sylver_dragon

If something requires an “app” and a connection to “the cloud” for basic functionality, don’t buy it. This sort of abandonment by the manufacturer will always happen. Maybe it will last longer. Maybe it will be next week. But once the company has your money, the last thing they want to do is to spend any of that money providing you with support.

My apologies, I was not familiar with the difference. I’m going to have to test this when I am back at my system. Looking at the docs, it does seem to be experimental in Linux. But it seems odd that it would turn off automagically.

That’s interesting. I’ve not had that sort of issue. On my phone (Android), my son’s laptop (Windows) and my desktop (Arch Linux) the NextCloud clients all sync perfectly and run at start up. Granted, knowing that the Linux landscape is fractured, I wouldn’t be overly surprised if the client had issues on some flavors of Linux.

If you are willing to self-host, I’ve found Nextcloud integrates well in Linux. I had been using it before I made the switch and it worked out just fine afterwards. I originally set it up to have a cloud-sync option for my phone, which didn’t mean passing everything through Google first. But, it also proved to be a handy way to sync files on my desktop as well.
It just shows up as another folder on my system and Libre Office is happy to work on files from there (with some permissions fiddling due to flatpak).

Every new “feature” I hear about in Windows Privacy Invasion Goes to 11, the happier I am that I switched to Linux. It’s been mostly smooth and games have just worked. Though I know that much of that is because of Proton.

My experience has been pretty similar. With Windows turning the invasive crap up to 11, I decided to try and jump to Linux. The catch has always been gaming. But, I have a Steam Deck and so have seen first hand how well Proton has been bridging that gap and finally decided to dip my toes back in. I installed Arch on a USB 3 thumbdrive and have been running my primary system that way for about a month now. Most everything has worked well. Though, with the selection of Arch, I accepted some level of slamming my head against a wall to get things how I want them. That’s more on me than Linux. Games have been running well (except for the input bug in Enshrouded with recent major update, that’s fixed now). I’ve had no issues with software, I was already using mostly FOSS anyway. It’s really been a lot of “it just works” all around.

The answer to that will be everyone’s favorite “it depends”. Specifically, it depends on everything you are trying to do. I have a fairly minimal setup, I host a WordPress site for my personal blog and I host a NextCloud instance for syncing my photos/documents/etc. I also have to admit that my backup situation is not good (I don’t have a remote backup). So, my costs are pretty minimal:

• $12/year - Domain
• $10/month - Linode/Akamai containers

The Domain fee is obvious, I pay for my own domain. For the containers, I have 2 containers hosted by the bought up husk of Linode. The first is just a Kali container I use for remote scanning and testing (of my own stuff and for work). So, not a necessary cost, but one I like to have. The other is a Wireguard container connecting back to my home network. This is necessary as my ISP makes use of CG-NAT. The short version of that is, I don’t actually have a public IP address on my home network and so have to work around that limitation. I do this by hosting NGinx on the Wireguard container and routing all traffic over a Wireguard VPN back to my home router. The VPN terminates on the outside interface and then traffic on 443/tcp is NAT’d through the firewall to my “server”. I have an NGinx container listening on 443 and based on host headers traffic goes to either the WordPress or NextCloud container which do their magic respectively. I also have a number of services, running in containers, on that server. But, none of those are hosted on the internet. Things like PiHole and Octoprint.

I don’t track costs for electricity, but that should be minimal for my server. The rest of the network equipment is a wash, as I would be using that anyway for home internet. So overall, I pay $11/month in fixed costs and then any upgrades/changes to my server have a one-time capital cost. For example, I just upgraded the CPU in it as it was struggling under the Enshrouded server I was running for my Wife and I.

“High Impact” like a body hitting the ground at the bottom of a cliff.

While I’m a fan of Kali, some work environments see anything Kali related and go full “zomg! WTF!” Mode. Even in less restrictive environments, it’s often easier to just go with the flow and avoid making life harder for the security folks, without a good reason.

