That reminds me…

In circa 1995 I was running a dial upBBS service – as a teenager. So if course, it was full of bootlegged video games and such, and people would dial in, download a game, log off.

Someone uploaded Descent or something like that. But they had put "deltree /y C:" or similar into a batch file, used a BAT2COM converter program, then a COM2EXE program, then padded the file size to approximately the right size with random crap (probably just using APPEND)… And uploaded it. Well, fortunately for the rest of my users, I say the game and said: oh, that’s neat, I should try it and copied it to another computer over my internal network and launched it. It started deleting files right away and I hit CTRL-C to abort. I lost only a few dozen files.

Banned the user, deleted the package. Got lucky.

Keep going, I’m almost there

I bet this is a falling out with Hasbro execs on royalties. BG3 royalties were a cash cow this year for Hasbro, pushing Wizards (as a division) to be quite profitable, while almost all other divisions in their company lost money.

So now the agreement is over, and Larian is like: we will own the IP on our next project instead of paying $90M to Hasbro… And fair enough – they’ve shown they can kick ass. Hasbro is probably gambling that it’s the IP that made the money, and not Larian being magic in a bottle as a developer. So they’ll kick tires on selling BG4 to another studio.

BG3 will go down in history as the legendary game before enshittification. Larian will make a few great games that don’t sell as well – before selling out to a whale that dumps money on the owner’s front lawn (see also BioWare). The devs who made BG3 will found indie studios and make cool shit for a decade or two. So the wheel turns.

I still go to Reddit for some communities that don’t have critical mass on Lemmy. Sure you can talk about programming or Linux here, but the more niche ones (like specific mods for specific games) are entirely absent.

But when I want to post something or create content, it goes here.

Very cool as a tech demo. Terrible as a product.

O7

They are speaking truth to power at the moment, but people still play MTX mobile games so…

As a long term slackware aficionado, I agree that it meets the criteria. But it also is significantly different from other distros in enough ways that you may find yourself relearning things you took for granted. And that is off-putting for a lot of users.

That would go a long way towards solving the range anxiety barrier. 1000km is close to the maximum that same people can do in a single day. Yes, you could push further in a day in a pinch, but not comfortably unless you’re rotating drivers. It’s pretty close to the limits enforced on long haul truck drivers in Canada or the US (depends on speed limits and traffic density and a few other things).

Self-identification is such a bizzare polarized issue. On one side, you have sexual self-identification being embraced by the same people who bemoan cultural self-identification. I don’t understand this cognitive dissonance. Alas.

Lemmy (like its predecessors) is temporally arranged content. Think of it like having a discussion in a pub. Imagine bringing up a topic and someone said: but we discussed this 5 days ago, so we cannot discuss it now. Your obvious response would be: but I wasn’t here five days ago. It’s okay to repeat a conversation.

If you want more of a hierarchical structure, use wikipedia article conversations. Then each conversation only occurs once (ish). Not encouraging repeated conversation here will lead to slow content death – like on StackOverflow.

In this thread: a bunch of people making it more complicated than it needs to be.

Grab an old laptop, grab a user oriented distro that has a live-USB boot option. Play and learn.

Live USB options that should be user friend enough. Choose at random – because you like their logo or whatever.

https://pendrivelinux.com/put-mandriva-2010-on-a-usb-flash-drive-windows/

https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Live_USB_stick

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2230389

https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/burn.html

You’re not wrong. KDE 1.x very much aimed at the Win95 market. They even directly targeted the windows userbase with jokes. The ordinal Win95 had a little fly-in animation that said “Where do you want to go today?” with an arrow pointing at the start menu. KDE 1.0 had this too, but it said “tomorrow” instead of “today”. Etc.

KDE also stole good ideas from wherever they were found. Trash is thus called because of Apple. The virtual desktops came from CDE. Etc. Sometimes it stole too much, and we would have discussions about flying too close to the sun, and tweak something so it would be just different enough not to raise the ire of lawyers.

Corel Linux was a KDE distro, so it largely had that familiar Win9x look, even if it felt different once you were actually using it. KDE later developed it’s own identity, but it retains its history and the baggage that comes with it.

I remember it and was there, on the KDE side of it. Summarized half-remembered version.

Corel WordPerfect had been ported to linux late in the 90s and they got this notion that people only bought Windows to use MS Office. So if they made their own OS, people would buy it just to use WordPerfect. They had grand plans to take KDE and linux and package it as a consumer grade OS. The closest other competitor doing that at the time was Caldera, and they were seeing some success, so why not eh?

They hired two people to “fix” KDE. But the people they hired had no idea how open source worked – how to interact with a community that functioned more like a meritocracy than a managed hierarchy. They showed up on the mailing list and tried to make demands – work on this, fix these bugs, adhere to our standards for this other thing, etc. When KDE didn’t jump to their whimsy, they sort of got annoyed and just decided to maintain a patchset or something.

The distro flopped hard. And it started with their management. They could have instead hired a half dozen KDE developers that were already contributing, started feature or bug bounty programs (like Google Summer of Code, which was great but came later), and possibly have pulled something amazing together.

Prediction: this will be considered Apple’s biggest product flop in decades, and may even unseat the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_5300 for worst in company history. The whole product line will be scrapped before 2027.

Fortunately they have the cash to burn on projects like this to see what takes.

I’ll post this in !prediction@lemmy.ca so someone can call me on it one day ;)

Yeah, the drama that comes with it is probably the biggest issue – it will occupy some part of your cognitive energy.

Konsole and xterm, although I haven’t had to use xterm in a while. Actually, circa 1997 I used kterm, the predecessor to konsole. ;)

Straight up Linux ttys are also quite common for me. Most old school distros still let you escape to the terminal, with CTRL-ALT-F1 or similar. I haven’t distro hopped in a long time, so I don’t know if other distros still do this.

Still difficult in another sense. The person who was reading the code live on twitch or whatever, could never in the future work on wine. They’d have to commit to long term seperation from the project.

(Plus, they’d probably want to do it anonymously, since they’ve illegally obtained the source code.)

Wow, you’re the most entitled user of free software I’ve met in a while. Just buy a windows license next time.

Ask for a refund