Yes siree, the excitement never stops!

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 7th, 2023

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  • This person asked if they can make PopOS secure via TPM.

    I am saying that while yes, you can, there isnt much point, because setting up LUKS to work with TPM is inconvenient, easy to fuck up, and basically offers no additional protection against all but extremely implausible security scenarios for basically everyone other than bladed server room admins worried about corporate espionage who are for some reason running bare metal PopOS on their server racks.

    Like the only actual use case I can see for this is /maybe/ having a LUKS encrypted portable backup drive, but even then you can still base the encryption key in the actual main pc’s harddrive without using tpm, though at /that and only that point/ are we approaching parity between the difficulty of using or not using tpm to accomplish this.


  • Oh ok so the use case here is if this casual linux user asking this question has only their harddrive stolen from their pc or their laptop in their home or apartment or workplace, not their whole pc.

    Mhm that seems likely.

    I guess this maybe makes sense if youre running like a server room, but chances are low thats the actual context of this question.

    Why would you run PopOS on a large operation’s servers?





  • Ok… so… if you have TPM… and LUKS…

    You still have a scenario where the encryption key is still on your physical device, LUKS with or without TPM, or … some kind of TPM based Linux encryption solution I have never heard of?

    Does Windows Secure Boot work on Linux via the TPM?

    No…

    Am I missing something?

    Theres no point in involving TPM in securing a linux computer.

    In a scenario where you’ve physically lost your computer, using TPM or not it wont matter if your pc gets into the hands of someone who can attempt to brute force the keys.

    If your pc is remotely compromised to the point it has something on it that can grab your keys, it also will not matter if you are using TPM in some way.

    The only practical use of full disk encryption is if your linux pc and or laptop gets stolen and falls into the hands of a non tech savvy person, and in that scenario, going through the trouble of correctly binding LUKS to TPM will have just been a waste of time.

    Thus, you should probably just use LUKS and not bother routing it through TPM.


  • Sure but you dont need to use TPM at all to use LUKS.

    You can store the encryption key on the harddrive, in the LUKS partition layer.

    Like thats the default of how LUKS works.

    Im really confused why people think TPM needs to be involved in anyway when using LUKS.

    Generally speaking you have to go out of your way to correctly cajole TPM v1 or v2 to actually correctly interface with LUKS.





  • Hah, Ive gone uh, full tilt, and actually am working on making a game myself that will hopefully /actually have meaningfully innovative and compelling gameplay/, and i dont plan on or seem to have any real need to fall into the kickstarter/early access trap.

    From a developer standpoint, both those approaches mean deadlines and managing expectations, which is basically maddeningly stressful and soul crushing.

    From a gamer perspective, more often than not that means throwing money at a promise that at best will not live up to the hyped experience you have generated with the fandom, and at worst is just a total bust, failure, or scam.

    So yep, my plan is tinker away for a year or two until the fundamentals are technologically sound and the actual gameplay is unique and compelling.

    Then, only then, would i maybe release a demo or in depth teasers or testing session footage.

    Yes thats right. Testing. Remember when games used to actually be playtested, not just for bugs, but for actual gameplay experience?

    Many of at least my favorite games and mods were hugely shaped by tester feedback that radically reworked certain game elements to solve unexpected gameplay problems, or to further an idea that the testers found fun or useful that tje devs didnt even realize was really possible in the world theyd constructed.

    Anyway… woo video games, shit sucks mostly these days but there are some notable basically niche exceptions, and hopefully i can make something thats at least niche successful.

    In the words of a person i truly do think is an actual genius of game design:

    These things, they take time.

    Time where no one has any real clue wtf youre actually doing, haha.


  • First off, dang thats a pretty good username, second:

    sigh yep, youre right.

    I am the only avid video gamer I knew who actually refused and refuses to buy anything ever again from Bethesda after FallOut 76.

    I personally know a good deal of gamers who said theyd do the same… and actually did not, some even pre ordering Starfield.

