I also don’t want to have a dozen different crappy launchers from different companies to deal with. There are a lot of benefits to the user to having everything centralized in one place.

I wonder if there’s a future where every game marketplace uses open standards/APIs that 3rd-party launchers (like Heroic) can consume for downloading games, checking DRM status, tracking achievements, friends, and so on. DRM is probably the hardest part of that, though maybe there could be closed-source blobs downloadable to enable a store’s DRM. It’s obviously not in the interest of companies solely focused on profit and dark patterns, but I wonder if Steam would ever consider using its weight to do it anyway.

While I don’t think hypervisors are all that interesting to most people due to their brittle nature and real security risks, I still think there’s a definite blow being dealt to Denuvo even if not a single person actually uses them. The publishers making the decision to pay for Denuvo are still going to see their games being cracked same-day, hypervisor or not, and that probably puts a lot of pressure on their decision to continue paying Denuvo.

I already read a lot of the lutris devs’ honest feelings about AI and their willingness to obfuscate what they’re doing with it in the initial issues/discussions. No offense, but I’m not all that interested in watching them attempt to whitewash and downplay what happened after they’ve had time to figure out how to spin it.

I just did it manually, pointing faugus at the old prefixes and setting the launch options the same

I guess I’ve just been behind the times, but I’ve never had an incentive to switch. I just installed faugus and transferred everything over and it seems very slick. It seems to be missing 1 or 2 things, like environment variables per-game, but all the other important stuff seems to be here. I know what I’m doing with prefixes so having all the knobs to turn is great, but honestly linux gaming does not need most of those knobs nowadays.

Whether or not I use Claude is not going to change society

This gives me shopping cart theory vibes. I don’t usually base my moral compass based on whether my action will have some kind of measurable impact, but whether I believe it’s the right thing to do. After the intense doubling down in that discussion thread I’m definitely steering clear of lutris. It costs me very little effort to avoid projects that do icky things I don’t want to encourage (even though it may not have a measurable impact~)

Oh my god my biggest pet peeve is every single new project awarding itself “modern, lightweight, blazing fast”. Seeing these words actually negatively affects my perception of your new super cool project. Along with the fucking emojis.

aka:

Modern: “I couldn’t understand the codebase of the previous solution, so I rewrote it using stuff I’m familiar with”

Lightweight: “Featureless/no features that I don’t use”

Blazing fast: “Doesn’t have any edge cases handled yet”

It makes sense to want to use Delta Chat because of the UX right now, but I’m just assuming the UX on all of these projects is bad in some way, and I’m assuming there are improvements to be made in other regards as well (Delta Chat is only recently trying to land Perfect Forward Secrecy, for example). I’m more concerned with looking at the future trajectories of these projects, as someone who has had to convert their friend group between solutions multiple times and is sick of projects that don’t go anywhere or will get superseded by projects with better designs.

With that in mind, I’m mainly looking at the fundamentals of the implementation and if, given enough community support/money, all the UX issues could be solved eventually. Even projects like Matrix, which sucks for a few big reasons right now, could still be mostly fixed up with enough effort. My suspicion is that “fixing up” Delta Chat would realistically mean that they should move away from emails as part of their stack, unless there is some actual value-add from keeping it.

(For the record my friends and I are using Signal currently. I played around with SimpleX a long time ago but found the UX lacking for normies.)

Yeah I did, I watched the talk and read the article before I posted. I understand that the article calls out several times “email is fine actually”, but I’m not under any delusions that Delta Chat is using “traditional email”, which is what the article spends the most time debunking. The article’s points on stubbornly using email technology were “countries have a harder time blocking it” (which I mainly focused on) and “email servers are battle-tested”. I’m not counting the second point as worth talking about since it’s kind of dumb to imply that there’s no possible way to have more efficient communication relays than pre-existing email servers, and they’re already modifying those email servers to fit their own purposes anyway so that removes the “battle-tested” perk.

