Quazatron

Quazatron , 18 hours ago

It’s not the cost. I’ve not pirated anything since Steam and GOG came along. It’s just that games nowadays want you to be online all the time, force you to open accounts you don’t want, try to sell you in game items (that’s a brilliant idea to get money from certain types of people, a bit like religion, do congratulations to whoever came up with that).

I want games to be single player playable, offline, start to finish. I’ll buy expansion packs if the game is worth it. It’s it too much to ask?

Quazatron , 3 days ago

Oh look, Netscape Navigator is back.

They used to say that every product evolves until it can send mail. In that sense, this is now a mature product.

Of course nowadays no product is finished without built-in LLM functionality, so I’ll wait for that

Quazatron , 3 days ago

Way back in the late XX century.

Quazatron , 4 days ago

Some games you sometimes load just to hang around. This is one of those. Lovely game.

I’d add Valley and Sable to this group.

Quazatron , 6 days ago

Still playing Skyrim. Can’t seem to put it down.

I’ve modded it a bit and started over. I’m picking up more hidden details that I missed the first time, and I’m abusing some game mechanics to be all powerful. Muhahah!

Quazatron , 4 days ago

Thank you, I’ll check it out.

Quazatron , 8 days ago

You can and should use whatever OS fits your use case. Right tool for the job and all that.

What you should not do is post a clickbait video to trigger the penguins into giving you views.

Quazatron , 8 days ago

Inertia is an immensely powerful force.

Quazatron , 26 days ago

Upvote for you, dear PUSA fan!

Quazatron , 26 days ago

How often are you going to be managing ports?

Just use any tool you like, all they do is fiddle with the Kernel’s filter table.

Quazatron , 1 month ago

We played Doom on MS DOS. It was hugely popular because it was a breakthrough for PC gaming. So nothing to do with Linux.

Quazatron , 1 month ago

Same here. I have a few games from the Fallout series, but it just doesn’t click for me. I keep going back to Skyrim. It is just fun to ride around the landscape, sometimes doing nothing, with a huge ass battleaxe on my back.

Quazatron , 30 days ago

I’m on level 50-ish in Skyrim, and I either have done all the quests I could find or can’t do some quests because of some bug.

Then I can either pile mods on it to make it more interesting (and lose achievements in the process) or start again with a new character.

Either way, it’s still a nice place to burn some hours.

Quazatron , 1 month ago

Hang on, that is a single player game? I now auto-discard AAA games up front because most of them are online multiplayer affairs with fancy in-game items to purchase and silly anti-cheat gimmicks that give Linux users a hard time.

I might look into buying this one, then.

Quazatron , 1 month ago

Use Audacity. You can even load all the old Winamp skins.

Quazatron , 1 month ago

Yes, sorry, I always get them mixed up.

Quazatron , 1 month ago

My first machine was a ZX Spectrum.

I love the 8 bit games I grew up with but I’m not stuck in that timeframe. I appreciate that I can still play all my old games and the new ones.

I just wish I had more time to enjoy them.

Excluding the 8 bit games, the games where I spent more time are: Doom, Half-life, Portal, Bioshock Infinite, Skyrim.

If I had to choose one, it would be Doom. Such a simple game, so much brainless fun, so many great mods.

Quazatron , 1 month ago

Try the Brutal Doom mod if you haven’t already for an added dose of violence and gore. Combine it with mods like Eviternity for huge new maps and enemies. Enjoy!

Quazatron , 1 month ago

My favorite way of reviving ancient 32 bit hardware is installing Haiku. It’s such a cool little OS, even if it can’t do all the tasks modern Linux can.

Quazatron , 1 month ago

Xubuntu is still my distro of choice.

Removing snap and installing flatpak is two commands away.

Quazatron , 1 month ago

And so, as humanity reaches new peaks of digital audio fidelity, people decide to dumb down vocal audio quality.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Quazatron , 2 months ago

I’ve been using Tidal for a long time, and it has only gotten better.

They recently upgraded all tiers to high quality (better than CD) quality for free.

Meanwhile Spotify still doesn’t have the high quality audio tier they promised a few years ago.

Quazatron , 2 months ago

Don’t forget there are services around that will copy your playlists from one service to another.

Quazatron , 2 months ago

This is the only game to have a permanent shortcut on my desktop.

I play it with some modern tweaks and mods. It’s a sure way to get my quick dose of gaming rush.

Quazatron , 2 months ago

I hate strategy games but I love Into The Breach. It’s a perfectly executed game packed into a single screen.

Quazatron , 2 months ago

You’re right, that’s probably why I love it. I’m a big fan of puzzle games (Portal, Talos Principle, Qube).

Quazatron , 2 months ago

Is it even winnable? I always get killed before clearing all the islands. Still love it, though.

Quazatron , 2 months ago

Achievement unlocked.

If you can fix it you unlock another one. If you manage to boot the system without using a rescue USB pen you unlock another one.

Quazatron , 2 months ago

Once level up enough you’ll be writing a GRUB replacement yourself. Now that would be a massive achievement.

Quazatron , 2 months ago

The damn thing Just Works™. That’s why the developers aren’t being pestered. It’s a pretty great piece of software.

