QuoteWITCH ON THE HOLY NIGHT.

I had this on my wishlist, but I didn't realize it was going to be that expensive at release. It's a dual-language release, though, but I don't know if it's DRM-free. I'm interested in it, but I think I'm going to wait for a bigger sale...

There are a number of negative reviews from people who can't even get it to run on their Steam Deck: https://www.protondb.com/app/2052410

There are a lot of broken videos in this game that will crash the game, apparently. It's a pretty common problem with VNs and Valve is the only one who can really solve this by transcoding them to another format, so it's a good thing it's on Steam, I guess.

Most useful information here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/7348

For now it seems it doesn't crash anymore but the videos are still silently skipped. I'm guessing the comment that was removed for "legally problematic" reasons is related to Media Foundation.

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69% of my playtime was Rocket League. A bit of Deep Rock Galactic. Some Journey to the Savage Planet. Multiplayer games. I still need to finish The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog...

The other games I played were from Itch, GOG, DLsite, MangaGamer, JAST, or I bought physical editions like with H2O.

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Quoting: Mal

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualIt's definitely great that Epic won the antitrust case, because that means Google lost, and Google is the first large tech company in more than 20 years to lose an antitrust case. It indicates a paradigm shift. Hopefully the remedies will be meaningful.

Dunno. As far as I can see, it just means the end of semi walled gardens platforms. Sweeney might think that he can just start leeching from Google work on Android, but his win combined with Apple one is just a signal to tech firms that US law allows closed systems or open systems, no mid ground. Google will most likely rectify this by building its own iPhones. I guess it's good overall, Android was a little hypocritical in the end (technically open, but not commercially due to Google deals behind the scenes). It was just a mean to prevent the likes of Samsung, LG and the rest to play competitors at a time when Google had no hardware experience. But now it has it. For a time it will look interesting but I'm 80% sure it will end the same way as now, just with iPhones vs Pixels instead of droids. All the rest marginalized. And more transparency on the business models which doesn't hurt.

Apple won the antitrust case against Epic, didn't they?

Android is open source. It's the Google apps that aren't. Ars has a great breakdown of how Google maintains control over Android: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/

Google has set things up such that competitors stay in their own lane and present a united front against Apple. OEMs are allowed to ship Android on devices, but if they want Google Maps, Google Play, and Google Play Services, they need to comply with Google's rules (namely, don't build an alternative app store or maintain your own Android fork). It's already a monopoly in Google's favor; it's not as if antitrust remedies could make it worse. OEMs are already at Google's mercy, except for the really big ones like Amazon and Huawei. Google is bundling two distinct products together just like IE and Windows.

Google has far less control over powerful app publishers like Epic. It's why they needed to resort to bribery to stop Epic from offering a competing service.

I don't think Epic is interested in "leeching" from Google's work on Android. They want to develop their own payment system so they don't need to give Google a 30% cut. In a competitive market, they should be allowed to do that.

Google Pixels own a pitiful percentage of the phone market compared to other Android phones (I say this owning a Pixel myself). It has less than 5% of most markets. The Nexus phones were the same way. Google Pixels, just like every other Android phone, are just a platform for Google to offer their services to Android users. Google doesn't care about making money directly from phones; they're a software company. They only built a browser so they could make Google search the default. Android exists for the same reason.

If Google stops releasing new sources for Android, Samsung will just fork it, leave the OHA, create their own Play Store and APIs for apps, start building replacements for Google's apps, and app developers will scramble to move to that platform because it's the biggest Android platform by far. Most other OEMs will flee to that fork of Android too. Google gains nothing from this, but they lose a lot.

But in case it wasn't clear, fuck Epic.

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It's definitely great that Epic won the antitrust case, because that means Google lost, and Google is the first large tech company in more than 20 years to lose an antitrust case. It indicates a paradigm shift. Hopefully the remedies will be meaningful.

I'm not quite sure what Sweeney is referring to by "the Linux problem". It's such a short answer that it could be a reference to so many things. Steam Deck sales are currently at a few million, but my guess is they will cap out at ~8.9.

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: PikoloThe patent office can't find prior art for those? How? They're all issued since 2019! The only one that even seems novel is AUTOMATED PLAYER CONTROL TAKEOVER IN A VIDEO GAME, and I'd assume someone more familiar with MMORPGs can find an example. ROUTE NAVIGATION SYSTEM WITHIN A GAME APPLICATION ENVIRONMENT is bonkers - we've had animated navigation lines for decades!

USPTO no longer looks for prior art since at least a decade back, the new regime is that they only do very basic checks and then any violations such as prior art is up for a court to decide in a future lawsuit.

This explains a lot about how Unified Patents manages to keep invalidating codec patents in court...

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Quoting: LanzGnome now resembles the bastard child of a smartphone, Mac OS, and Windows 11 - combining the worst elements of all 3 into the most dialectical GUI.

On the contrary, GNOME changed my workflow completely. I mope when I need to use macOS or Windows. The workspace indicator is an improvement.

I've always maintained that GNOME is what macOS could have been if there was more thought behind some of the designs. And hell, it's really not hard to build a better file manager than Finder.

I like KDE a lot too! Having two rows of virtual desktops makes a lot of sense, for example.

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Quoting: dziadulewiczThis survey appears not very useful until we get some absolute numbers. Also the "other" section includes probably Linuxes and then also Chrome OS is definitely Linux but is often left out from Linux share.

"Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market. It would be twice as much if people could stop arguing about who counts and who doesn't".

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/18/linux_desktop_debate/

Well, even Google refers to "Linux" as something separate from ChromeOS: https://chromeos.dev/en/linux/setup

I don't know what the difference is exactly, but Google seems to think there is one.

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QuoteAs you can see on the board many things are missing or broken but we’ve got a functional session with window, applications and workspace management. We’re able to log in, run most apps, manipulate windows, workspaces, nemo, the panel etc..

Still early (the Trello board identifies some significant missing features, like screen capture), but great news.

I wonder how they will implement screen capture permissions. Every compositor seems to do it differently. I like GNOME's implementation the most; loudly indicating when the screen is being captured in the top right.

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QuoteFixed a bug that could cause monitors to flicker when the performance state changes on Turing GPUs.

I really hope this is actually fixed this time. I'm getting really sick of one-third of my monitor flashing black every few minutes.

For the record, here is the forum thread about this issue.

It seems like it is finally, actually fixed. Since I'm on Arch, I can just install nvidia-dkms from the AUR and hope for the best. Or just wait for the package to be bumped. I might do the latter.

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Quoting: Cyril

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualIt works okay for running Keepass but it's certainly ugly. C# is considered properly cross-compatible because of Mono now, so it can't be that bad...

Why would you do that?

For importing my Bitwarden database periodically. KeepassXC doesn't have a Bitwarden import option that works properly, but Keepass does. After that, I just access the converted database in KeepassXC.

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