Off-and-on trying out an account over at @[email protected] due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • 13 Posts
  • 925 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023

  • My main requirement was for the touchpad to actually have physical tactile buttons, fuck that whole solid slab of touch thing, I want 2 proper clicky buttons.

    I’m in the same boat, except I want three for Linux, where the third button is more-useful than in Windows, and there are very, very few laptops that have that any more — a few Thinkpad models. I finally gave up on it, just accepted that I was going to have a laptop without same, though you can get USB touchpads with physical buttons if you want to haul one around (and I keep one in my car for just this reason — sometimes it’s worth hauling out).


  • But I want a Kenshi like game set in Morrowind.

    Honestly, I’d like a Kenshi-like game set in damn near any setting.

    Like, the Kenshi setting is interesting, but in terms of gameplay…it’s essentially unique from a gameplay standpoint. I’m still a bit amazed that nobody has made other games in the genre.

    There is a sequel that is being worked on and will come out someday…


  • I think that part of the problem is that there aren’t that many settings where it makes sense. Descent worked because you were supposed to be on low-gravity asteroids to justify the zero-G environment. That also means that it has to be in space and in the future. It had to be in mines, to justify the scale — most human-created environments are going to be smaller.

    I was playing Starfield and one of the moments there that I was impressed — most of the combat isn’t all that new — was in a zero-G gunfight on a space station (the Almagest or whatever the space casino is), where gunfire was sending objects flying around and riccocheting all over. I was thinking “it’s odd that more games haven’t done zero-G first-person shooters”. But…when you think about how limited the settings are where it really makes sense, I think it’s understandable.

    I mean, I guess you could create a fantasy world and just throw up your hands and say, “it’s all magic” or something, but…


  • Some games that I like thematically, but don’t enjoy the gameplay on:

    • Elden Ring. If it was more RPG-like, avoided respawning enemies and reliance on learning patterns, I think I’d like it more.

    • Sunless Sea. Neat setting and writing. I don’t like the gameplay — simple combat, not very interesting choices, hunt-the-item stuff.

    • Cyberpunk 2077. This isn’t bad, but I wanted something like a Bethesda game, and I got something like a Grand Theft Auto game. I think that it’d be much better as a Bethesda-like game. Oh, though I never really liked Johnny Silverhand as a character much.

    • Fallout 76 — well, I don’t have a problem with the franchise — but on that particular game, I’d rather it wasn’t an online game, were a single-player open-world RPG. It’s more like that than when it launched, but…

    • To expand on that: a whole slew of games that are really intended to be played multiplayer, but where I only want to play against the computer. I don’t like playing games multiplayer. I would buy an expansion for these that went back and put in some major single-player improvements and good game AI. Carrier Command 2 can be played single-player, but it’s kinda repetitive and not balanced well for single-player teams. Wargame: Red Dragon. I like the game and the setting, but the AI is very difficult to enjoy playing against; just too primitive. Steel Division 2, later in Eugen’s series, really improved on the AI. Defense of the Ancients 2; the whole MOBA genre is really oriented towards playing with real humans.

    • Scanner Sombre. This is a mostly-psychological horror game, where the gimmick is that you can only see something that you’ve scanned with this LIDAR-type gizmo. You’re walking through a cave complex, and the mechanic of things slowly emerging and having to manage your visibility really works in a horror environment. But…the game isn’t really very replayable, and I like replayable games. I wish that someone would basically take the stumbling-around-in-a-cave-with-a-scanner thing and make a different sort of game out of it. (Note: If you play this, I played the Windows version in Proton. The Linux-native build was extremely unstable for me.)

    And just for the hell of it, the opposite — some where I like the gameplay, but not the theme:

    • The Binding of Isaac. I love the action roguelike gameplay. I don’t like the gore/fetus/abuse/scatological stuff all that much. I’ll deal with it, but I’d have liked the game more if it had a different theme.


  • You’re not wrong that you’re not safe posting on Reddit, but if this case is any indication you’re not any less safe posting in Reddit than any other site, including Lemmy.

    You can choose the location (and thus legal jurisdiction) of your home instance, but yeah, in general, I think that people need to be aware that server operators on the Threadiverse are probably not going to fight legal battles on your behalf.

    We had someone ask about turning over IP addresses to law enforcement a while back on lemmy.today. The lemmy.today server admin gave what I’d call probably a pretty accurate answer.

    https://lemmy.today/post/7255213

    How will Lemmy Today handle IP subpoenas?

    Lemmy instances are run by volunteers who wants to see a social media network without big tech.

    I dont think you can trust any of those volunteers, including this one, to not comply with law enforcement. Thats not why we are running instances. Its about providing a platform without tracking, ads and algorithms for talking to other people and having a good time.

    Hope that makes sense.

    Use a VPN if you have a reason to. :)

    It linked to a similar question for lemmy.dbzer0.com:

    How will dbzer0 handle IP subpoenas?