Every couple of years I install other desktops to check out what the cool guys use nowadays, then go right back to XFCE.

It’s like having a hot cup of tea on a cold day while sitting in a comfy chair by the fire with your slippers on.

Quazatron , 2 months ago

How else would one motivate itself to learn about grub, boot partitions, UEFI, MBR and all the other wonderful crufty technologies involved in starting operating systems?

Quazatron , 2 months ago

There are resources out there to learn exactly what’s going on, and the process is not too complex.

I’ve recovered a bunch of nuked MBR records and broken boot partitions myself, and maybe things UEFI added some complexity, but it’s not hard if you have a live USB ready and know the appropriate conjurations.

Most of the fun comes from self centered arrogant companies that make monocultural software, blatantly ignoring that other OSs may already be installed.

Quazatron , 2 months ago

+1 for Lenovo Thinkpad

Quazatron , 2 months ago

Lazy people tend to be creative people, which is good, especially when confronted with boring activities.

I’d solve it in hardware, maybe an ESP32 dongle with a mic pretending to be a keyboard.

Seriously though, sounds like you need a more creative or fulfilling job.

Quazatron , 2 months ago

If it works it ain’t stupid. 😄

Quazatron , 2 months ago

Slackware.

Quazatron , 2 months ago

Don’t get me wrong, but please start using LVM volumes, ZFS volumes or BTRFS subvolumes instead of partitions. We’re not in 1995 anymore.

I know a lot of you come from a Windows background so you’re used to juggling partitions with all the hassle that entails, but if you put a bit of time towards learning LVM you’ll find that you can stretch and shrink volumes to your heart’s content.

You can do neat tricks with mirroring, stripping and other RAID levels, mix and match disks and more.

Quazatron , 2 months ago

The only 2 scenarios where I can see problems are: old distros that must have a boot partition or outdated installers that will not recognize LVM volumes.

Quazatron , 3 months ago

That’s what I did.

On their site you can order a fully customized machine and they’ll even install Linux for you.

I ordered a full AMD laptop with a lot more RAM by saving the Windows tax.

They are solid machines. I just got a Thinkpad P1 Gen 6 from work (1,8kg with a friggin 880 gram 230 Watt power supply that I will not have to carry around, fortunately) and it is great.

Quazatron , 3 months ago

She should abide by the company rules, use company provided software and follow company policies if she likes working there.

Otherwise she should move. Bypassing the rules is very unprofessional and can get you in trouble.

Quazatron , 3 months ago

Try it out and see if it fits you.

There’s plenty of resources and helpful people out there to help you, and a lot of new shiny tech and toys to enjoy.

Have fun and help others if you can.

Quazatron , 3 months ago

Partitioning does have benefits especially for enterprise scenarios. It allows you to specify different policies per mount point (i.e. no executables on /tmp, etc.). It prevents a runaway process from filling your hard disk with logs. It lets you keep your data separated from your OS, or have multiple OSs with the same home partition.

For home use you’ll probably go with something simpler, like separated home, root and games partitions, for instance.

Nowadays you should opt for LVM volumes or BTRFS subvolumes instead of partitions as these are way more flexible should you change your mind in the future about the sizes you allocated.

Quazatron , 4 months ago

Can you run non native binaries on Linux? Sure, Linux is the Swiss army chainsaw of the OS world. There are multiple ways to achieve that.

Is it complicated? A bit. You’re interfacing a binary created for a completely different and alien environment. You’d get the same answer if you asked “why can’t l just run Mac apps in Windows like any other .exe?”

The best way to run .exe files is Windows. You have wonderful tools to help you run Windows apps on Linux, but the experience will probably never be as seamless as you want.

Quazatron , 4 months ago

You don’t have to sell Linux to me, I’ve been onboard since 95. :-)

All I’m saying is: if I needed to run Windows apps with zero hassle, I’d use Windows. I don’t, so I won’t.

Quazatron , 4 months ago

Nice work.

I used to get teased by the veterans for using nano instead of vi. Nowadays, I’m the one doing the teasing. Even if you don’t like it, learn the basic stuff, it’ll save you someday.

What I learned this week:

ping _gateway

is faster than looking up the gateway’s ip address and pinging it.

I also learned how to deploy stuff on AWS using OpenTofu, but the _gateway trick is neater.

Quazatron , 4 months ago

Microsoft is free to publish minimum requirements for Windows (TPM 2.0 for Windows 11, for instance), but you don’t have that in Linux. You are free to throw it at any hardware you want, and it will mostly work out of the box.

But that depends on companies and volunteers working on the hardware support. Intel and AMD provide good support for their hardware. NVidia does not. You should act accordingly, either buying supported hardware or sticking to software that supports your hardware (Windows or Mac).

Quazatron , 4 months ago

Having a nVidia GPU does not stop you from running Linux, it just makes it more painful depending on what you’re trying to achieve due to nVidia’s poor Linux support.

I merely suggest that one should use the appropriate tool for the job or endure the consequences. Blaming the tools achieves nothing.

Quazatron , 4 months ago

alias ll = ‘ls -l’

alias kk = ‘ls -l’

alias jj = ‘ls -l’

Dyslexia sometimes hits hard.