This was how all glass bottles used to work during most of the 20th century.
I mean, good for them, but returnable packaging isn’t that crazy of an idea. It’s not surprising that someone came up with “hey give us back the thing instead of trashing it and we’ll use it again” before the year we figured out talking computers.
I mean, I pulled it from reality. I’m just assessing the way it works for the OP, not representing what you said.
As for Disgaea 4, I do believe that it works for you, the threads on the Steam forums also include people who say it runs for them, along with several who can get it to run by fiddling with Proton versions or doing some combination of launch options, multiple retries and settings changes. But it does have problems. It won’t run at all for me and others report frequent crashes, endless loading screens and other issues. It should definitely not have a Verified rating.
That’s the exception, not the rule, I just mentioned it because you pointed it out and it happens to be one of the games that don’t run universally for everybody.
The weird part of this post is I’ve spent a couple of days trying to get Disgaea 4 to work on my Deck and it really, really doesn’t. I know I’m not alone because the game’s forums have several threads of people complaining about it.
Slightly embarassingly, I also tested it on a Windows ARM device and it ran fine.
Look, compatibility on the Deck is… good for what it is, but it’s certainly nowhere near universal. Especially if you have a big library of games outside Steam, which I do. I’d still say it’s the easy go-to for a casual gamer mostly interested in older single player stuff or indie games, particularly for the price.
Yep, if you actually read what he’s saying he seems to be pretty level-headed and even positive about it. More to the point, I don’t actually disagree with any of it. Cinema IS in crisis, the fact that event movies still make a ton of cash is masking that fact and prestige TV has absolutely replaced it as the place to do compelling straight-up drama.
This isn’t a rant, it’s a fairly sharp observation from a smart person in the thick of it all. I don’t presume to have a better read on the film and TV industry than Brian Cox, of all people. Turns out Hannibal Lecter/Logan Roy/William Striker knows the business he’s been working successfully for sixty years, go figure.
Absolutely, and if you can’t take the plunge on either do whatever feels right.
But I’ll say if you’re anxious about it at all, shaving is a good way to not have to think about it. Not everybody has an easy time just getting over the way they look and not giving a crap, obviously.
Plus if you’re worried about your hairline, going to get a haircut can be a stressful time and shaving means getting it out of the way. And it’s super cheap and fast by comparison.
Okay, I’m here to help.
Shave.
Seriously. The amount of pressure put on guys around balding is horrendous, and it can consume your attention if you let it. The moment that superfluous, vestigial hair comes off, it’s such a breath of fresh air (no pun intended). No more fussing, worrying or stressing about it. Plus, in many cases it looks pretty good. Give it a couple of weeks and it’ll just become your face.
Give it a couple of months and the moment there’s a scratchy, annoying milimeter of hair on your head will be a natural call to give it a shave for the comfort alone.
It is a replacement for a specific portion of a very complicated ecosystem-wide integration involving a ton of interoperability sandwiched between the natural language bits. Why this is a new product and not an Assistant overhaul is anybody’s guess. Some blend of complicated technical issues and corporate politics, I bet.
So an interesting thing about this is that the reasons Gemini sucks are… kind of entirely unrelated to LLM stuff. It’s just a terrible assistant.
And I get the overlap there, it’s probably hard to keep a LLM reined in enough to let it have access to a bunch of the stuff that Assistant did, maybe. But still, why Gemini is unable to take notes seems entirely unrelated to any AI crap, that’s probably the top thing a chatbot should be great at. In fact, in things like those, related to just integrating a set of actions in an app, the LLM should just be the text parser. Assistant was already doing enough machine learning stuff to handle text commands, nothing there is fundamentally different.
So yeah, I’m confused by how much Gemini sucks at things that have nothing to do with its chatbotty stuff, and if Google is going to start phasing out Assistant I sure hope they fix those parts at least. I use Assistant for note taking almost exclusively (because frankly, who cares about interacting with your phone using voice for anything else, barring perhaps a quick search). Gemini has one job and zero reasons why it can’t do it. And it still really can’t do it.
I genuinely think Linux misses a beat by not having a widely available distro that is a) very closely tied to specific hardware and b) mostly focused on web browsing and media watching. It’s kinda nuts and a knock on Linux devs that Google is running away with that segment through both Android and ChromeOS. My parents aren’t on Windows anymore but for convenience purposes the device that does that for them is a Samsung tablet.