    Don’t know man. I’m not making enough in donations to pay for the server costs, never mind hiring lawyers. I’ll deal with this when I have to 😅

    There are platforms more-aimed at providing harder pseudonymity. I’d put Hyphanet fairly high on the list of “a pain in the ass to track a poster down due to technical barriers” list (though that comes with very real performance and latency and suchlike costs).




  • Musk sued Altman and OpenAI in 2024, claiming the artificial intelligence company that he helped start almost a decade earlier “assiduously manipulated” and “deceived” him into donating $38 million, based on promises that the entity would remain a nonprofi

    Musk’s attorneys previously said, in a January filing, that their client should receive up to $134 billion in damages

    That seems a little disproportionate.


  • In the indirect sense that an engine might impact a game’s visual appearance, hardware compatibility, or performance, sure. But I don’t care about the engine specifically as an engine. That’s just an implementation detail. It’s just “does the game look appealing” or “does the game run well on my hardware”?

    There are some cases where I can look at an engine and know that it’s very likely that some feature that I want is or isn’t there. For example, the (open-source) Twine engine supports interactive fiction multiple-choice Web-based games, usually written in a language called Sugarcube.

    There’s a similar proprietary engine and language, Choicescript, which runs in a proprietary viewer. This is used by Choice of Games LLC, which has published a large number of commercial text-based games.

    The developers of the Choicescript engine decided that an “undo/go back/save” feature would be undesirable, probably because it reduced the gravity of a player making choices; they basically require a player to play the game in “ironman mode”, where if anything happens that the player doesn’t like, the player has to go back and play a new game from scratch to avoid it. The Twine developers decided that “undo/go back/save” was a good idea and enabled it by default (and even if a game disables it, there are typically ways to modify a Twine game to re-enable this feature). I very strongly disagree with “undo” being disabled; I feel that it’s not respectful of my time, so when I purchase a Choicescript game, I know that I’m probably going to have to live with this particular decision that I do not like.









  • Someone else in another comment linked to a memory comparison between desktop environments, and there KDE Plasma used the most memory, with GNOME in second place, but I think that the broader point here is that on Windows, you have one basic graphical shell that basically all desktop users are expected to have running. It’s not completely impossible to hack up a Windows environment to avoid doing so, but it’s a highly nonstandard configuration, and stuff is going to break.

    Linux has a much broader range of options available, and those are first-class citizens. Some of them are considerably lighter on resource usage than others.

    A lot of users aren’t going to cobble together their own ideal environment the way I do, but there are “presets” of packages that are aimed specifically at being light on resource usage. XFCE has historically been one example; they were slow to move to Wayland, but it looks like they’re doing it now. One doesn’t have the sort of “the OS vendor is giving you one monolithic blob that you need to run” the way you do on Windows.



  • I mean, it’s probably a good idea to have them higher, given that if someone wants to use it with some typical out-of-the-box desktop settings, that’s not unreasonable, but while I haven’t looked at the Ubuntu installer for a while, I strongly suspect that it permits you to do a minimal install, and that all the software in the Debian family is also there, so you can do a lightweight desktop based on Ubuntu.

    My current desktop environment has sway, blueman-applet, waybar, and swaync-client running. I’m sure that you could replicate the same thing on an Ubuntu box. Sway is the big one there, at an RSS of 189MB (mostly 148MB of which is shared, probably essentially all use of shared libraries). That’s the basic “desktop graphical environment” memory cost.

    I use foot as a terminal (not in daemon mode, which would shrink memory further, though be less-amenable to use of multiple cores). That presently has 40 MB RSS, 33 of which are shared. It’s running tmux, at 16MB RSS, 4 of which are shared. GNU screen, which I’ve also used and could get by on, would be lighter, but it has an annoying patch that causes it to take a bit before terminating.

    Almost the only other graphical app I ever have active is Firefox, which is presently at an RSS of 887.1, of which 315MB is shared. That can change, based on what Firefox has open, but I think that use of a web browser is pretty much the norm everwhere, and if anything, the Firefox family is probably on the lighter side in 2026 compared to the main alternative of the Chrome family.

    I’m pretty sure that one could run that same setup pretty comfortably on a computer from the late 1990s, especially if you have SSD swap available to handle any spikes in memory usage. Firefox would feel sluggish, but if you’re talking memory usage…shrugs I’ve used an i3/Xorg-based variant of that on an eeePC that had 2GB of memory that I used mostly as a web-browser plus terminal thin client to a “real machine” to see if I could, did that for an extended period of time. Browser could feel sluggish on some websites, but other than that…shrugs.

    Now, if you want to be, I don’t know, playing some big 3D video game, then that is going to crank up the requirements on hardware. But that’s going to be imposed by the game. It’s not overhead from your basic graphical environment.

    I’d also be pretty confident that you could replicate that setup using the same packages on any Debian-family system, and probably on pretty much any major Linux distro with a bit of tweaking to the installed packages.