Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe thing is, that can be entirely enough for a sizable category of use cases. Sure, look just a bit under the surface and it's different . . . but many users don't do that, so for them it is not different.

Yeah – I was thinking about what I wrote later in the day after posting, that I didn't mean to imply "we should only introduce people to Linux with a less-familiar DE". I think what I said was mostly about a certain class of Windows power users who would have to learn/unlearn/relearn the most when switching because their prior Windows knowledge no longer applies (like, I dunno, editing the registry). For lots of people who don't need or want to go deeper, the surface familiarity of various Linux DEs is a great asset.

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Quoting: TheRiddickCompared to the recent SW games, is this one actually decent?

I played a little bit of the early portion of it (poorly) on a friend's Game Cube in the early 00s. I remember finding it pretty interesting as a kid (you get to be a cool bounty hunter, and a jetpack, and a flamethrower, and poison darts, and…). I don't know if anyone would call it one of the great Star Wars games, but it seemed fairly solid in design and competently executed, though who knows what I'd think of it now. Reviews on Steam are currently sitting at "very positive", for what that's worth. Maybe I'll pick it up and give it a try now that it has proper mouse and keyboard support.

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Quoting: PenglingPrecisely. And it's important to point out that the Linux option isn't Windows, and that things aren't going to act the same, and that the software you'll use won't be the same. I know that sounds like common-sense, but for some reason, though people are fine with adjusting to the differences that MacOS has from Windows, they don't seem to approach Linux like that for some strange reason.

I think part of it is that some Linux DEs mimic the desktop paradigm of older Windows versions much closer than MacOS does, which masks the differences. With MacOS you've got the task bar at the top, which changes based on the program that has focus, the dock at the bottom, the whole file explorer looks completely different, it clearly doesn't work exactly like Windows does. Whereas someone using Linux with (say) the Cinnamon DE, it's a pretty similar experience superficially: familiar task bar at the bottom with some shortcuts, a list of open programs, a "start menu" in the lower left, the file explorer looks and behaves pretty similarly, etc.…

From personal experience, we got a Windows computer when I was 10, then I first tried Linux in my early twenties at college. It looked similar enough to hide the differences, which kept me from immediately realizing how much work it actually takes to learn a new operating system (since as a kid you just soak up information like a sponge and don't remember the work it took). When I ran into difficulties like learning how to navigate the terminal it kinda put me off Linux for a few years until I started using it in a new job; after a year of getting familiar with it there, I was finally comfortable enough to switch at home.

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"Dear Valve, I'd like to pitch a concept for an upcoming event: the Steam Soccer and Aluminum Fest. Unorthodox mixture I know, but hear me out…"

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Quoting: Talon1024Sort of. Maybe I'm just fearmongering, but don't forget that other game industry companies have been making lots of shitty, greedy decisions lately.

Games like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora have microtransactions and lots of bugs, thanks to Ubisoft.
Some of the studios eaten (bought) by Microsoft were shut down in May.
Good independent game studios like Mimimi are going to shut down in the near future.
As for other indie games.. There's quite a few of them, and many of them are good, but the reason the game industry crashed in the 80s is because the market was oversaturated with half-baked games. With so much competition in the market, it's already very difficult for an indie developer to find a significant audience and earn enough money to live.

Also, I haven't heard of any other indie studios hiring the recent layoffs. I do remember some former Ubisoft employees forming their own studio and developing the game Stray.

It's just basic supply and demand. If the market for PC games ever becomes too saturated (and keep in mind, it's not like the population of consumers is fixed – it continues to grow year over year), then some studios will be unable to stay solvent and leave the market…leaving a larger portion of the revenue for the remaining studios, and space for new developers to join. It's not like all studios are going to simultaneously go bankrupt, and even if they somehow magically did, new ones would pop up overnight to fill the void. PC gaming's not going anywhere even if a few studios are shutting down.

It's just like any ecosystem, where individual actors are simultaneously dying and being born. It's easy to focus on a few trees in a forest felled by a passing storm and proclaim "Oh no! The whole forest is dying!" and miss the dozens of saplings growing up in the space they cleared over the coming years (plus all the mature trees doing just fine). Or notice the dead whale, and not the hundreds of small creatures its flesh nourishes. Or the dramatic supernova whose shockwave sets off a new round of star formation. It's always easier to see studios closing down (because they're established, and get reported on) than seeing new ones form (because no one knows about them yet).

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That final "The guild always wants more" line crystallized what the rest of the trailer had been hinting at: this is basically single-player Lethal Company in the Wild West.

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Quoting: scaineHow are 100K people still playing this? Or are the numbers actually a true-er reflection of just bad the bot problem has actually become?

After Valve did their big bot purge earlier this month multiple people have been reporting playing for hours without a single bot in sight since then, so this seems like actual human numbers (probably with a bump from the summer event; I might hop back in myself).

As to how, well, it's a great game with staying power (so you've got the people who've been playing for a decade or more) and it's been around long enough to have new gamers get older and discover it for the first time.

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"Multiplayer" and "code editor" are two terms I admittedly would not have associated on my own, as a programmer for over a decade. Not saying it can't work, and I'd even be interested in trying it, but:

Quoting: akselmoEdit: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12589 oh no

Oh, yikes. That's just asking for a supply chain attack.

