polygon

polygon , 10 months ago to gaming in Dragon Age: Origins walked so Baldur’s Gate 3 could dash

I feel like JRPGs completely changed what an RPG video game is. They are watered down compared to the original cRPGs from the 80s and 90s. Then the "westernized" version of JRPGs watered it down even more. The old cRPGs were so big and so complex. OG Baldur's Gate, yes, but also Wizardry and Ultima too. I enjoyed Dragon Age because I liked the story, but I'd say Divinity: Original Sin 1 & 2 are more direct descendants of the old cRPG days (DA 2 & 3 bear no resemblance to cRPGs at all). I think Dragon Age games are good modern RPGs everyone should play but Baldur's Gate 3, imo, is a proper cRPG straight out of the 80s with 2023 graphics.

I'm so thankful this game is proving to be so popular. Maybe people are discovering (re-discovering) what RPGs used to be, and what makes them so great.

polygon , 10 months ago to selfhosted in The Cloud Is a Prison. Can the Local-First Software Movement Set Us Free?

I felt this "prison" very strongly with iCloud. Don't get me wrong, I think iCloud functions exceptionally well. It's an extremely well integrated cloud and works seamlessly with all Apple products. It's just that after a while I start to realize just how much of my life was sitting on Apple servers and what a dependency I had on Apple, hoping they are the good guy (narrator: they were not, in fact, the good guy) or at least, not as bad as the next best option (I feel Google has legitimately become evil at this point). I was constantly reading about security and getting myself worried, etc.

Finally I just bought a NAS. Synology is my current choice, but use whatever you prefer. A NAS can replicate anything the "cloud" can do, it's faster, it's safer, it doesn't rely on the good graces of any cloud provider. YOU hold the access to your data. As it should be. I still use the "cloud" for my backups with HyperBackup sending encrypted backups to Wasabi, but that is a different matter. Even if Wasabi decided to be evil, my data is encrypted before it ever leaves the NAS and Wasabi could never see my raw data like Apple/Google can.

The only thing holding people back from this, I guess, is price. Apple charges $0.99/month for 500gigs, while just the NAS itself with no drives will cost you several hundred. But man, not being worried about the latest cloud drama, government overreach, privacy scandals, etc is worth every cent. A Synology NAS with Tailscale is just about the safest place to put my data. All the Snyology mobile apps even pass the gf test for features and ease of use. I recommend a small 2-bay NAS to everyone I can.

Turn off the cloud, and take your data back.

polygon , 10 months ago to linux in Why OpenSuse is said to be KDE Plasma first?

I see people say they turn off notifications about updates and just do it once a week, but man, if I open Discover and see 30 updates sitting there I cannot ignore it. I get real twitchy about it. So my update routine is daily. Every morning with my fresh cup of coffee I run "zypper dup". If all goes well, I start my day. If all does not go well, I rollback to the previous state with snapper, and then start my day. Using snapper takes about 30 seconds, and frankly nvidia is the only reason I can remember ever having to use rollback.

Tumbleweed is really painless to maintain, even if you update every day. You don't have to update every day, but my particularly specialized Update OCD doesn't allow me to wait a week, it seems.

polygon , 11 months ago to linux in Why does Nvidia hate linux?

I have a 3080 and it runs fine with openSUSE Tumbleweed. On first boot you do need to add the nvidia repo and then install it which I guess could be problematic for new linux users, but it's literally pasting 1 line into terminal and then clicking the driver in yast. Echoing what others have said, I'd prefer if nvidia was a little less hostile to open source but frankly the driver just works, and works well. The only thing I've used besides openSUSE lately is Pop_OS and I believe the nvidia driver was installed automatically. If someone is having trouble getting the driver installed that seems to be a failure of the distro, not the user. You should be able to depend on your distros packaging to take care of this stuff.

polygon , 1 year ago to gaming in Steam Summer Sale is now live

I just went all-in on Final Fantasy on this sale. Almost all the games are on sale for super cheap. I realized that while Final Fantasy is probably my favorite series of all time, I've never finished one. Not a single one. They've always been so long that I never had the time to get through them. I can fondly remember being a kid playing FF1 on my NES with my brother, drawing maps, and trying to figure the game out. Flash forward to working, getting married, having kids..

But now, I am older (and blessedly single) and I have much more control over my time. I'm going on a Final Fantasy binge, from 6 to 16. I'm stupidly excited to actually complete these games.

polygon , 1 year ago to mildlyinfuriating in 📢Entire mod team on r/mildlyinteresting removed and locked out of their accounts after changing their rules upon community's request. (They're also switching subs BACK to SFW)

No one had any illusions about how this was going to go. The point was making them do it. The point was forcing Reddit into a PR nightmare just before their big IPO. The point was giving this platform traction. The fact that this post exists on this platform is proof that the mods succeeded. Sure, Reddit is still huge.. but with entire mod teams being replaced with Spez bootlickers it remains to be seen whether they can maintain what they have, or if this is Digg all over again.

It's hard to predict what will happen, but I'm here, and you're here, so something is happening.

polygon , 1 year ago to RedditMigration in At Reddit I can save a thread, at Mastodon I can bookmark a post or comment. How do I save a Kbin (or other) 'article', comment, etc?

If you upvote a post it will put it in your Favorites. You can access favorites by hovering over the hamburger menu just to the left of your username in the top right corner. To upvote without putting it in your favorites, you can use boost instead. This is essentially how you save posts on kbin.