Astaroth

Astaroth , 6 months ago

Are they really picking their OS then?

But yes I agree, most people will just use what they have and Windows is the standard because they made sure it would become the standard.

Astaroth , 6 months ago

I tried to get some JumpStart games to run with DOSBOX a few years ago on Windows 7. Iirc I managed to install but not run the game.

I recently tried a bit to try and get another 16bit game run on Arch Linux with WINE in win98 or 95 mode but that still didn’t pan out.

Honestly it’s probably doable in some way without one but next time I try I’ll probably use a VM (Virtual Machine).

Astaroth , 6 months ago

TIL

I didn’t have it set to true but I also never noticed any problem

Astaroth , 6 months ago

Secondly, the purchase UI seems to have been designed to ensure that a new player can never understand it. I’m sure like all things it becomes clear over time but jeez, did a professional team really work on that thing?

Yes it’s professionally designed, like all microtransaction games the shop is the most important feature and they’re always designed to be confusing by forcing the user to jump through hoops and use multiple currencies to make it less obvious how much money you end up spending on the game if you’re a “whale”.

They don’t want you to be able to have a direct association between how much money or time anything costs, that’s why these games are so predatory and you should not be playing them, regardless of what you think of the actual game itself.

Well, I will say, for a “free” to play game League isn’t that bad (especially not when compared to mobile games), or at least not last I played (3~4 years ago) but they still use the same methods.

Also as others have mentioned, the game’s reputation in terms of it’s community isn’t exactly stellar. Being very “toxic”.

But what I think is even worse than the language, which you at least can mute, is that the most popular streamer for the game “Tyler1” constantly rages, shouts, screams, destroys equipment and punches furniture etc.

Let’s just say if your son starts doing those kinds of things then it’s not (only) because they’re going through a teenage phase it’s probably also because of bad influences from the game and its community.

Astaroth , 6 months ago

just google chinese ev car graveyard i.imgur.com/vjtkj6J.png

not only are they selling at a loss, most of the sales aren’t even real

Astaroth , 6 months ago

I don’t know about the bug in particular but for the next time when/if your system hangs and seems completely unresponsive:

I recommend looking into the Magic SysRq Key, it shares the same button as print screen on the keyboard.

Depending on the keybinds enabled you can kill all processes and reboot the PC, among other things. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

Astaroth , 6 months ago

Why are you using Chinese enumeration commas?

i.e. “、” instead of “,”

Astaroth , 6 months ago

All I know is wine-mono and wine-gecko doesn’t come in any default package lists on apt that you get on Linux Mint (which should include Debian and Ubuntu packages), not sure if they exist on some other mirror list somewhere but it didn’t seem like it, while on Arch I got them directly from Extra (not even AUR).

Well you technically don’t need mono or gecko, especially not if you’re just going to use Steam Proton to play, but I use pure WINE a lot and it was a pain having to install them manually. Eventually I gave up on using mono and just downloaded the .net runtimes I needed through winetricks.

There were also some lib32 package I got from AUR on Arch that didn’t exist on apt. One of those gst plugins (ugly/good/bad/nice/whatever)

Astaroth , 6 months ago

I second the Lego games. Although the older ones (Complete Saga) & Lego Indiana Jones were annoying to play COOP because there’s no split screen.

But Lego Star Wars Clonewars has split screen so you don’t get in the way of each other. I haven’t actually played other newer Lego games but I assume they will have split screen as well.

Astaroth , 6 months ago

Lego games like Lego Starwars has already been mentioned and I will second those (especially the newer ones that have split screen).

Divinity Original Sin is also great.

Honestly most games I can think of have already been mentioned and those who have not seem like they might not be that great of an option since it seems your partner isn’t normally into gaming. (RTS in particular might be too hard)

But I will suggest some anyway just in case

Starcraft 2 has free online multiplayer which includes a COOP vs AI mode.

There’s also a 2 player campaign adaption of Warcraft 3’s normally single player campaign. Although it might only be available for pre-Reforged.

Also I didn’t know about it before now, I googled it just in case, but apparently SC2 also has COOP mods for its campaigns.

