KubeRoot

Hold up, how is proton leveraging open source to avoid dev costs? Are you referring to steam using and contributing to existing projects instead of reinventing the wheel? Or to game developers that use it as a reason for not making native Linux versions, which wouldn’t be Valve’s workforce in the first place?

I can see how the things Valve does contribute to their business model - steam input giving their controller compatibility with games, proton letting them launch a Linux-based handheld, and the new recording feature probably there for the steam deck… But the thing is, Valve is still providing all those things to customers for no extra charge, and they keep adding new stuff.

Is it AI generated? I don’t know the brand and labels so maybe I’m missing something, but it just looks like a regular edit?

I think you’re actually agreeing with me here. I was disputing the claim that software should be made available in “a native package format”, and my counterpoint is that devs shouldn’t be packaging things for distros, and instead providing source code with build instructions, alongside whatever builds they can comfortably provide - primarily flatpak and appimage, in my example.

I don’t use flatpak, and I prefer to use packages with my distro’s package manager, but I definitely can’t expect every package to be available in that format. Flatpak and appimage, to my knowledge, are designed to be distro-agnostic and easily distributed by the software developer, so they’re probably the best options - flatpak better for long-term use, appimage usable for quickly trying out software or one-off utilities.

As for tar.gz, these days software tends to be made available on GitHub and similar platforms, where you can fetch the source from git by commit, and releases also have autogenerated source downloads. Makefiles/automake isn’t a reasonable expectation these days, with a plethora of languages and build toolchains, but good, clear instructions are definitely something to include.

The responsibility to figure out the dependencies and packaging for distros, and then maintain those going forwards, should not be placed on the developer. If a developer wants to do that, then that’s fine - but if a developer just wants to provide source with solid build instructions, and then provide a flatpak, maybe an appimage, then that’s also perfectly fine.

In a sense, developers shouldn’t even be trusted to manage packaging for distributions - it’s usually not their area of expertise, maintainers of specific distributions will usually know better.

Sure, you can probably clone it - I’m not 100% sure, but I think laws protect that as long as it’s private use.

You can also fork it on GitHub, that’s something you agree to in the GitHub ToS - though I think you’re not allowed to push any modifications if the license doesn’t allow it?

Straight up taking the content from GitHub, uploading it to your own servers, and letting people grab a copy from there? That’s redistribution, and is something that needs to be permitted by the license. It doesn’t matter if it’s git or something else, in the end that’s just a way to host potentially copyrighted material.

Though if you have some reference on why this is not the case, I’d love to see it - but I’m not gonna take a claim that “that’s very much a part of most git flows”.

I imagine they made this specifically for Steam Deck, since windows users already have stuff like this built into GPU software. They’d want to offer feature parity on their handheld, so it’ll probably work nicely out of the box.

I do believe it’s illegal if they take a repository with a restrictive license (which includes any repository without a license), and then make it available on their own service. I think China just doesn’t care.

And reinstalling the packages, moving over all the configs, setting up the partitions and moving the data over? (Not in this order, of course)

Cloning a drive would just require you to plug both the old and new to the same machine, boot up (probably from a live image to avoid issues), running a command and waiting until it finishes. Then maybe fixing up the fstab and reinstalling the bootloader, but those are things you need to do to install the system anyways.

I think the reason you’d want to reinstall is to save time, or get a clean slate without any past config mistakes you’ve already forgotten about, which I’ve done for that very reason, especially since it was still my first, and less experienced, install.

The good thing is, on Android you can get an APK without root or anything like that, same for installing it, and you can use an emulator (or something like waydroid) to run it on a computer. For cases where the game doesn’t use any more specialized servers, and just uses the app store for authentication, DRM, etc. the situation is no different from PC games with DRM - it’s bypassable, and if done right, will work for all games, not just one.

That said though, it’s very true for multiplayer/always online games, and those are very common on mobile. While it’s possible to reverse engineer and rewrite the servers, for most of them nobody is going to bother. And in the world of aggressively monetized games, developers have an incentive to keep it that way - they can’t make money from players who are still enjoying a game they’ve already squeezed every penny out of.

Apple has always been about locking down the system and forcing the user to do things the way Apple wants. Not only within one device, but also in locking down inter-device protocols and removing standard ones, as well as obfuscating information about the hardware, not letting the users make an informed decision. And that’s already after the fact that you aren’t legally allowed to use the system on non-Apple hardware.

PDFs are… Not an image format? It’s a document format that is difficult to edit, and thus mostly meant to be read-only, but a document nonetheless.

An image viewer can’t open a pdf, unless for some ungodly reason it also has a whole pdf reader built into it, which just sounds inane. Defaulting to a browser is icky, and I think stems from browsers having gotten good PDF support before Microsoft could figure it out. This is something that ideally belongs to a reader, either dedicated to PDF, or supporting similar formats, be it documents or ebooks.

That’s like saying that a 3D project file is basically an image format, if it’s built to be rendered out from a viewpoint into an image.

It is real, it’s just not data from YouTube. The information on how it works is made very clear, and people using it should be aware of the drawbacks.

Sorry, what I mean is, if Valve wasn’t forced to keep it opensource, I think a big factor against would be the extra work

Even if they want to open-source it, an issue is the amount of work of organizing the repository, making sure it’s properly organized and doesn’t have any files they don’t want to distribute, and then maintaining that with future versions.

In addition to what was said by somebody else about atomic updates, even a simple update via package manager on a regular distro will do all the work up front, and not take extra time on next boot. Before you reboot, most things will continue working fine - and most of the remaining things that might not can be worked around.

I think the vibrant red lips remind me of his red hair stripe, now that you mention it

“Calling out” gnome for needing extensions for customization seems stupid when those extensions are easy to find, easy to use, and work really well. On the other hand, I have not been able to find a taskbar for plasma that would let me group windows from an application together while also letting me rearrange the windows inside of a group. I know I need to try implementing it myself someday, but I feel like gnome ends up having more options.

If you look at the screenshot, you can see this is the “Repair tips” tab/button. I don’t know what it looks like, but it does say something about repairing.

Except when you’re doing calculations, a calculator can run through an equation substituting the given answers and see that the values match… Which is my point of calculators not being a good example. And the case of a quantum computer wasn’t addressed.

I agree that LLMs have many issues, are being used for bad purposes, are overhyped, and we’ve yet to see if the issues are solvable - but I think the analogy is twisting the truth, and I think the current state of LLMs being bad is not a license to make disingenuous comparisons.

That’s not really right, because verifying solutions is usually much easier than finding them. A calculator that can take in arbitrary sets of formulas and produce answers for variables, but is sometimes wrong, is an entirely different beast than a calculator that can plug values into variables and evaluate expressions to check if they’re correct.

As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure that argument would also make quantum computing pointless - because quantum computers are probability based and can provide answers for difficult problems, but not consistently, so you want to use a regular computer to verify those answers.

Perhaps a better comparison would be a dictionary that can explain entire sentences, but requires you to then check each word in a regular dictionary and make sure it didn’t mix them up completely? Though I guess that’s actually exactly how LLMs operate…