    Gamers are basically hilarious hypocrites from the standpoint of market research, public sentiment analysis and actual dollareedoos.

    Which is why i would have been an actual idiot at this point to think that an actually significant number of gamers could actually successfully pull off a boycott as a means to influence the overall market conditions.


  • This is not /that/ complicated.

    Who plays video games these days?

    Children, and adults who are basically working shit jobs and have little disposable income, but theyre generally likely to get hooked into a game that offers microtransactions of some kind.

    Ok, so, we all know AAA studios are more or less led by extremely money hungry bullies who see games as a product to sell to consumers for the purposes of maximizing shareholder profit, and they know they have to mainly compete against other games, and movies and tv (netflix hulu fucking whatever).

    Gamers also basically expect high quality graphics and the production value of basically a blockbuster movie, if you go by sales data.

    Sure, other games with less astounding graohics and actually unique or novel gameplay exist, thats neat, they have teensy tiny draws, excepting the essentially totally unpredictable break out hit thats popular for maybe a month, maybe literally days.

    So, we need huge studios for huge production values, and then the only way to possibly make profits on that is exploitative games as a service with microtransactions and season/battle passes.

    Their brains are stuck in a loop state basically, and going by their logic, it makes sense from their position and with their motives and personalities.

    Theyre following corpo logic basically perfectly.

    You can say theyre the bad guys, and I can say go rewatch V for Vendetta and replay the part where V says ‘you only need look into a mirror’ multiple times.

    How does this situation actually change?

    Either, somehow, not one but a number of basically indie games somehow become huge successes with massive regular player counts, and most importantly they somehow have to draw people away from the mostly unoriginal schlock that is most AAA money printing games these days…

    Or, basically, a significant number of big name studios/publishers need to basically just go entirely bankrupt.

    Are either of these likely to happen?

    Probably not, not soon, barring an extremely serious basically global economic downturn.

    The fact that there is this much uniformity in strategy means that there will be sort of attritional damage done to the less successful, but that… might result in a sea change of market strategy to some other basically fad for AAA game studios… or it might result in even further buyouts and consolidation of once great IPs and studios.

    Welcome to video game hell, nearly no one is truly innocent.



  • That is a neat story, thanks for sharing!

    Best I’ve got doesn’t have to do with Godot, but I think its neat.

    The year is 2003 or 4, and I am beta testing the 0.5 release of Project Reality, which later more or less evolved into Squad.

    I know nothing about coding at this point being still in middle school.

    What I do possess is apparently pattern recognition.

    We are in a last minute waaay overextended beta testing session trying to iron out a mystifying bug:

    The whole new feature of implementing squad specific kit bags that are only obtainable at certain in game locations is working.

    But… sometimes it is not. At all. Sometimes you can grab an unlimited number of kits without restriction, sometimes you cant and have to follow the newly coded rules that limit kits by being in a squad, and having a total pool of requestable kits per squad and per your whole team.

    We get in vehicles, we get out of vehicles.

    We go to different parts of the map.

    We die then respawn via suiciding.

    We die then respawn via being shot, killed as infantry with different weapons, killed inside different vehicles.

    We join and leave amd create and disband squads.

    We die on the water, we die on the land.

    We die on islands, we die on beaches.

    We shall never surrender!

    Er, well the goof off testers wont, the devs are getting frustrated.

    Absolutely none of this has any discernable effect on the problem.

    After what must have been about 3 hours… we are basically just fucking about as testers as the actual devs including the one who actually coded the new system is in despair, we are gonna have to push back the massively advertised release date of about 8 hours from now.

    Fucking about a bit and watching random zany attempts at most impressive suicides with those who we are at this point joking are just the chosen ones able to spawn unlimited specialist kits with c4 and anti tank weapons…

    Something clicks.

    I hold down the tab button to bring up the scoreboard with player names.

    I start telling a few of the testers who have not already left to try spawning kits at various locations.

    Everyone goes sure man why not.

    After doing this with myself and 5 other people… I have a theory.