You mentioned having a Switch so I will recommend Advance Wars Reboot and Wargroove 1 & 2, although there are no COOP campaigns but you can play multiplayer maps.

Besides Advance Wars Reboot Camp on Switch (or the originals for Gameboy, which you could play with emulator), there’s also an online fan site called Advance Wars By Web where you can play advance wars in the web browser, although there’s no single player.

Wargroove is also on Steam and besides the campaign and regular game itself there are puzzles.

And speaking of Puzzles, card games tend to have Puzzles. I haven’t actually played Magic, Yu Gi Oh, etc. so I can’t say for sure whether they have any, but there’s puzzles in Faeria. (I would’ve recommended Might and Magic Duel of Champions, it had some great puzzles, but Ubisoft shut that game down many years ago)

Astaroth , 6 months ago

For me I just found it annoying that whenever we wanted to go in different directions one player would end up getting dragged back by the camera border. So many failed jumps…

But that’s fair, if someone thinks that being able to get in the way of each other and being forced to cooperate better due to it adds to their enjoyment of the game then playing the games without split screen could be preferable.

I just never considered that possibility.

Astaroth , 6 months ago

Been a while since I had a VM but iirc it was pretty easy to have a shared directory to the VM, which is very useful to (obviously) share files but it also means that since the files aren’t actually on the VM itself they’ll still be there even if you remove the VM since they’re not part of the image.

How I learned my lesson to have a shared directory was this: I had been having audio issues on the VM and at one point just decided to start over with a new VM, completely forgetting that the files I had been working on for a project were part of the VM and would be gone.

Astaroth , 6 months ago

same reason why people buy games even though they can pirate them to get them for free

Astaroth , 6 months ago

IKEA used to sell great mattresses, but when I had to replace my old one a few years ago they only had hard and semi-hard ones.

And over time the mattress I ended up buying because they didn’t sell the one I wanted anymore sunk in and has formed an uncomfortable indent.

Astaroth , 6 months ago

Just the other day I was looking into how to use a single shared WINE prefix for multiple users since it’s not like any 2 users would ever use the same PC at the same time… TIL I was wrong

Unfortunately I don’t really have anything helpful to add except it seems like Linux is more or less inherently built to support what you’re looking for.

Astaroth , 6 months ago

I got through another few missions of Wargroove 2. It continues to be a worthy successor to Wargroove.

I didn’t have high hopes for WG2 at first but I saw they made some really good improvements with the map editor.

I’m still on the fence about buying it though, I heard it doesn’t have ranked match making so if I get it it would only be for the single player. Might get it if it goes on steam sale

Astaroth , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Disclaimer: I only tried NixOS for less than a month when I was a complete Linux noob, I have since then been daily driving Arch Linux for about 2 years now.

---

For me, at least on the surface level, NixOS just felt like Arch Linux, with more similarities than differences.

What was nice about NixOS was the single config file for everything, although iirc I had to reboot every time for it to be applied while with Arch you can just install something and run it immediately.

Edit: I either remembered it wrong or I was doing it wrong because you don’t have to reboot the whole system according to the reply from hallettj.

What I didn’t like however was all the packages that got installed (through the list in the config file) had really strange directories which I couldn’t find easily.

like on Arch the packages and the executables are basically all at /usr/lib/ and /usr/bin/ and iirc it was pretty much the same on NixOS, except on Arch I’ll have usr/lib/firefox but on nix it would be usr/lib/u123uadqasd782341kasjhiu3sh932s9sdasdsapzxcqw-firefox

Another thing is that it works great for everything you install through the Nix config file, but it’s not necessarily going to clean up any files created by programs that got installed through it when you remove the packages from the config file.

Like say you have installed steam and then you install some game through steam, well that game wasn’t added through the config file so there’s no guarantee that if you decide to remove steam that you will also remove whatever the programs steam installed or if they created some new files somewhere.

Of course the same thing already happens on other OSes as well, so you could say that it’s an upside that Nix is better at cleaning up after itself whenever you remove something, but also because it’s supposed to all be controlled through a single config it just feels that much worse when you have to hunt down some file somewhere.

---

Again these are mostly my anecdotes from 2 years ago when I was a complete noob. Maybe I wouldn’t have any issues if I tried it today. And chances are I was just trying to do something you shouldn’t even be doing.

