I’ve been happily using RSS feeds for many years. I mostly use them for webcomics. I’ve got a bunch of different webcomic feeds. But I also use RSS to follow a bunch of low-traffic sites that I care about the content of but don’t want to have to manually visit just to see if there’s an update.
Also, I don’t have a google account, but I use RSS to follow a couple of youTube channels that I find interesting. (Again, stuff that rarely updates. eg. hbomberguy.)
I’ve found that a lot of blogs do have RSS feeds even if there is no visible link or mention of RSS anywhere on the website. I often just throw the blog URL into the ‘add feed’ box on The Old Reader, and it turns out there is feed info hidden in there somewhere.
I’ve recently discovered and made heavy use of xournal++; for stylus-based note taking.
Nar. A statement and its converse are not equivalent.
Sure. I very much like having offline installers too. I’ve got a heap of them saved on my computer, and on an external drive. But Lutris and Heroic Games Launcher are clients. So I’m not really sure what you mean.
Thanks for the info. That sounds like a decent system. The idea of unpacking into a place of my choosing, and running without an additional launcher kind of appeals to me from a software-simplicity point of view - even if installing the game is slightly more hands on. But I don’t think I’ll do it that way myself, mostly because I don’t really want to further entrench Steam. Valve does a lot of good stuff … but their dominance in this space still makes me uncomfortable. (And the fact that they don’t let you disable the “what’s new” advertising bar on the library page is a big red flag for me.)
When I was first getting started, I briefly tried Lutris - but was put off by two things. The first was that it felt very complicated. I was new to Linux at the time, and I’m being asked helps of config questions about how to install which-and-what components in order to use such-and-such runners or launcher or whatever… basically just a heap of stuff that I didn’t really understand. And when I tried using a recommend ‘gold rated’ auto-setup to install something, it just froze. So that was disappointing. I decided that maybe I’d try something else.
I’ve seen Lutris recommended in a lot of places; so apparently it’s pretty good. But at the time I used it, it wasn’t really what I was looking for. I think a lot of people praise Lutris for the way it lets you have case-by-case special configurations for all sorts of things, which might allow you get some stubborn stuff working. But for me, it felt like more things I could break. I’ve got enough games that I’m happy enough to just say that if it doesn’t work then I won’t play it. So I guess Lutris wasn’t for me. [edit - Bottles also had a lot of config choices to get started; but I was lucky enough that what I picked worked first time; and I haven’t looked at the config since.]
That sounds like a similar setup to what I’m doing; just using proton-ge rather than bottles. Perhaps your way is a bit more light-weight, which is probably nice.
Heroic does seem to have jumped in popularity recently. I’d never heard of it when I first started installing games on Linux.)
Does the comet support mean that it can also do Galaxy cloud-saves and achievements? I wouldn’t say those things are super important to me, but it would make switching between launches easier - since I wouldn’t have to stuff around trying to move save files to the right place after switching.
I’m more than happy to just download the installers, and only manually update. That’s how I use to do it when I was using Windows. But the installers don’t run natively on linux, I’m just not sure how best to use them. My first attempt was to use bottles to run an installer, then again to run the game after it installed. That worked - but after doing it once I decided that it would be easier to just install Galaxy instead so that I don’t have to setting things up over and over.
I’m curious about how Steam responds to you adding a non-steam game like that. Are you using innoextract to unpack the files from the installer into some personal directory, and then telling Steam to run the game from there? Or do you tell steam directly to run the installer? … And when you add a non-steam game to steam is that an entirely local thing? (I don’t really want to be reporting to Valve about what GOG games I’m playing.)
I see one advantage of using Steam is that if I already have Steam, then it saves me installing another tool. But some disadvantages is that it presumably won’t do save syncing, or Galaxy achievement tracking - and the installation process for each game might be a bit fiddly by the sounds of it.
Widelands is a great strategy / building game. The gameplay and UI style is a niche - but that’s one of the things I like about it. It’s doing something different to most games.
(The gameplay is similar to Settlers 2; before that franchise changed direction.)
[edit] But the open-source game I’ve spent the most time playing would be OpenXcom-extended, with xpiratez. That game is truly huge.
CrossCode is fantastic. But it is not an open source game.
Forced accounts are evil - including Android. Here’s my Android story:
When I got my first Android phone, my intention was to not have an account - or at least have as much isolation between any account and my actual usage as possible. So I decline account creation when I first started using the phone, and told the phone to only store all contacts locally. That worked, and I was pretty happy with it. But later, I wanted to download a couple of basic apps from the app store - and that required an account. So I created a bogus account to download the apps. …
After creating the account to download stuff, I noticed that the contacts had automatically associated themselves with that new account had automatically uploaded all my contacts and personal info to google to sync with this account. This is precisely the thing I was trying to avoid in the first place. So, I immediately logged into that account via google’s website and told it to not store any contact info, and to delete all existing info. Which it did.
But then some time later… the account again decided to sync with my phone - this time to delete all the contacts from my phone (presumably because I’d deleted them from the online account). So although I’d gone to some deliberate lengths to tell my phone to only store data locally and to not upload it, what i ended up with was all personal data uploaded, and then purged from my phone. I had to try to restore my contacts from an ancient sim-card backup from my old phone.
Since then, I’ve decided that I will not use a google account for my phone for any reason, ever. I’ve use F-droid and the Aurora store instead. (But actually I very rarely use any apps anyway.)
If we are separated from our parents shortly after birth, and grow up in isolation from other humans - then we would not learn to talk anyway. Note that that’s what happens with most pets that humans keep. Maybe we get to walk past some other humans in the park a couple of times a week, but that’s it.
I like the meme - but the identity of the villain hasn’t yet been revealed. I’m sure lots of people are keen to see who’s behind the “Jia Tan” mask.
And so the microkernal vs monolithic kernal debate continues…
I think the high popularity of Trump is very damaging for all of the USA.
Mozilla’s Firefox is essentially the only competitor to Google’s Chrome. So to say that Mozilla is pro-google is kind of weird. Almost every other browser uses Chrome’s engine, and thus is enforcing Google’s view of the internet. Firefox and Safari are the only significant holdouts. (And Safari is obviously backed by one of the largest companies in the world, with its own reasons.)
No? The code for the model can be open-source - and that’s pretty valuable. The training data can be made openly available too - and that’s perhaps even more valuable. And the post-training weights for the model can be made open too.
Each of those things is very meaningful and useful. If those things are open, then the AI can be used and adjusted for different contexts. It can be run offline; it can be retrained or tweaked. It can be embedded into other software. etc. It is definitely meaningful to open source that stuff.
I think the answer is fairly clear. Lemmy’s topics & votes system funnels condenses the user-base to focus on particular things at particular times. The total number of users may be smaller than Mastodon, but basically everyone on lemmy is looking at the top posts on the front page first, and then exploring to other stuff later; whereas on Mastodon everyone is just doing their own thing.
Focusing people on one topic means that there will be discussion at that topic at that time; and discussion leads to people checking back to read and reply to responses…
I routinely use both Mastodon and Lemmy. I see a lot more varied content on Mastodon, but it is more fleeting. i.e. very little discussion, and fairly short window of interaction with posts. Lemmy has a lot less ‘stuff’, but a lot more conversation.
I think the difference is interesting, but it definitely isn’t something we should use to say which platform is doing better or anything like that.