hiccup I’ve enjoyed it so far.
I liked how straight forward Linux Mint is but prefer KDE Plasma. Plus Mint seems quite far behind in versions.
In their gnome version, during the setup process (first boot, not install), they would prompt for third-party repo and codec (Enabled by default, IIRC).
I think you might have unchecked that? or KDE not offering such experience?
EDIT: NVM, I just checked, and I have never installed the codecs… LOL.
Fedora is notorious for avoiding shipping proprietary software with their distro even at the cost of new users.
I think this might stems from the fact that fedora used to be a distro aimed for advanced users. It is slowly getting better at being new user friendly.
Do most Linux users (in this context we’ll say people who specifically choose to use Linux and by extension chose a specific distribution) look unfavorably on proprietary software being excluded by default?
For me, I prefer it so I don’t see it that way. But it is also an extra step and an annoyance if you want things to “just work”. Which is an understandable position.
I’d like it if they weren’t necessary and everything was AV1, then I would be alright with the codecs being omitted by default without any simple way to install them.
Similarly with the NVIDIA proprietary driver, NVIDIA actually recommend installing the driver through the package provided through your distro on thier download page
From past forums reading I remember that a boot loader in Linux can have trouble booting properly when you use two different physical drives (Rather than one drive and different partitions), I think it needs to specifically get to know about both drives. Does this help ?
About 90% of what I know about ssh, terminal multiplexing, scripting, and diagnostic programs grew from an optimization project.
I had a vague desire to build a one-stop dashboard where I could monitor, update, and control a half-dozen linux computers at once. It was just for fun, but it kept me reading through the manpages for weeks.
I didn’t, but only because my solution wasn’t novel or generalized for other people. I made a script to fire up tmux on a ‘primary’ computer with key-based access to my other computers, load up a set of windows and panes, and ssh into each computer. One window would be computers in one section of my home, another window would be computers elsewhere. The only challenge was getting a baseline grasp of the tmux scripting syntax.
I initially set it up to run htop on each computer (dashboard goal, plus easy ability to terminate programs), but the basic setup was flexible. I could set other programs to run by default or and send terminal command updates to each computer from any device that could ssh into the primary computer. Automating updates on a computer-by-computer basis is a better solution, but the setup let me quickly oversee and interactively start multiple system updates at once, from a phone, tablet, or laptop.
Draw is great, and I’ve been able to use it for most of what I used Acrobat for before, but it has issues with converting certain documents, especially when they have special fonts. Also there’s the issue of not being able to just fill out some fields and then share it back as a PDF
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