Sort of. What that page describes is in the same building as what I’m thinking about.

The thing I’m more nostalgic for was the time when everything had to be a glistening amorphous translucent blob, a bit like the Cingular Wireless logo or the MusicMatch Jukebox logo. And I’m in that era where you can just play MSN messenger sounds and you’ll get an OH MY GOD out of me.

I’m changing my vote in the Agora from “yes defederate” to "Hell fucking yes defederate.’

Excel?

I’ve seen a few seconds of gameplay, but I’m not sure what that game “is.” Is it fun?

I have persuaded The Sims to run on Linux; though if the game wasn’t purchased through Steam it can take some doing. No experience with Cities Skylines. Stardew Valley runs very well, I think ConcernedApe releases Linux native versions. My understanding is Roblox deliberately prevents itself from running on Linux. Minecraft Java edition runs on Linux and you’ll find launchers for it in most package managers. An open source alternative called Minetest or recently changed to Luanti exists, but I know it’s not the one his friends play and that’s mostly the point. Can’t say for Stellaris or Slime Rancher.

Statistically, yes.

I’ve seen a cable lift that worked basically like that. It transferred ore down the mountain, so heavy buckets going down lifted the empty buckets back up.

My understanding of things like the IME is that its reason for being is mostly benign, it lets enterprise-level IT departments do things like boot computers from across the network and stuff like that. It has no real use to home customers on their private PCs, but it’s included on all systems to simplify engineering; it handles a lot of the early boot process. And it’s always running. The privacy enthusiasts out there who carry a copy of TAILS on their keychains just in case aren’t fond of the fact that there’s a proprietary OS with unrestricted access to memory and networking just sitting there with no way of auditing or monitoring what it was doing.

This has been a thing for AWHILE now, and the whole coreboot thing…Intel, board manufacturers etc. keep their data so locked up that it’s a challenge to build anything that works, so it’s a miracle we have things like Coreboot at all. They largely concentrate on laptops IIRC, and it’s rare to see full fat desktop motherboards that work with Coreboot.

By “desirable motherboard” in this context I mean a standard ATX (or standard size variants) motherboard with a currently supported socket and chipset commonly available on the consumer market. To run Intel 13th or 14th gen, or Ryzen 7000 or 9000. I don’t know if you can just buy an MSI or Asrock etc. board and expect to run Coreboot on them.

What’s the advantage of coreboot? Soothes paranoia mainly. Both Intel and AMD platforms have little black boxes in them that run a separate little OS beneath Windows or Linux that has Ring 0 or similar low-level access to the hardware and could theoretically man in the middle anything done on the machine. Intel’s is MINIX based, it’s called the Intel Management Engine, and it genuinely is a little bit bile inducing reading what it has access to. AMD does have a simlar technology.

In terms of performance, system stability etc? Very little. Once the kernel is loaded and in control of the hardware the BIOS doesn’t effect much AFAIK.

I’m not very familiar with it but I’ve not heard much about even AM4 boards being supported. I think of Coreboot (or it’s completely binary blob free fork LibreBoot) and I think of either Purism or System76 and in both cases for their laptops.

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This kind of thing (the “main” operating system is built atop a secret basement full of god knows what) isn’t restricted to x86 either. On a Raspberry Pi, Linux running on the ARM cores is a second class citizen to ThreadX running on the VideoCore processor.

My understanding is there are few desirable motherboards that support Coreboot.

Don’t like Intel Management Engine? or processors that shit themselves? go AMD.

Mindustry looks like one of those games you’d find on those “1001 Games!” cds back in the 90s thatbalways had the Hugo Whodunit games and the shareware version of Wolfenstein 3D. It has that MS Paint look to it.

A lot of 2D games made their art that way; earlier I called Factorio “Age of Empires with a 3 pack a day habit” because AoE’s graphics are 2D sprites made from 3D graphics. I mean, think about it, would you rather draw the little villager walking frame by frame by hand in a pixel art editor in 8 or 16 different angles depending on if the model is symmetrical, or model and animate it in 3D and then frame capture it from several angles? Hell there’s probably tools to do the latter automatically. I bet Blender can just do that.

It is my understanding that Factorio’s art is 3D modeled and rigged, and then 2D animation frames are captured from that so the game doesn’t have to actually render 10,000 inserters every tick.

Factorio does look like Age of Empires with a 3 pack a day habit. And given pollution is a major mechanic in the game it’s on theme.

Mindustry meanwhile has the look of a game you’d find on one of those old 101 games on 1 CD! complilations you’d find back in the 90’s, and yet it runs…well like every other game that’s ever been packaged as a .deb.

I don’t really hitch horses with a game whose main gameplay loop involves keeping an eye on things that are off screen.

The only question anyone has on their minds is, does it still have the UX of a road accident?

It is my understanding that Inkscape does not support the CMYK colorspace and is thus a non-starter for any work that involves printing.

Difficult to concisely explain what Wayland is.

Software in the Linux ecosystem tends to be built on earlier projects. You may be aware of the various Desktop Environments like Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, xfce, etc. Something they all have, or had, in common was they all used a truly ancient piece of software called X11. This is the Windowing server. Most of the look and feel of a desktop environment comes from a configuration file that sets up X11 to work a certain way.

X11 has been a standard for longer than Linux has existed, it dates to the early 80’s. It is quite old and isn’t capable of keeping up with some newer technologies like multiple monitors at different framerates, HDR, there are problems with things like Freesync, etc.

Wayland is a project for replacing X11 with a newer system designed with modern display technology in mind. It works a little differently, and it breaks compatibility with a lot of long-standing systems, but it’s now in use by several DEs by default. At the moment there are technical reasons to use Wayland and technical reasons to use X11.

Yes, I’m aware. Basically I don’t see life on the Arch family tree as preferable to what I have enough to redo my settings menu preferences.

There are basically 2 things that can tempt me away from Fedora KDE right now:

1. I’ll return to Mint Cinnamon if Wayland support and the GPU features it enables are robustly added to Cinnamon.

2. Equal or better support for my hardware with better and easier package management. The main gripe I have about Fedora compared to Mint is the repository is a lot emptier. The long if now gone era of Ubuntu being THE distro for desktops means a LOT of stuff is packaged as .debs or when you do have to go to Github there’s almost always “Debian/Ubuntu” instructions. Arch’s AUR has a reputation of having literally everything in it, but my understanding is being bleeding edge it’s liable to break, and it’s yet another source of software in addition to the standard repos and Flatpak. Yes I think I would install things from Flathub rather than the AUR if available in both because I see Flatpak and Flathub as either the de facto place for the publishers of software especially commercial software to officially release for Linux, and if it isn’t yet I’d like to encourage it to be. The AUR being Arch-specific is as much of a non-starter for me as Snap is.