sleepyTonia

sleepyTonia, 8 months ago

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.

sleepyTonia, 8 months ago

I’m sure it’s not much compared to what many here experienced, but it took me a long time to properly recover from this.

A couple years back on Christmas Eve, a few of my then friends, or at least acquaintances ripped apart my friend group. Doxxed me (I’m told) and slandered me for days. Basically out of nowhere from my perspective. No fights that I can recall were had shortly before and I was still having friendly conversations with the perpetrators that same day. I tried asking the “leaders” what I might’ve been accused of and I never got a single answer. Not even a “you should know”. Just a message from my girlfriend telling me I should go offline for a while and beyond that, radio silence for a solid day.

Some time later my girlfriend told me one of them had been trying for weeks to convince her I was toxic. Manipulative. Untrustworthy. We’re engaged now, somehow. She brings way more to the table than I do, but I do my best to make her days more interesting and I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I hope I bring her a similar comfort. I also got back in contact with a few of those old friends a year later.

But for a whole year and out of nowhere, I had to cut contact with essentially everyone I talked to online. And let’s not kid ourselves, I’m an introverted nerd somewhere on the spectrum, that was basically my whole social circle. I’m told their… whatever this all was for ended up imploding, but I learned that day how easy it is to get exploited and mislead by those we trust.

sleepyTonia, 8 months ago

Hasn’t Steam just beat its record of simultaneously online users? And while I’m sure Steam Decks contributed to this, we’re taking of numbers an order of magnitude bigger. Hell, PC gaming is doing so well that we’re seeing until then console exclusive games come out on Steam.

sleepyTonia, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

It’s not some miracle packaging system and while Flatpak-installed programs tend to start just as fast as native ones, I consider it inferior for most cases. Its two big advantages are that Flatpaks have a runtime they specify and depend on. It gets downloaded and installed automatically if missing when you install a Flatpak. So you’re much less likely to run into issues where a program won’t run on your system because of an incompatibility with a missing, or newer version of some library. Each Flatpak also gets installed in its own fake environment and is essentially a sandbox when you run the program. You can use a program named Flatseal to give each Flatpak access to specific directories or functionalities, or restrict it further. But the one big negative is that this runtime uses a lot of disk space. ~800MB per runtime.

It tends to work really well and I’ve been told that years ago a guy would use this packaging system to bundle pirated windows games with a preconfigured version of wine, which made them run out of the box, with zero tinkering. On top of essentially being sandboxed and unable to access your real home folder, internet, camera or microphone. Just to illustrate its versatility. It also kind of already won the war when Steam Decks started using Flatpak as their main packaging system.

sleepyTonia, 10 months ago

I don’t remember anyone mentioning Snap being closed source, but it receives many complaints for interfering with the functioning of common programs, on top of slowing down the execution of programs installed through it and is now being forced on users. I haven’t touched any *buntu distro in years, but it always seemed half-baked from the comments I keep on reading about it.

Also yes, Flatpak is what I believe you could call a universal package manager. Package it once and it should run on any Linux distro since it takes most things out of the equation, save for the kernel and drivers. And yes, it mostly is used to distribute desktop applications. It’s ideal for safely running random applications or older programs that wouldn’t run through a modern runtime.

sleepyTonia, 11 months ago

Nope, no thank you… I’m not touching anything other than native, AUR or Flatpak packages. AppImage has only been an inelegant and overall inferior alternative in my experience. The Windows experience, with Linux portability issues. “Find an installer online from some website, have it do whatever the hell it wants, polluting my home folder with random crap and hope it’s not a virus” with essentially zero advantages over Flatpak or even Snap.