• 0 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle
  • This is all fair complaints about Linux, but I don’t really feel like windows is much better. I’ve had windows break on me or family members a lot over the years. Sure I’ve had some Linux distros break with an update and fail to boot (namely Manjaro), but windows has broken itself with updates dozens of times for me. The whole reason I started using Linux at all was because windows was breaking so often on my computer that I needed to try Linux to make sure my hardware wasn’t defective.

    You talk about having to fall back on the command line in Linux, but that’s also true on windows without 3rd party software. I’ve had to use windows command line utilities to fix drives with messed up partitions and to try to repair my windows install after windows update broke it. A couple weeks ago I had to help a friend on windows do checksums using the windows command line because windows doesn’t support that through the gui. Meanwhile dolphin on KDE let’s you do checksums in the gui from the file properties screen.

    I honestly feel like Linux isn’t really that much harder or more prone to breaking than windows, people just have less experience with it. The smaller user base means there’s a lot less help available online as well.



  • I had a 3-4 year old gaming laptop, and a mandatory windows update would corrupt the hard drive forcing a fresh install. I say mandatory because it installed no matter what I tried. Disabling updates in settings and registry never would prevent this update from wrecking my computer. I could get a few days to a week of use and then it would crash and require a fresh install.

    I installed Ubuntu to see if it was a hardware issue, and it ran great. Years later when I finally got another computer I tried windows again, but quickly realized how many things I hated about windows. I deleted my windows partition and have never looked back since.






  • A lot of the AI stuff is a Pandora’s box situation. The box is already open, there’s no closing it back. AI art, AI music, and AI movies will become increasingly high quality and widespread.

    The biggest thing we still have a chance to influence with it is whether it’s something that individuals have access to or if it becomes another field dominated by the same tech giants that already own everything. An example is people being against stable diffusion because it’s trained by individuals on internet images, but then being ok with a company like Adobe doing it because they snuck a line into their ToS that they can train AI off of anything uploaded to their creative cloud.



  • I’ve gotten back into gaming lately, and the two biggest things (for me) were focusing on fixed length single player games and getting a steam deck.

    It seems like every new game these days is a live service game or an open world, but playing through some focused, shorter, more straightforward games has been great for recapturing a love of games. When I was younger I preferred games that gave a lot of hours of gameplay for the money invested, but these days I have plenty of money and a shortage on time, so shorter games are king.

    Second, I bought a steam deck. I only use it for games, I don’t share it with my kids/wife/anyone, and it has a sleep function that lets me stop instantly in the middle of a game when needed and start back from that exact moment when I have time again. One of the biggest issues that was keeping me from playing games was feeling like I didn’t have enough time or didn’t know how much time I had. I wouldn’t want to start a game unless I knew I was going to have time for a good play session. With the steam deck it doesn’t matter if I only have 5 minutes, I can jump straight back into playing where I was last and quit the second I need to. It’s turned lots of small time where I was scrolling reddit/etc into time where I’m actually making progress on a game I want to play, and I’ve found that to be more satisfying. Small play sessions add up, if you’re able to frequently hop in and play a little bit you’ll quickly find yourself playing through games again.




  • Yeah, and the user experience matters a lot right now. The reddit blackout is the best chance for rapid Lemmy/fediverse growth, so giving the best user experience right now is critical. Users who are new to the fediverse are already confused by the multiple instances, adding in extra conditions like “don’t join these communities because you can’t interact with this community” adds an extra level of complexity and makes the fediverse seem fractured and flawed as a first impression.

    Beehaw’s decision to defiderate may have been the best short-term decision for them, but I feel like it’s a terrible decision for the rest of the fediverse and will hurt growth.