    Everyone who has non alphanumeric characters in their name is able to break the kit limitation rules, everyone else is bound by them.

    The lead dev is skeptical, but checks the code again anyway.

    About a minute later he screams over the mic on teamspeak.

    About 10 minutes later, he has fixed what was probably a really simple but easily overlooked bug in how early python parses string values and passes them to other functions or data types.

    The server is back up, everything works correctly now, and Project Reality 0.5 is released only a few hours behind schedule, instead of the next week or two when the team would be able to organize another large scale testing bout.

    Lol and thats the story of how i saved a mod release date wooo!


  • Ding ding ding, winner winner chicken dinner.

    Sure if you are a bigger entity and have more money to throw around, there are other engines that’ll probably be a much better fit.

    If youre a broke ass indie dev, I am not really seeing a better choice than Godot right now, as youre not gonna be able to afford a more expensive engine without /usually/ pulling some kind of asset flip scam type thing.

    Sure there are some very good more niche 2D only development engines, but even with a lot of them youve still got some kind of liscensing to deal with.

    That basically leaves Unity and … OGRE, as far as I am aware for possibly good choices for a 3D game.

    Unity is currently self destructing, and OGRE, at least as far as I have tried, is pretty hard to get a native dev environment working on linux. Maybe I missed something or got confused, but I kept running into error after error trying to set up its more advanced features, which seem to require windows specific dependencies.

    I guess you could run it in a VM but that seems basically insane, and even if I was to set up a dedicated Windows machine just to develop on OGRE, it is far more clumsy to work with than Godot.


  • Whew, wont lie, I am getting tired and I had to reread that a few times till it clicked.

    SystemD… and Linux gaming.

    I am far from an expert on systemd and its alternatives, but so far all what I at least think I know is:

    SystemD is not as efficient as other paradigms could be,

    It could potentially be a massive security vulnerability, or maybe not, or maybe so, or no one seems to agree on this and then everyone starts yelling,

    I am reasonably confident that at least currently there are not any existing alternatives to SystemD that allow one to play much less develop basically somewhere between any to most games that involve 3d graphics.

    Again, I could be completely wrong about all of this, absolutely beyond my experience and skill set to comment much more than:

    A systemd alternative that would allow for modern kinds of multiplayer 3d online games would be really neat, but it seems like it would take a massive amount of effort that is at least nearly certainly beyond my ability to contribute to in any meaningful way.


  • You conveniently left out the qualifier of my statement.

    That I have ever known.

    Probably unlike the field of electrical engineering, every /single/ person I have known in my life has relied on me to provide free expertise in software related issues of all possible kinds, and also simultaneously mocked my expertise and ability any time I suggest they do something or use something that will actually work, but they do not think it will because -insert utterly nonsensical concern about issue they do not even know how to use basic vocabulary to describe-.

    This is apparently a rather unique phenomenon that happens to those who are programmers and know software.

    Software and programming is in every modern computerized device, but an astounding amount of people who use such devices both realize they are not experts and will seek the help of a software expert for assistance, but will also feel as if they are better able to solve a problem when -literally any random thing they do not like for any random reason is different in any other way-.

    If you attempt to explain anything to these people at this point it does not matter if you are correct, they will be angry and abuse you quite often.

    I do not hate the tech illiterate people I have known because they are ignorant.

    I hate them because they are abusive.

    Finally, when it comes to the kind of game I want to make?

    I want to make something I would enjoy playing.

    And I have found that I enjoy games that offer a mix of skill based challenge in the sense of being able to quickly execute exact commands to the controller rapidly and with precision, but also with a larger sense of strategy, and also with multiple possible ways to solve a problem, some that are obvious, and some that are non obvious and encourage thinking outside the box.

    And I have also found that every technically incompetent person I have known is utterly incapable of enjoying this kind of gameplay.

    And that is fine. As I said, I want to make a game for myself and people with similar game preferences, and mental capacities.

    I have been surrounded by abusive morons my whole life and I have no interest in making a game that appeals to such people.