I keep trying to explain how Linux advocacy gets the challenges of mainstream Linux usage wrong and, while I appreciate the fresh take here, I’m afraid that’s still the case.
Effectively this guide is: lightly compromise your Windows experience for a while until you’re ready, followed by “here’s a bunch of alien concepts you don’t know or care about and actively disprove the idea that it’s all about the app alternatives.”
I understand why this doesn’t read that way to the “community”, but parse it as an outsider for a moment. What’s a snap? Why are they bad? Why would I hate updates? Aren’t updates automatic as they are in Windows? Why would I ever pick the hardware-incompatible distros? What’s the tradeoff supposed to be, does that imply there is a downside to Mint over Ubuntu? It sure feels like I need to think about this picking a distro thing a lot more than the headline suggested. Also, what’s a DE and how is that different to a distro? Did they just say I need a virtual machine to test these DE things before I can find one that works? WTF is that about?
Look, I keep trying to articulate the key misunderstanding and it’s genuinely hard. I think the best way to put it is that all these “switch to Linux, it’s fun!” guides are all trying to onboard users to a world of fun tinkering as a hobby. And that’s great, it IS fun to tinker as a hobby, to some people. But that’s not the reason people use Windows.
If you’re on Windows and mildly frustrated about whatever MS is doing that week, the thing you want is a one button install that does everything for you, works first time and requires zero tinkering in the first place. App substitutes are whatever, UI changes and different choices in different DEs are trivial to adapt to (honestly, it’s all mostly Windows-like or Mac-like, clearly normies don’t particularly struggle with that). But if you’re out there introducing even a hint of arguments about multiple technical choices, competing standards for app packages or VMs being used to test out different desktop environments you’re kinda missing the point of what’s keeping the average user from stepping away from their mainstream commercial OS.
In fairness, this isn’t the guide’s fault, it’s all intrinsic to the Linux desktop ecosystem. It IS more cumbersome and convoluted from that perspective. If you ask me, the real advice I would have for a Windows user that wants to consider swapping would be: get a device that comes with a dedicated Linux setup out of the box. Seriously, go get a Steam Deck, go get a System76 laptop, a Raspberry Pi or whatever else you can find out there that has some flavor of Linux built specifically for it and use that for a bit. That bypasses 100% of this crap and just works out of the box, the way Android or ChromeOS work out of the box. You’ll get to know whether that’s for you much quicker, more organically and with much less of a hassle that way… at the cost of needing new hardware. But hey, on the plus side, new hardware!
I am constantly surprised by how often you get reports of “animal such and such is capable of basic task”.
I would assume it’s a case of misreporting technical information, but then you hear how entrenched some professionals on the field are when it comes to assuming some type of exceptional, unique magical property in human brains and how “antropomorphizing” is used as a dirty word and it makes you wonder. I once had a biologist get very angry at me for suggesting dogs are capable of play behavior, so all bets are off, I guess?
I am cringing pretty hard, doesn that count as “emotional”?
I sincerely don’t care enough about the fate of F-Droid to spend too long litigating the parts of this strategy that seem ill-conceived. If you think that implies hostility… well, it doesn’t. Hell, I hope I’m wrong, it’d be great to have a good indie storefront on Android to use as a default. I just don’t think as described this is it at all.
Otherwise, cope as you need. I have explained the bits I think you’re misunderstanding, I just don’t want to repeat that over and over because man, I need to have an online interaction that doesn’t devolve into that at some point. And I don’t want to explain why not wanting to talk to you any longer is not conceding the point, so this is the last time I’ll express that, too. Cool? Cool.
That’s a weird take, man. By that metric no online conversation can ever end.
I’ve made my point, I’ve said my piece. I’m not super emotionally invested on F-Droid’s success, either. This seems like a bad move in a few different ways, and it’s one that interferes with how I use the platform for the reasons I’ve stated. You don’t want that to be the case, I get that, but I don’t need your permission to feel that what’s being proposed here is going to mess with how I use it.