(Not a crypto expert, not familiar with Delta Chat at all, vaguely familiar with SimpleX)

I kind of don’t understand why this is being built on top of email at all. They say it’s harder to block by nation-level actors, but how is something like SimpleX easier to block? They also needed to staple Iroh and its encryption implementation on as additional surface area in order to get regular chat capabilities because email transport doesn’t support things like larger data or real-time communication (voice/video). I see a lot of ways that they have retrofitted email technology to fit parts of the task, but not really a compelling reason why we needed to use email technology as part of the solution? Is it really just the nation-level thing, and is that really only possible through using email?

Assuming SimpleX is resistant to government censorship in the same way that Delta Chat is (multiple dumb relays, no central identities, etc), what transport/encryption problems are being solved that something more purpose-built couldn’t handle? Is Delta Chat more of a proof-of-concept that it’s possible to get this far when starting with email (which, yes, congrats, it is impressive), or is it meant to be the last word in instant messaging? Given that it’s not popular right now, I’m not sure if I’m compelled to switch to or support it over some other new bespoke technology that isn’t starting with its hands tied behind its back?

Gamers just don’t care about non-intrusive DRM. The ideological downside of losing access to a game at some unknown point in the future just isn’t real enough for many people to care about. If there were more examples of it happening (e.g. The Crew) I think we’d start seeing a culture shift. I do think there are a fair number of gamers who will skip buying games just because they include worse DRM like Denuvo, but games that ship with Denuvo are typically also just bad games, so the intention of “voting against DRM with your wallet” gets a bit diluted.

Arches isn’t pornographic, but it can still hurt you in other ways.

Unsettling that I could recognize Mii Todd Howard from the thumbnail. Have graphics gone too far?

TOTP yes. I don’t normally have any passkeys (not political, it’s just new tech that I don’t use enough), but I tested with passkeys.io and passkey creation works with Vaultwarden, and the passkey then exports as expected, so I would guess all fine. When transferring from BW->VW, I’d recommend using the .zip export option so that it carries over attachments also.

If it helps, you can use https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ to stop the auto-AI inserts.

I switched to self-hosted Vaultwarden and it was so trivial. I had it set up and switched in literally like 10 or 15 minutes. The ability to export your vault from any of your devices makes it less of a concern that you might accidentally wipe your Vaultwarden DB and be screwed, and you don’t even need to add surface area by exposing it to the internet if all your devices log onto your local network occasionally.

Originally I was okay kicking $10 to Bitwarden as a sort of donation, but them doubling the fee for dubious “ooh fancy smart scanning tech” just seems like them wanting more money, or at least misusing the money that they have. If they polled users to ask “do you want to spend double the fee for us to do smart scanning?” I guarantee they would have gotten a resounding ‘no’.

Apparently the price increase happened yesterday; I hadn’t heard anything about it until just now. Gave me the push I needed to switch to self-hosted vaultwarden in like 15 minutes. Very pleased with how simple the docker compose and export->import were. I’ll note that I’m running it privately on my local network, which I’m assuming should work fine as my devices enter that network semi-frequently and should keep everything synced up(?).

Personally it’s because my fingers are already on “s” and “u”.

Really appreciate their takeaway from this. It’s unfortunate that AI is so popular right at the moment that a lot of people are trying to switch to Linux. They’re also still solidly within the honeymoon period so we’ll see how they feel in a month or two.

After a certain point I think the more likely scenario is not that right-wingers keep “falling for it”, it’s that they have a singular motivation that they need to hide with other more socially acceptable excuses. When those excuses are cast aside whenever convenient, they get to appear outraged and tricked, all while their real goal continues chugging along. This also sets up a sock dummy for leftists to laugh at and pretend that progress is being made, while in fact nothing has changed. IDK, maybe there are people genuinely being convinced otherwise, but we’re about a decade into this nonsense and if someone didn’t exit the train about… a decade ago, it says almost everything we need to know about them.