Plus at the start I used KDE Plasma 5 on Nix and Arch, maybe it will go better if I use i3wm on NixOS like I’ve been doing for a year and half or so on Arch now.

At least I’m pretty sure that having daily driven Arch for 2 years now I would have much better chances with NixOS now than when I tried it with 0 experience on Linux.

So since you’ve already got the experience from using EndeavorOS you might not have any big problems using NixOS, or at least learn how it works pretty fast.

Astaroth , 6 months ago

Thank you for the correction. It was 2 years ago + I was really inexperienced so I could be misremembering things and/or just have been doing things incorrectly

Astaroth , 6 months ago

Guess what I found in /home/{user}/.wine/drive_c/users/{user}/Temp, 10GB of log files. Although 9GB was from one time when I used Cheat Engine and I don’t know what really happened tbh besides it causing a OOM crash.

It created a 9GB sized file called ADDRESSES.TMP, I never considered checking for temp files in .wine before. And I guess I should be checking all the prefixes created by Steam games as well…

Astaroth , 6 months ago

Do you use workspaces on Windows?

Tbh I didn’t know that’s a thing

Astaroth , 6 months ago

Disclaimer: my experience is only with Arch Linux (daily drive for 2 years) and a little bit of Linux Mint on a relative’s PC.

For me I found it more tedious to get games working through WINE on Linux Mint compared to on Arch Linux, some packages I wanted seemingly don’t exist in the apt repositories (wine mono and wine gecko) and had to be manually installed.

I also had some trouble because the package names were different compared to on pacman, especially the lib32 ones, but to be fair I would probably have had the same issue on Arch if I first used Linux Mint then Arch so not having the same package names isn’t inherently a fault of Linux Mint.

But it wasn’t that it wasn’t doable, it was just more tedious, and to be fair daily driving Arch for 2 years compared to using Linux Mint every once in a while means I’m way less familiar with Linux Mint.

Astaroth , 6 months ago

Arch is made out to be a lot harder and unstable than it really is. And AUR is a great resource but realistically you won’t even use it that much. At least I haven’t. I used it for Brave Browser package before switching to Firefox, some WINE gst plugin, and some other small stuff I don’t remember.

Also keep in mind even if it’s a AUR package, you can just install the package like normal if it’s a binary (it will be named with a -bin at the end, like brave-bin), so just because you’re using some packages from AUR it doesn’t mean you have to build lots of packages from source every time you update.

People hear scary stuff about some random update breaking the system but it’s exaggerated.

You definitely can break stuff with user error and sometimes if you’re not paying attention while updating you can get problems (combination of bad defaults + user error).

Main problem is that you can do whatever you want, but you might not actually know what you really want to do or you might not be doing what you meant to do, and Arch Linux will let you do it even if something breaks due to it.

And well that’s going to be same regardless of OS but it’s more accessible on Arch.

However you shouldn’t be too worried about it, in the basically worst case scenario you might need a Live USB and another device with an internet connection to look up and what you need to do to fix what’s wrong, but you can always count on that there’s a fix.

Most other OSes if you have a problem, depending on what it is you might just be stuck with it.

Biggest noob mistake I recall doing was that I had my old windows hard drive as extra storage and slowly moving stuff over once in a while, so I hadn’t reformatted it and I also wasn’t aware of that the default Linux NTFS driver wasn’t very good and that I should’ve gotten NTFS-3G if I weren’t going to reformat.

Well one day while not paying attention while updating my system through pacman (yay actually) I was also copying files from my old windows hard drive and I didn’t even look before just pressing accept on some AUR package rebuild.

Well it turns out that package was formerly part of Extra repository and thus it used to be a binary package, but now since it was moved to the AUR and it didn’t have -bin it was changed to a package to be built from source, and if I were to continue using it I should’ve changed which package.

But I just hit accept and it started chugging away, and it needed more RAM that I have and apparently there’s no safe guard for this (at least not by default) and by the time I noticed that my RAM usage was getting to high the system already got too sluggish and I was too late to end the process.

I also didn’t know about SysRq at the time so the only option I knew was to force shut down by holding down the power button for 5 seconds.