And this is why indie games have been having such a good time of it. Sure, we might get the decade long “Early Access” of 7 Days to Die, or “We resemble but are legally distinct from Pokemon” Palworld, but we get fun games with a lot of obvious passion behind them. I do wish we would see more Baldur’s Gate 3 style large productions which aren’t designed around micro-transactions. But, I also realize that big name studios are run by folks with business degrees and not gamers; so, I should expect major games to be after my wallet like a meth addict.

I remember the hint books for Sierra’s games (e.g. King’s Quest). Each hint would be a question or sentence with multiple boxes underneath. The boxes were blank and you used a special highlighter pen to reveal the content of the box, with each subsequent box being more and more specific. It was an interesting way to get hints.

Try getting old. I used to want 9 or so. These days, I seem to just wake up after about 7 hours. I don’t really use an alarm anymore. I just get up when I am awake and know that getting back to sleep isn’t going to happen. Even nights after a good workout, I pop awake after about 6 1/2 to 7 hours. Never used to be this way. But, I just seem to need less these days.

By hours played, it’s either Valheim or Baldur’s Gate 3. Fallout 76 should get mentioned, as it was a lot of fun until it wasn’t. Falling victim to the story lines sort of running their course and the game turning into a standard MMO grind-fest. I’ll also mention Green Hell, which was a passable survival-crafting game with enough story to make a “play through” actually have a meaning. Even if that meaning had all the subtlety of a tactical nuclear weapon. It’s also still seeing development, so it might be worth going back too. Finally, there was Raft, which was another fun survival-crafting game (is my preference in games obvious?), which also went for the subtlety of a water buffalo rutting. Again, fun while it lasted, but hardly worth playing more than once or twice.

Melee combat is possible on motorcycles.

Oh now this is going to be fun.

Depends on how far ahead he planned the sale. It does sound like he’s getting ready to deploy a golden parachute while the company burns. Clean out his own stock while the price is still high enough and then say, “well shucks, who’d have thought that developers would leave in droves when we instituted micro-transactions for using our engine?” And walk on to overseeing his next disaster.

Seems like it’s planned enshitification. Use lower costs and even free for individuals to get market share, then crank up the price once you have a large audience. It’ll be interesting to see if and where indie developers jump to.

If you want to step just a bit further back in gaming history, the old Sierra games were absolutely fantastic for their time. My personal favorite series will always be Quest for Glory. And I still go back and play through the series about once a year or so. For more even more of a puzzle focus, the King’s Quest series or Space Quest series were both very good. Most of these games were DOS based and so run well with DOSBox. The Steam version on Quest for Glory literally just auto-runs the game in DOSBox. If you enjoy any of them, I’d also recommend looking into ScummVM which tends to make running those older games really smooth, at the cost of a tiny bit of setup work.

Seems like MS is trying to run afoul of anti-trust laws, again.

Assuming your partner is breast-feeding, pop that kid on a nipple. We flew several times with young kids and being able to suckle kept the little ones quiet for most flights.

If you’re paying for a new version every year, is all that different than paying for a service? At the very least, with the yearly release model, you can simply decide not to pay for a year and keep playing the old one.

Assuming you mean a digital game, as opposed to physical, the problem with users trading cards is that there is no money in it for the company running the infrastructure. If two users trade cards, then both got something they wanted but the company hosting the infrastructure didn’t get anything. It’s much more profitable for the whole thing to be linked to micro-transactions which allow players to endlessly gamble on getting the cards they want. Every time a player buys a pack/lootbox/pull of the one-armed bandit handle, the company makes some amount of money. The user gets their gambling dopamine hit and maybe a card they want. The lure of monetization is going to be too great for most companies to resist. So, it’s all about the gambling mechanics.

Even table-top CCGs face this pressure. It’s just impossible for the companies to control. So instead, they ratchet up the power level of cards with each new edition to force some segment of the player base to pay large sums of money to get the most desirable cards in circulation. Once enough of the desirable cards enter circulation, players can shift to just trading for or buying the cards they want outright and the company making the CCG is cut off from further profit. This is why new editions, expansions, seasons or whatever they are called are introduced on a regular basis. The goal of the game is to make the company more money by getting people to pay for cards which cost next to nothing to produce. But hey, if this is your form of fun, you do you.