I also don’t need your permission to make the case that a store of monetized apps is a store of monetized apps and is competing with huge, polished, integrated alternatives in a way that F-Droid currently doesn’t. You’re mostly arguing with the kind of just-use-GIMP wishful thinking where it’s feasible for people to step out of their comfort zone or make morality-driven consumption choices en masse. I don’t feel I need to argue with you about it, though. It’s gonna go the way it’s going to go. The part that bums me out the most, as I said, is as an illustration for how self-reinforcing the niche position of FOSS can be sometimes. Otherwise, you do you.
I genuinely have nothing new to add to this conversation. All my previous points stand and they either address those objections already or the caveats are self-evident.
If anything I’ll say that seeing the defensiveness come together in real time is really helping me understand many recurring narratives happening around this space. I suggest we call this process “the GIMP effect”.
My point is I don’t care about the intentions of the project, I care about the piece of software that comes out the other end, regardless of whether that’s intended or not. A store with a mix of commercial and noncommercial software is just an Android store, like all the other Play alternatives. A repository of non commercial software where you know all the stuff you find fits a specific set of properties is a different thing, and I don’t need to read what the developers say online to feel that difference in the software.
It´s fundamentally harder to see the difference between Play and F-Droid if both have free, monetized and ad-based applications than if Play is mostly monetized and F-Droid is all noncommercial. If F-Droid steps away from that then it has a lot of homework to do and it enters a direct competition that is easy to understand: there are many stores, Play is the best one and the default, so why would I be using another one? If it was up to me, I’d even consider doing this as a separate app and keeping F-Droid as a dedicated version to remain in the position it already has, even if for developers they´re all uploading their software to the same back-end.
F-Droid now has a good answer to that. The version they´re proposing, regardless of their intentions, does not.
Does that help clarify where I´m coming from?
I think this train of thought fundamentally misunderstands how usability works and how positioning works. But hey, I don’t own this, I don’t have a stake on this and I already have F-Droid installed. At a glance it seems like a bad move that makes a thing I use less useful and more like a bunch of things I don’t use. We’ll see where it goes.
To clarify, I’m making a two step argument: One, I will only install a second store on my phone if that store serves a specific use case I don’t get from the first one (which is Play by default, since it comes preinstalled). Two, if F-Droid is going to sacrifice the clear message that it’s the place for noncommercial apps, then it must carry the same apps Play does, it needs to carry ALL of them so I can make it my default store.
So I understand what you’re saying, my point is that this is not a viable value proposition for me. F-Droid is positioned as the safe place for noncommercial software. If it’s no longer going to be that, then it’s picking the same fight with Google Play that the Samsung or Amazon stores do, and it’s just as likely to lose that fight. The reason it isn’t doing that at the moment isn’t its moral high ground, it’s that it has a clear position that doesn’t overlap with Play’s: noncommercial software.
Those are all advantages for developers and activists. End users don’t care or need to care. As an end user the only reason for keeping two stores in my phone is that one does a thing the other one doesn’t, functionally. That’s why Samsung can keep putting their dumb store on their phones forever but people just don’t engage with it.
Now, unlike the Samsung store when I was on a Samsung phone, F-Droid is something I do use, because there is a clear use case there: Play for all the commercial apps, F-Droid for non-commercial alternatives and a stuff that Google doesn’t allow on Play for whatever reason.
If F-Droid wants to make a push for being my only store, they better provide all the functionality, support, variety and convenience Play does, because Play comes pre-installed. If I can’t go to F-Droid to be guaranteed to not have to deal with payments or MTX, then it better have every single thing I need. I’m talking every game, every app, every legacy piece of software. It better have the same one-click payment convenience I get from Google Pay. And it better still have a default option to search for completely free apps, or I’ll have to go find a F-Droid alternative that does that for when I want to be sure I’m not getting any hidden fees with my app.
I’m not sure I can be as pliant as others here. Being less of an activist and more of a user of convenience, if I am making PayPal payments somebody better give me a reason why I’m not just using the same store that came in by default with my phone.
See, this is a tough one. Privacy concerns are legitimate, but also, when people keep reminding that Meta was a key player in acts of terror and genocide what is often not said is that a lot of it happened over Whatsapp groups and direct messages, as in India and Burkina Faso. Direct messaging apps are also social media.
I don’t have a solution for this. It’s a mess of an issue and honestly, I don’t know that I trust anybody with a strong, aggressive position one way or the other.