My actual system was still fine and all but my old windows hard drive that was transferring files got borked. It wasn’t completely bricked so I eventually salvaged it and it’s since been reformatted too, but I thought I had bricked it at the time.

Well that might still seem a bit scary but that was me making several user errors in a row, and at the end of the day it still wasn’t even a big problem.

Astaroth , 6 months ago

Eclipse Vanguard 💀

Astaroth , 6 months ago

How does it compare to PollyMC? It was super easy to use and you can play both offline without an account but also online with a Mojang Account. (Java versions)

Admittedly I didn’t actually try to play it online since I just looked it up for a nephew.

I used the Linux AppImage, just download and run it and you’re good (might have to install new java runtime depending on what you have already), but there’s also Windows and Mac versions.

p.s. I’m not really into Minecraft and don’t know what’s up, but apparently there’s some drama or something and PollyMC (with 2 'L’s) is not to be confused with PolyMC (one ‘L’).

Astaroth , 6 months ago

I legitimately didn’t know it removed features and until reading the other reply and watching the linked videos I wasn’t aware of a lot of the changes or even the existence of features like rejoining matches. If I ever got disconnected from a match I just played something else even back in the day. I don’t remember ever having an option to rejoin a match, unless that’s specifically a ladder games thing. I don’t recall getting disconnected from many games though, but I know it did happen. Definitely not enough for me to have been upset about it.

Warcraft 3 itself never had rejoin as in you could not close WC3 start it up again login and rejoin, but if you were having connection issues it would pause the game and wait a minute or so to give you a chance to reconnect before dropping you.

Some private WC3 servers did a have better reconnection features added, like ENTConnect, but obviously those were obviously just for games hosted by their own bots (although you could still join these games from official battle.net lobby search until Blizzard nuked host botting a year or so before Reforged came out)

But if you get Desynced there’s no waiting for reconnection, you’re just dropped.

Because being Desynced means the game state on your client doesn’t match with the rest of the players, so to fix that the game would have to be rewinded until before the desync happened and no such feature existed in WC3.

And the patches leading up to reforged and Reforged itself added a ton of desync issues.

I’m assuming that’s what you’re referring to by missing network features because it still has multiplayer and I’m pretty sure it still has the chat lobbies although I never really used those back then and I don’t use them now either.

LAN doesn’t exist. Ranked Ladder & profiles didn’t exist until 2022, and it still sucks and everyone uses W3Champions instead anyway, and the auto hosted in game tournaments don’t exist.

As far as me saying the custom games were improved I’d say you’re the dishonest one if you’re saying that’s not the case. They definitely improved custom games and while I don’t know all the changes, an easy one to point out would be the saved ranking system that exists for line tower wars now. That definitely didn’t exist back in the day.

Regarding custom games, the custom games are not made by Blizzard, they’re made by players. However in the patches leading up to Reforged Blizzard did add a lot of new functions that modders/map makers could use which were great additions, thus allowing for new cool stuff in custom games.

One super obvious and huge change was that in version 1.30 24 player support was added, instead of the usual 12.

But that doesn’t change that Blizzard then also made changes in Reforged that broke basically every existing custom map and they had to be updated to fix.

There were some desync issues and saving games in single player was broken but for custom games version 1.31.1 (the last patch before Reforged) was the best patch, you had all the new functionality added to the map editor but a lot less bugs and problems from Reforged.

Also there still haven’t even added the ability to play custom campaigns to Reforged lol. The few single player campaigns you can play in Reforged are thanks to people independent of Blizzard coming up with a work around and they’re technically just a series of custom games you play (although that is what campaigns are so).

Astaroth , 6 months ago

re: Skyrim, could just be that some SKSE mod you’re using needs some newer .net runtime or similar

could also be not enough vram (even if you have enough ram wine/proton could have it’s vram allowance set too low)

If you don’t already have one get a crashlogger, for SkyrimSE 1.5.97 I would recommend .NET Script Framework (and use SSE Engine Fixes skse64 preloader instead of DLL Plugin Loader)

If you already knew about all this and still having issues then don’t mind me

Astaroth , 6 months ago

Already saw this a year or two ago, it’s a great watch and would highly recommend anyone who hasn’t seen it yet does watch it

Astaroth , 6 months ago

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Not the Skywalker Saga)

Clone Wars is also really good, plus it has a lot better split screen which is great for 2p coop playing with your kid/nephew/niece or just being able to have 2 children play together instead of fighting over who gets to play and who has to wait for their turn that never comes

Astaroth , 6 months ago

How you worded this makes it seem like “if those games didn’t” refers to requiring subscriptions.

