Excuse me, why is my cat in your house? Please return her immediately.

Outlook is lousy, but what gets me is the fact that basically all “email, calendar, rss and chat (maybe)” apps are pretty bad. You’d think someone would have implemented something better by now.

Excel is perfect, PowerPoint doesn’t need to be any better.

Word is a terrible text editor and its layout algorithm is lousy. You can make better-looking documents by converting markdown to html and then applying some css; modern browsers have much more sophisticated styling options than Word offers as “styles”. You can make much better looking documents with Latex, which is pushing fifty years old now.

Both ways let you edit text files in a superior editor (which should be Vim, of course - the most superior editor). Collaborative working and revision history with Git, which runs none of the risk of Word just randomly deciding to shit itself when those features are enabled.

Fine - Word can retain a “compatible layout” mode for all those ancient documents where people have paginated by pressing enter 17 times exactly, and the line-breaking, hyphenation, text colour etc. algorithms cannot be updated. But for the rest of us, let’s push things forward.

It lets you “add game”, but then gives you the choice of Linux / Windows with a Wine version / browser, and you have to put in the path.

So for example, in Lutris I could have “every Zelda game” or “every Castlevania game” as a filter. Castlevania needs MSX, NES, Gameboy, SNES, N64, DS, PSX, PS2, and Wii emulation; and one of (Steam, or PS3 or X360 emulation) to be reasonably complete.

I suppose I could create a Linux shell script that daisy-chains into the correct emulator, but that would be quite clunky compared to Lutris, which is still pretty clunky. And I wouldn’t be able to filter to that, nor sort them by release date.

Just for gaming purposes, having a unified front end that:

• lets you start an application with the arguments it needs, whether to use a specific Wine folder, or start an emulator with the right arguments

• lets you tag up each application with some custom arguments - genre, date, and so on - and lets you filter and sort by them

• lets you configure each app with their own box art or whatever as an icon

• keeps some gaming-related metadata; hours played, whether you’ve finished it, …

Essentially, Windows 3.1 Program Manager for the 21st century. Lutris did that quite well. Heroic doesn’t let you add custom stuff, it just integrates with store fronts. RetroArch has the old-school Linux problem of “all the functionality you need, plus all the functionality anyone might ever need, plus all the functionality that no-one needs, all arranged seemingly at random in dozens of menus”.

Lutris scripts were great - just having the required winetricks commands to get something obscure working was awesome, but packaged up in a useful way along with art and metadata was handy. The front-end being “only what you need” was good as well. Shame it’s gone off the rails a bit…

Support for Linux has to be explicitly enabled, it’s not on by default. Even when it’s enabled, it causes complete bullshit. For instance, I can’t use all of my CPU cores when playing Elden Ring - EAC isn’t compatible with so many, have to disable some so that it can start.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1245620/discussions/0/597412189643679711/

Fine Young Cannibals?

What a shame - Netflix have given up on doing anything at all imaginative, and have fallen back on making Harry Potter and FIFA games, chucking everyone else to the wolves.

In some ways, having someone with a head for business would appear to make sense for a gaming studio. You could look at most of the announcements from eg. Obsidian or Double Fine on their intention to make ‘Scope Creep: The Video Game’, guaranteed to release massively over-budget to critical success but modest sales which will put the studio into a lot of trouble; and think that someone holding the purse strings, keeping the creatives from their worst excesses, and vetoing any really stupid ideas would be a clever idea. Unfortunately, this role always seems to go to dumb-arse dipshits without a single thought in their heads.

Would appear that an Indie Studio of three people might be ideal - Suspicious Developments, Team Cherry, Cuzzillo/Boch/Foddy have put out some great stuff recently. Small enough to stay focussed, and also small enough to put in a few years of polish without running up crazy bills. Seems like Night School, being four people, was just a bit too big.

Yeah. I’ve got my home server set to install all security updates and restart Monday at 3 am; my first thought when seeing a two-month uptime on any of my machines is ‘whoops’, not ‘wow’.

Amazing uptimes are strictly for machines that aren’t connected to a network, and I’d start to be concerned whether they’d restart on eg. power failure if I started seeing really big numbers.

Exactly - most game engines now will hide this rather than stutter.

Got an NVMe and a RAID array in my gaming desktop; the RAID does about 1 GB/s sustained read and write, which is good, but its latency is quite bad. Was playing Elden Ring directly from it since I couldn’t be bothered moving it - load times were good, but “fog doors” appear over doorways and cave entrances while they’re being loaded, which never happens on SSD. Never dropped a frame, though.

