I would love to see a Palworld update that changes the balls to cubes. Same animations and effects, same textures, just stretched over a cube.

He reviews/discusses mostly audio related tech (mainly headphones) but also dabbles in more generic mainstream tech like smartphones and laptops. The past few years he’s been expressing major frustration with the likes of Microsoft and Apple and I guess for the last few months has moved all his production over to Linux rigs, and even ditched his smart phone in favour of a modern flip phone.

Also he has a car channel called “garbage time” and a drumming stream called “garbage stream.” Very funny guy who’s definitely worth a watch.

Just bought Forza Horizons 4 on Steam, which meant none of my 100+ hours of progress on the Windows Store version carried over. Apparently in those many hours I forgot how absolutely grueling the beginning of the game is.

I’m two hours in, and after basically everything I do, down to even opening the menu, I get the controls yanked away from me, and a plucky zoomer talks at me for 30 seconds about shit I absolutely don’t need explained. One of those was literally, not even joking, to explain to me how to buy items, and that adding multiple items to my cart would equal a higher total price.

It’s like they expect their players to have absolutely no agency or intuition. All I want is to boot a game up, customize a car, and chuck it around. At most I’d be fine with a quick blurb saying “here are the different types of events, here’s your home base. Now go explore.”

Honestly, take away the PR blunders, bloatware, privacy nightmares, and ads, and I really just dislike how Windows works.

The file structure is the main one that really made me feel like Roddy Piper putting on the glasses. I was perfectly happy shambling around between Program Files this and LocalAppData that. As soon as I understood how logical and elegant the file structures that Linux uses is, there’s no way I could ever go back.

Also, things like Settings, Device Manager, Control panel, and 2 or 3 other separate GUIs all containing A, the same settings 6 times over, or B, all containing different settings that should be consolidated. It’s almost as if Microsoft can’t stick with a design language or feature scope to save their lives, but they also can’t get away with completely removing these old GUIs, so they just bury them and add another on top.

However, I can’t say I actually hate Windows. I cut my teeth in computing on XP, and I see XPs DNA all over modern Windows (the aforementioned Control Panel being a remnant). I think without all the added garbage, Windows is actually an incredibly powerful, albiet obtuse and frustrating, piece of software.

Case on his Ono-Sendai

Main desktop runs Arch but everything else runs Debian. It’s the perfect “install and forget” system so long as you don’t need the absolute bleeding edge packages.

Did the absynth goblins visit you yet?

This has always been my concern with relying on Flatpak. It is only as simple as your requirements are it seems.

SteamDeck plays the same version of the game as a regular PC. Any mods that work on PC will work on SteamDeck (in theory), but seeing as the deck runs Linux, you’ll need to do some more tinkering with Wine and such.

I mean, I use maybe 3-4gb at any given time, without limiting myself. I personally don’t need heaps of RAM, 6gb is enough to have some overhead for me.

I haven’t looked at too many prices recently, I’ve had the same phone for a while, but this doesn’t seem to unreasonable imo, especially considering this is the first product from a small, new company.

These specs actually seem really solid for the price point, I’m glad to see decent alternative smartphones popping up that actually have some power.

What’s bugging me is the lack of information about the software. Apparently this is Android with a layer like Hallium to run a Debian userspace on top? And yet they don’t advertise that fact. It’s just a little off putting that this product seems to be aimed at Linux/general tech enthusiasts, yet the company seemed to miss the fact that those customers tend to really like knowing what they’re running under the hood.

(Not incredibly educated on Flatpaks, please educate me if I’m wrong) My main issue with Flatpak is the bundled dependancies. I really prefer packages to come bundled with the absolute bare minimum, as part of the main appeal of Linux for me is the shared system wide dependancies. Flatpak sort of seems to throw that ideology out the window.

Let me ask this (genuinely asking, I’m not a software developer and I’m curious why this isn’t a common practice), why aren’t “portable” builds of software more common? Ie, just a folder with the executable that you can run from anywhere? Would these in theory also need to come bundled with any needed dependancies? Or could they simply be told to seek out the ones already installed on the system? Or would this just depend on the software?

I ask this because in my mind, a portable build of a piece of software seems like the perfect middle ground between a native, distro specific build and a specialized universal packaging method like Flatpak.

A second remaster of the first game.

Ran LineageOS on a OnePlus 6T for a couple months. Overall, it was perfectly usable, but also lacked some of the polish of my daily (Galaxy S23), which was totally to be expected.

That’s the thing though, they really were never as rabid as Nintendo. Bleem wasn’t the first PS1 emulator, it was just the fact that it was a commercial product that Sony took issue with, honestly understandably so.

There are actually PS1 emulators from the pre-Bleem era that are still available. Sony did nothing to shut those ones down because they were being offered freely.

Piracy is a totally different deal. I’m not delusional, any company that owns an IP is completely within their rights to aggressively stomp piracy at every turn, and I think it’s silly to criticize a company for trying to protect one of their main sources of income (I mean really, do people expect a company to spend billions on a product, then just be okay with the theft of that product?).

That’s not to say I’ve never sailed the high seas, or think it’s objectively wrong to do so no matter what, but I tend to save it for times where I really wouldn’t be able to enjoy the product otherwise (abandonware, or in Nintendo’s case, games they stubbornly lock behind ridiculous paywalls).

What IP does Sony hang its hat on?

Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Killzone, Sackboy, inFamous, God of War, The Last of Us, and if you want to go older, SOCOM, Syphon Filter, Spyro, Sly Cooper, I could go on.

I mean, I get what you’re saying, they don’t have something as iconic as Mario, but to say you’re hard pressed I think is a bit of hyperbole. Sony has had a really well rounded line of exclusives for decades. Sure, some are on PC now, but they’re expressly “PlayStation ports” not console ports.

There are other platforms and franchises to mod on

I personally disagree with that attitude. If every consumer went along with that set of ideals, every studio, firm and corporation would be free to jerk us around willy nilly because we’d just move on to the next thing. There are people out there who really don’t care about modding Skyrim, they want to mod BOTW.

I do get the Ubisoft hate, but at the very very least, they don’t shut mods down. There are still mods being actively developed for games like Ghost Recon 1 and Rainbow Six 3.

They can still get all the way fucked for pulling The Crew.

You know what they say; if buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing.

I’d agree with you, except Sony, another massive Japanese company operating in the same industry as Nintendo, doesn’t lash out this aggressively at their own community that is just desperately trying to enjoy games in their own way.

Sony has left basically all emulation projects alone as well as modding projects like 60FPS patches (there was one emulator that they took to court in the 90s, Bleem, but Bleem was charging money for the emulator. Funnily enough, Bleem won the case and was allowed to continue existing, but the company went under due to the cost of the legal battle) .

Nintendo doesn’t have to act out like this. They actively choose to stifle such products so that they themselves can offer tightly curated versions on their own schedule and at their own price. This isn’t an IP protection strategy, it’s an agressive cornering of their own market.

Sounds like something an AI would post. Quick, what color are your eyes?