I would suggest editing it to “If those games didn’t appeal to kids” or similar; if what you meant was that kids just plays what appeals to them, and those games “just happens” to be subscription games.

Astaroth , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Warcraft 3, Age Series (AoE, AoE2, AoM, AoE3), Need For Speed Most Wanted (2005)

I played the first age of empires when I was 6 or 7 y/o and I’ve played all of the games besides AoE4 (including Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds).

As a kid we had few crappy dell computers connected to just a hub (LAN without internet) and would play a lot of Age of Empires 2 and C&C Red Alert 1 & 2 multiplayer.

Age of Empires and Red Alert were also games I would frequently play at small LAN parties (although everyone was really bad)

I played a bit of online AoE2 when AoE2 HD came out on steam but it was pretty bad so I stopped playing it. When DE came out I started watching AoE2 content but I’ll never play it because I’ve come to greatly dislike Microsoft over the years.

I’ve replayed Need for Speed Most Wanted (and also Carbon) tens of times over the years, and I still play it every now and then (with mods now)

But the game I’ve played the most is probably Warcraft 3. I’ve played a ton of custom games on Battle.net (RIP) and it’s what got me a bit into programming since I liked making custom maps and making triggers eventually led me to learn JASS (Just Another Scripting Language)

If Blizzard didn’t completely ruin Warcraft 3 with WC3 Reforged Refunded I’d probably still be playing it and making custom maps every so often.

I have played a bit on private servers but it’s just not the same anymore.

There’s a pretty cool Warcraft 3 open source project called Warsmash though so maybe one day I’ll start playing again.

Astaroth , 6 months ago

End of Windows 7

Astaroth , 6 months ago

At the moment, I don’t have the hardware to run games… Will try it out next year…

There’s plenty of great old games and also newer games that don’t require high specs.

For example indie games like Slay the Spire & Hades

And there’s always Nintendo games like Pokemon that you can play through emulators (Bsnes, Mgba, MelonDS, Dolphin, Citra, Yuzu, etc.)

Astaroth , 6 months ago

Arch Linux with i3wm

Fish, Alacritty, Rofi (dmenu replacement)

Astaroth , 6 months ago

I first tried KDE Plasma 5 but tbh I thought it was just a worse experience than Win7, it was really close but all the tiny little annoyances got in the way and it felt like I couldn’t do everything I needed through GUI so I still had to use terminal but it was awkward having to switch between using the keyboard and mouse and I would navigate through the GUI to get to directories then open terminal…

After a month or two of that I finally tried a tiling WM (i3wm) and it’s just a way way better user experience than any DE.

I will note though that I’m using Fish for my interactive shell and seeing anything in the tiny dmenu was just way too hard until I used Rofi for drun.

Without Fish and Rofi I might’ve tried more DEs or even gone back to Win7.

I recently used Linux Mint with Cinnamon on a relative’s PC and using Bash and the apt package manager sucks so bad. I even prefer Arch KDE, although I think Nemo is a bit better than Dolphin.

Anyway it’s been about 2 years of daily driving Arch with i3wm for me and I haven’t really gone out of my way to learn things but you naturally pick stuff up along the way just by using it.

Just make sure you’ve got another device with an internet connection in case something happens. I basically haven’t had any issues after I got better but I made a lot of user errors at the start. Nothing that can’t be fixed but finding out how to do the fixing without internet is a million times harder.

Astaroth , 6 months ago

It’s easy to forget the steps you took to do something on your computer, especially several months later when you’re trying to upgrade. Sometimes when you try several different ways of solving a problem, it’s easy to forget which method was successful the next day!