It isn’t a problem; mote has misunderstood the law.

https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives

“Illegal without good reason.” You are most definitely allowed to buy kitchen knives to take home with you; trying to take them into a football game will be frowned upon, though.

Police are usually fairly sensible about it. I’ve got friends that do medieval reenactment that have been stopped with cars full of longswords and crossbows. Show them your event tickets and some of your other gear, you’ll be waved on your way.

A three-inch blade is allowed provided it doesn’t lock in place; as long as it just folds away (like a swiss army knife) then it’s fine. Three-inch butterfly knife will get you in a lot of bother, though.

Speaking as an Arch btw user, my socks match, thank you very much. How rude.

Running an update in a background tab, forgetting about it, and closing my laptop lid mid-initramfs generation has caught me out a couple of times. Recoverable with a boot disk. Apart from that, Arch has been rock-solid on multiple machines for years for me. Recommend it to anyone.

Some people dual-boot to play games with anti-cheat that doesn’t work on Linux, so a recent “AAA multiplayer” release might skew the numbers for a bit as people boot Windows instead.

Linux installations are slightly higher in the US than in Europe, and much much higher than in China. The “use of Linux online” has a bit of a sinusoidal pattern every day depending on who’s awake. But a big Chinese release - Fallen Feathers, for example - will suppress the Linux percentage for a while as well.

Steam do publish the number of concurrent users as well, it should be possible to multiply through to get roughly the “absolute numbers” you want. I think they publish the numbers of players online for multiplayer games too, and since those are the games that Linux will be locked out of, it might be possible to point fingers at the specific games causing the problems?

More aerodynamic for the zoomies. You’ve fallen straight into their trap!

I do miss the two-player mode of Lemmings on the Amiga. Amiga could support a mouse in every port, so you could both use a mouse while battling each other. One player needing to use a joystick on ‘every other platform’ (which for Lemmings, was every other platform in existence at the time) was vastly inferior.

Basically every other computer either only supported one mouse, or all mice moved the same pointer.

Not saying that this is a generally useful feature, and networking has improved to the point where split-screen games are rare, and in an era where most games have console ports then mouse-control multiplayer games are unusual, but you know. Niche usages.

If you’ve unlocked the “rare achievements showcase” on your profile, presumably using the desktop app, then it appears on your profile on the mobile app, too.

Behold! Not even getting all that far in They Bleed Pixels is my finest achievement, with only 1.1% of other players managing the same. What you need to do is focus on games that are old and unreasonably bastard hard, and rare medals can be yours.

They all challenge you on different ways.

DS3 is actually quite interesting to finish on SL1. You can cast one basic spell, lots of weapons are available to you, but you need to think carefully about your loadout so you’ve got a good set of resistance and buffs for each area.

DS1 limits you to terrible weapons with boring movesets, and by the time you’ve heard the pyromancy noise for the ten thousandth time, you’ll be ready to chuck your monitor out the window.

DS2 is hellish. Your dodge is tied to your agility, which only a few items boost, and for the first 3/4 of the game, you’ll only get that from a crap armour set. Only a couple of weapons are available to you. You’ll need to know basically every boss inside out; some of the ones that were comedic before are no longer so funny.

Scholar is like DS2, but you can’t run into the DLC early on any more to get some of the powerful rings that are in there. I almost cried when I finally got the ring of the embedded.

Wouldn’t know about finishing ER on RL1/no summons. Cleared out the four demigods easily enough, but Morgott was a run ender. RL1 does not leave you a lot of room for mistakes, put it like that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliant_Robin

The three wheels and the fibreglass construction meant that it was light enough to count as a tricycle, so that you could drive one on a motorcycle license rather than a full driving license. Plus they sip quite gently at the petrol by the standards of the 1970s. You still saw a few on the roads when I was growing up in the 80s, but it’s been a long time.

The thought of doing 85 mph in one of them is enough to make me fill my trousers, though. Couldn’t pay me enough.

Really traditional vampires are super OCD; one of the ways to get rid of them is to spill a big bag of eg. rice in front of them, and they’ll spend so long counting every grain that they’ll get caught by the rising sun. Salt ought to work as well?

One grain of salt, two grains of salt. Ah ha ha ha. Three grains of salt…