Quoting: wvstolzingThere's this new latex alternative markup language for scientific papers: https://typst.app/ -- it also comes with a collaborative web app, etc. The demo video on the webpage is absolutely hilarious IMHO. It supposedly shows a bunch of people 'collaborating' on a document. Though all I see is people editing out their peer's words in real time in a way that resembles the 'DUCK SEASON / RABBIT SEASON' bit from Bugs Bunny.

I keep meaning to check out Typst and haven't gotten around to it. Will be interesting to see how well it can actually replace LaTeX. There's a similar platform called Overleaf that allows collaboration on LaTeX documents which I used to write my thesis. The issue with such collaborative editing, in my experience, is that for any piece of writing there's always one person who does at least 90% of the work of actually getting words out, and the collaboration is limited to every other co-author doing minor edits or making suggestions. It's hard for me to imagine a scenario where multiple people get together to actually write something at the same time, other than, like, a brainstorming session.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyIt looks nice, but I'm feeling this weird disconnect in those screenshots. On one hand, there's this journal page talking about what good eatin' this kind of fish's tail is. The description talks about catching and selling fish, although it's unclear what gets done to them after they're sold. On the other, there's a shot where your seal is chatting with a fish. So, you're talking to fish, but you're also eating them and selling them into slavery and/or to be eaten? I always kind of feel like it's not nice to do that stuff to people who talk.

I believe the trope for that is Carnivore Confusion.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy. . . The whole thing? We're welcoming (if you're worth it), our souls are clean (presumably unlike you city slickers), we have more community, we apparently invented hard work, it just goes on and on. The whole trailer sounds to me like an extended summation of the American wonderful-frontiersman mythology, the kind of stuff Texan and Albertan oil men never shut up about.

Interesting, thanks. I definitely got a completely different feel from it, probably due to one side of my family being frontier farmers and having done quite a bit of farm work growing up.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyAs to the "hardy bunch" thing . . . poor people moved to the frontier because it was easier than city life. Fewer amenities, but much more food and shelter and less sweatshop labour. Frontier life involved hard work . . . but not a 12 hour day, 6 days a week PLUS whatever you had to do at home. And the frontier was dangerous . . . but factories had no safety standards and disease spread like crazy in the cities. So, sure, hardy, but only hardier than hardscrabble city people because they got to eat enough food to support hardiness . . .

I do have a few quibbles with this, though:

• While some people did move from city to country (some of my ancestors came over from Europe as bakers and become frontier farmers in Nebraska!), the overwhelming migration patterns throughout history have been from country to city (stretching back through pre-history to when there was first a distinction between the two). Cities were mostly population-negative prior to modern medical care and antibiotics (due to the diseases you mentioned), while family farms naturally grow over time to outstrip what the land can support, with people heading into cities hoping to make their fortune (and, much more likely, becoming the kind of laborer that ended up in factories).
• Outdoor farm work is typically done "sun-up to sun-down", which can be a lot longer than 12 hours during the summer. (Possibly shorter during the winter; to be fair, I've never lived where it snowed in winter so I don't have first-hand experience, but from what I've read the winter was spent doing indoor work in preparation for spring.) The vital importance of every single family member pitching in around the farm during summer is why public schools are off during those months; if they weren't, kids from rural populations (~80% of the population in 1800, and it's only in 2007 that the world's urban and rural populations balanced) just wouldn't come because their labor was needed to ensure their families didn't starve over the winter.
• Unlike factory workers, farmer don't get to clock off; if the animals escape in the night after a full day's work, well, better go round 'em up, because who else is going to do it?* If a storm's threatening the harvest, you do whatever it takes to get it in because the alternative is likely starvation over the winter (or at least, higher risk of dying to illness from a weakened immune system due to malnutrition). Factory workers at least got government-mandated holidays; farm animals don't care what the government says, they still need to be fed and milked same as every other day.
• Frontier farms also had no safety standards, and serious accidents were certainly far from uncommon (as accounts from frontier people recount, and even today agriculture ranks up there pretty highly in terms of most dangerous industries for both injuries and deaths).
• Disease kills as quickly in the country as in the city, and diseases like dysentery can come from the environment rather than other people…plus, the nearest medical help might be a day or two away rather than a few streets over. Though certainly disease was (and remains) easier to spread in cities.

I'm not disagreeing that the kind of laborers you've described had it rough – life was pretty hard back then for everyone compared to today – but the period of time during which such long hours were permitted is a relatively small portion of time in the grand scheme of history, and things got better with labor regulations over time; farmers were working sun-up to sun-down long before the first factory was a twinkle in a capitalist's eye, and even today if you're a self-employed farmer nobody's paying you overtime if Mother Nature's threatening the harvest with a storm.

Whether or not frontier life was physically harder than that of a blue collar city laborer**, it certainly had its own privations: isolation, food insecurity, and the constant threat of any one of numerous dangers hanging overhead like the sword of Damocles which could spell disaster.

*Speaking from personal experience, at least the part about the pigs escaping (AGAIN ) on a rainy winter night. To be fair I don't remember if it was after a full day of work or not.

**And not every city worker is working a physical job; lots of skilled labor positions exist in cities that don't on the frontier.

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