History with Fish makes this easy

Astaroth , 6 months ago

If you’re going to be using a DE and mostly do stuff through the GUI instead of terminal/command-line then make sure you can go admin mode (Root/Sudo).

Besides small annoyances I had with KDE Plasma 5’s UX the main reason I didn’t like it was that often enough I would have to use admin privileges but I couldn’t do it through the GUI File Manager (Dolphin) so I frequently had to use the terminal.

It should be possible to have admin privileges in Dolphin but I was a noob and didn’t know how (and still don’t even now).

If you end up facing that issue then either be a bit smarter than me and look up how to do that or use Nemo, another file manager, which is more or less the same thing as Dolphin except when I ended up using it on Linux Mint a while back it let me use it as Root as a feature out of the box.

And for the record I don’t like Linux Mint, apt package manager sucks (package managers are basically app stores where you get all your stuff), but at least it was super easy to install and Nemo was a good file manager.

If you don’t mind tinkering and have a secondary device with an internet connection in case you break something then I would recommend Arch Linux. Or you could try it in a Virtual Machine I guess.

Pacman (Arch’s package manager) is a hundred times better than Apt, and then there’s the AUR on top.

Also while I’ve never used it I hear a lot of good things about EndeavorOS, Arch Linux but supposedly easier

Astaroth , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

yay -Syu

you don’t use yay do you

Edit: typing yay without any other argument defaults to yay -Syu so there’s no reason to type it out

Astaroth , 7 months ago

I use Fish and have keybinds for previous and next directory, 99% of the time when going up in a directory it’s to (one of) the previous directory/ies I was in

Astaroth , 7 months ago

As a kid I had windows 98 (and later xp) dual booted with debian and at some point some version of suse. This was ~20 years ago

Well I used it just fine and I knew a bout the mysterious “root” and “sudo” that my dad would use but I was just playing some games and maybe using the web browser.

Using the GUI I never learned Linux and it wasn’t until a few years ago that I started using Linux again, and it was only because I wouldn’t be able to continue using Windows 7 anymore.

So I don’t have any experience with teaching Linux and especially not to kids, but I think kids are actually really good at learning stuff if they need too, so give them a PC and the tools to figure things out, if they want to use it they’ve got to learn, and don’t give them other options where they don’t have to learn anything.

Astaroth , 7 months ago

Finally someone that mentions an Enable Right Click extension. There’s a few out there but I use “Absolute Enable Right Click & Copy” as well.

On top of return youtube dislike & sponsorblock I will highly recommend BlockTube, it optionally removes shorts, the video pause and & popup asking if you’re still there, and a few other things. I’ve tried the “remove youtube loudness normalization” option but volume is just all over the place no matter what.

Of course these are specific to youtube and not essential for anyone who uses an alternative

Astaroth , 7 months ago

Maybe you should check some lets plays instead of watching tutorials. Just an episode or two to get an idea of what the game is and whether it seems to be up your alley or not.

The lets player will probably explain some mechanics as they come up while they’re playing (at least in the beginning to help new viewers unfamiliar with the game) and that should be a lot easier to digest than someone purely explaining a bunch of game mechanics in one go.

Astaroth , 7 months ago

I felt an urge to play Skyrim again, had a lot of fun for a day or two, but eventually after I added some more mods I started getting frequent CTDs and have been trying to figure out what the problem is (and how to fix it) through the crash logs.

I might just have to remove Immersive Citizens from the load order but I really don’t want to because it really makes the NPCs feel so much more “alive”.

Astaroth , 7 months ago

Does windows add an extra character at the end that gets converted to new line on linux? Because the other day I were copying a script and after pasting it an extra line was added after every single line, even the empty lines.

how it looked when I copied it:

<span style="color:#323232;">bla
</span><span style="color:#323232;">bla
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">bla
</span>

what it turned into:

<span style="color:#323232;">bla
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">bla
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">bla
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> 
</span>

Astaroth , 7 months ago

why not use underscores?

Astaroth , 7 months ago

well if you’re using a mono font (terminal) then there are no such thing as wider characters anyway, so for me that’s not a drawback either

Astaroth , 7 months ago

Do you type with one hand?

And well even if you did you could hold down right shift instead of left shift to only use a single hand.