Especially if you didn’t have a lot of spare time. With an active community you can just dip into discussions when you have the time. With a community you’re trying to establish yourself you absolutely have to provide a steady stream of content until it (hopefully) takes off.

Exactly. If this was “Marathon: Return to Deimos” or “Marathon: Battleroid Arena” or even “Marathon Infinity Plus One” I wouldn’t complain. Much.

But just taking the name (and logo) of the original one? The game that started Bungie’s path towards being one of the big names of the FPS genre? That’s like saying they went straight from Pathways Into Darkness to Halo. That’s not honoring Marathon, it’s a soulless recycling of an old IP.

My vent cores feel distinctly unblasted.

Man, I hate it when they make new games that have exactly the same name as an older game by the same company. And this one’s not even a remake. I have no idea if Marathon (1994) and Marathon (upcoming) even play in the same universe but they don’t seem to have much in common gameplay-wise. Ugh.

Makes me wanna install M1A1 Aleph One (didn’t know it does M1 directly these days) and shoot some Pfhor, though.

I’d argue that unfun design elements can be useful in games if used with care and purpose. For instance, “suddenly all of the characters you’re attached to are dead” is not exactly fun but one of the Fire Emblem games used it to great dramatic effect at the midway point.

Of course the line between an event or mechanic that players love to hate and one they just hate is thin.

Hoo boy, you weren’t kidding. I find it amazing how quickly this went from “the kernel team is enforcing sanctions” to an an unfriendly abstract debate about the definition of liberalism. I shouldn’t, really, but I still am.

Oh yeah, the equation completely changes for the cloud. I’m only familiar with local usage where you can’t easily scale out of your resource constraints (and into budgetary ones). It’s certainly easier to pivot to a different vendor/ecosystem locally.

By the way, AMD does have one additional edge locally: They tend to put more RAM into consumer GPUs at a comparable price point – for example, the 7900 XTX competes with the 4080 on price but has as much memory as a 4090. In systems with one or few GPUs (like a hobbyist mixed-use machine) those few extra gigabytes can make a real difference. Of course this leads to a trade-off between Nvidia’s superior speed and AMD’s superior capacity.

These days ROCm support is more common than a few years ago so you’re no longer entirely dependent on CUDA for machine learning. (Although I wish fewer tools required non-CUDA users to manually install Torch in their venv because the auto-installer assumes CUDA. At least take a parameter or something if you don’t want to implement autodetection.)

Nvidia’s Linux drivers generally are a bit behind AMD’s; e.g. driver versions before 555 tended not to play well with Wayland.

Also, Nvidia’s drivers tend not to give any meaningful information in case of a problem. There’s typically just an error code for “the driver has crashed”, no matter what reason it crashed for.

Personal anecdote for the last one: I had a wonky 4080 and tracing the problem to the card took months because the log (both on Linux and Windows) didn’t contain error information beyond “something bad happened” and the behavior had dozens of possible causes, ranging from “the 4080 is unstable if you use XMP on some mainboards” over “some BIOS setting might need to be changed” and “sometimes the card doesn’t like a specific CPU/PSU/RAM/mainboard” to “it’s a manufacturing defect”.

Sure, manufacturing defects can happen to anyone; I can’t fault Nvidia for that. But the combination of useless logs and 4000-series cards having so many things they can possibly (but rarely) get hung up on made error diagnosis incredibly painful. I finally just bought a 7900 XTX instead. It’s slower but I like the driver better.

I fix that problem by forgetting to turn off Do Not Disturb mode. Also works wonders for blocking all of the calls you do want to take.

“Well, excuuuuuse me, princess!”

gets shot twice, just to make sure

It happens on Linux – after your package manager has updated Firefox. Which typically means that you told it to. So it’s not really a surprise.

Oh, right. Fast Boot. I forgot about that bundle of joy.

But that’s wasn’t the only instance of an NTFS volume suddenly being broken. Another favorite was when I shrunk a volume on one disk from Linux (and then remembered that Windows correspond done it better) and rebooted to have it fixed and Windows proceeded to repair one on a different disk.

NTFS feels rock solid if you use only Windows and extremely janky if you dual-boot. Linux currently can’t really fix NTFS volumes and thus won’t mount them if they’re inconsistent.

As it happens, they’re inconsistent all the time. I’ve had an NTFS volume become dirty after booting into Windows and then shutting down. Not a problem for Windows but Linux wouldn’t touch the volume until I’d booted into Windows at least once.

I finally decided to use a storage upgrade to move most drives to Btrfs save for the Windows system volume and a shared data partition that’s now on ExFAT because it’s good enough for it.

Manga is typically read right to left.

I gotta be honest, I haven’t used a dedicated sound card since the Vista/7 era when EAX stopped being a thing and onboard sound could handle 5.1 output just fine. The last one I had was a SoundBlaster Audigy.

These days the main uses for dedicated sound interfaces are for when you need something like XLR in/out and then you’ll probably go with something USB.

Port 220.

IRQ 5, port 220h, DMA 1 was what I used for my SoundBlaster 2.

Later I used IRQ 5, port 220h, DMA 1, high DMA 5 for my SoundBlaster 16.

If you want a snake and a pie chart, at least have the snake do something with it like carrying the chart in its mouth.

Perhaps you can do the biblical scene of the snake tempting Adam and Eve but this time it’s the snake tempting managers with a useless pie chart.

Mind you, the real winner is of course Android. It has a consistent, easy to learn interface and a wide range of applications that integrate nicely.

And we don’t need to speculate; it has already won and is the true face of Linux for the masses. Plenty of young people don’t even own traditional computers anymore and do everything on their smartphone or tablets.

And that’s why this entire discussion is really just a form of fan wank; we don’t need to find a unified UI for Linux because it has already been found and has a massive market share. You may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like.

Everything else can be as complicated, janky, or exotic as it wants because it doesn’t matter.

Honestly, if you want one simple DE for everyone it should probably be XFCE. Dead simple to use, feels vaguely familiar to Windows users, not overly complicated.

KDE is heavily customizable, Gnome is very opinionated, and tiling WMs don’t adhere to orthodox UI patterns. Those are all suboptimal if you want something usable by the absolute widest range of users.

And even if we accept that it was always intended to be PSN-only and they decided to launch before PSN integration was done, the fact that multiplayer is entirely dependent on them providing a service is troubling. That’s how we lose games.

I can still launch Rainbow Six 3 and play multiplayer with my friends because it has the server built in and allows direct connect via IP address. You can’t do that with a live service game; once the official servers are down the game becomes (partially or completely) lost media.

Gtk and QT weren’t consistent but there was a Gtk style that used QT as a rendering backend, which allowed you to get some semblance of consistency. Then they came up with Adwaita, which doesn’t really allow that anymore.