I really just want an encrypted portable linux device with a cellular modem. I don’t even care if it can SMS or VOLTE, I just need it to run a secure chat client, support Bluetooth headphones and last all day on a charge.

Then you’re in luck, because that’s something you can already have by now! Just get yourself one of the more recent-ish phones that are well supported by PostmarketOS. The things Linux phones struggle the most with these days, are the more traditional phone-things, such as text messages or calling, which may not be ready for production, as they say (although, both texts and calls have actually worked well for me as of late). But if all you want is a pocket Linux computer/PDA, and intend to carry another phone for calls and texting, that’s something you can have, for the grand price of an old, second-hand phone. I’ve been loving my (LUKS-encrypted) OnePlus 6T, and I do actually use it for calls and texts as well!

Hahah, I can’t tell if this comment is queer, or neckbeard. X)

Never fear! I will happily spare you the trouble, and take that old thing off your hands - free of charge! ;D

I loved that controller. Best damn gamepad I ever had. It was a sad day when it finally gave in, and broke, last year.

I get you - kinda. Engines are big. Take a look at some of the other “havers of game engines” and see how often threw a whole, working engine away, to recreate one from scratch?

Valve’s Source Engine was first used for a release in 2004, but it wasn’t really a new engine either, as it was just a continuation of GoldSrc, first used for Half-Life, released in 1998. And GoldSrc? Well it was based off of the Quake Engine, later known as id Tech 2, which was the engine of the namesake game from 1996.

Is Valve’s engine a decrepit relic, not suitable for modern games? I haven’t been keeping up, but as far as I know, that’s not really a common refrain. And I know that it has at several points in time been an engine hailed for bringing innovative technology to the table - despite quite literally been a direct continuation of the engine of one the very first mainstream games to sport true 3D rendered graphics.

Without having checked, I’m willing to bet each new version of the Unreal Engine has simple been based off of the former, too, all the way back to 1998’s Unreal. It doesn’t make sense to throw away parts that work just fine, for the sake of it, when you’re dealing with something as big as an engine, as you’re likely to just end up rewriting parts of it 1:1.

But fuck if the Creation Engine isn’t a janky ass mess, and if that hasn’t always been the case! Morrowind was helluva janky too, but we excused it because it was able to deliver something unprecedented. By Oblivion in 2006, that was no longer the case.
Most other havers of engines have done a more or less good job of continually innovating, upgrading, expanding and replacing parts of their engines, whereas it seems Bethesda has always done the bare minimum, to the point that over 50% of the engine must be composed of duct tape at this point, with actual.code presumably on second place somewhere further down.

Bethesda needs to either spend all this excessive development on properly reworking and upgrading their engine, or they should throw it away forever and just license something like Unreal Engine.

Heroic is FOSS, though, isn’t it? I thought Legendary was just Heroic, but without the GUI?

Yeah, I only ever use:

sudo random numbers

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

Indeed, though as lacking as Ark is, I still think it’s better than PeaZip, which has just about the messiest GUI I’ve seen in a long while, with far too much redundancy, and annoying quirks.

I really liked the GUI of WinRar, but I no longer consider proprietary software to be an option. 7-Zip’s GUI was pretty okay, but the “Linux port” of that is so incomplete that it feels more like a prop than a programme. The only part that works well is it’s archive creation menu, which I can access through the context menu. But the equivalent in Ark is about on par.

I am still pining for a Qt GUI compression/extraction killer app, that feels fully featured and able to handle it all. As it is, I keep three different ones installed, to meet my needs and mostly satisfy my workflow.

Tell me about it. Did you see the one wearing an entirely transparent shell? You can see everything!

Call me a freak, but there’s just something about literally being able to see how far inside it goes, when you insert your cartridge.

Something, something, Kohlera.

professional actor.

Hmm… Does anyone else suspect Willem Dafoe?

I didn’t know what to think when I read this. There are clearly some hurt feelings here, as well as some strong accusations, but without hearing the different sides to the story, and more KDE insiders weighing in with their take, I feel like it’s impossible to say what’s up or down.

There are RPMs as well, but yeah, Proton has terrible Linux support overall.

Democratic influence on the rules you’re bound by, is that really an insignificant benefit?

From my perspective as a radical social liberal, it seems to me that totalitarian and authoritarian outcomes are inherent to any form of socialism which embrace revolution, or the complete replacement of societal institutions, and communism is of course the poster child. This seems to happen whether or not totalitarian traits existed in the ideology, before coming to power.

When you go back in history, and read letters written by the losers of party power struggles, before they lost, or read accounts of things they said, you will often find their sheer naivety to be striking, I find.

My personal theory is that several of the methods used to come to power, many of the power structures that emerge, and the eventual new institutions that are created, are strong tools for exercising power, while they often only have weak guards to prevent abuses of power. The most cynical members of a party will use and abuse them, they will come to dominate, and they will not get rid of these weaknesses in the system, thereby removing their own advantage in wielding, maintaining and grabbing for more power.

It’s interesting how socialism is an ideology that is very focused on power relations and dynamics (employer vs. employee for instance), presents itself as an equaliser or a liberator of people being subject to others, and has a lot of political theory at its foundation, and yet, it seemingly has such a glaring blind spot of falling victim to itself.

I think everyone on the far left would benefit immensely, from going back and reading a whole lot of early liberal thought about power and the state. From back when it was more just a strand of political theory, than an ideology as such. And when I say they would benefit, I mean it genuinely, in that it would help them ensure that whatever political change they might become a part in bringing about, will be able to serve it’s original goals, rather than quickly become corrupted.

I am struggling to think of much there that would be inherently incompatible with even far-left socialism. Except, perhaps, if your view is that the state is, and should be total and absolute, then that is of course incompatible with putting restrictions on its power, or dividing it into separate parts that must check each other.

Right you are! I’m not sure how that went over my head. Eh, too much morning, too little coffee. Thanks for correcting me.

Isn’t that irrelevant? According to the article, the archive itself doesn’t contain any malicious code. Rather, it’s encoded in the file name, and can start executing itself when being parsed by the shell - no extraction needed.

It seems to me that avoiding rar files, or limiting your ability to extract them will provide a false sense of security at best. Seems to me that this could be done using any file type at all.

I think you’re allowed to set your Day mode to sepia. :p

I’m not actually sure I understand it. What about Mint is easier or more user friendly than say, a Fedora spin?

And if having that decanonicalized Ubuntu base is important, then why not install Tuxedo OS instead? Plasma is by far the most Windows-like DE in my experience, and it is more developed and featureful. Cinnamon, as I understand it, is still stuck in X11 land, which is less secure, and only in maintenance mode.