Most distributions include Wine AFAICT yet I’d argue you shouldn’t use Wine because typically it means using proprietary software.

If you are using Wine for games then it’s also reconsider that there are plenty of open source game you can still pay for to support their author.

If you still want to play proprietary Windows games without native support then I would recommend to use a wrapper, e.g. Bottles (because of Proton, not because of the GUI) or even Steam (since you want to play proprietary Windows games anyway) as they’ll remove a layer of tinkering to find the right version, path, etc (basically prefix management).

… but yeah, even though Wine is amazing I would argue every time one uses it, if they are using Linux because they want more agency, they probably should reconsider and search for a free software alternative instead. It will be awkward at first, other UI, other UX, new community, but it’s an investment in the future.

I haven’t tested this myself but I assume one could benchmark both and see if there is noticeable performance loss.

FWIW the SteamDeck running official SteamOS does have a full desktop environment, it’s just hidden by starting Steam in Big Picture mode.

So… you could benchmark the “gain” but I doubt it’s significant, if any.

Also if you do like to play with hardware for gaming across networks checking Selkies or Moonlight to stream from your machine to your machine, no intermediary, little latency or overhead.

This makes me genuinely curious, who thought that would be a good idea?

It feels like a lot of “contribution” to open source suddenly is fueled by AI hype. Is it a LinkedIn/TikTok “trick” that is being amplified that somehow one will get a very well paid job at a BigTech company if they somehow have a lot of contributions on popular projects?

Where does that this trend actually come from?

Did anybody doing so ever bother checking contribution guidelines to see which tasks should actually be prioritized and if so with which tools?

This seems like a recurring pattern so it’s not a random idea someone had.

CoMaps / OpenStreetMap / local public service for public transport

So glad I moved from iOS to /e/OS (last year) then to GrapheneOS (last month).

Indeed, when I read this parent comment I had in mind a snake oil salesman in Lucky Luke (Doc Doxey’s Elixir, volume 38)

Lex Fridman is a fucking moron and his pretentious podcast is unbearable.

Confession time… just like Elon Musk, initially I though Fridman was good. I even recommended his podcast when he started it around 2018. I was thinking “Nice, he’s doing interesting technical interviews” then gradually it became longer and longer about broader and broader topics to the point I asked myself “So… is it still <<The Artificial Intelligence Podcast>>” then shortly after stopped listening entirely.

I think he’s deal is networking. He started with his domain of expertise, namely AI, but then (that’s just me speculating) he noticed the correlation between audience size and fame of the guest, so he tried to gradually climb the social ladder of guests, pulling bigger and bigger names regardless of the topic. He used fame from his employer, MIT, then of his guests, to keep on doing so, and it worked. I also imagined he noticed that the more controversial the broad topic was, again the bigger the audience.

So it went from technical niche to teach… to generalist discussion podcast trying to be “open” to the most outlandish views.

TL;DR: it started good IMHO but it slowly yet surely devolved into garbage indeed.

OG “fake it till you make it” business.

Feels like 99% of “social” network startups. The dead Internet theory started before the LLM craze.

You can try.

FWIW I imagine security and privacy researchers have done that already but my point precisely is that anybody can do so. Even if some researchers might have done it showing results you agree, or disagree, with you should still be able to replicate. It’s just a process.

The very notion of proof implies that you can reproduce it. So I would suggest you forget what anybody here or elsewhere said. Instead, you :

• get a cheap phone (so typically Android)
• reset/format/flash it to a blank state
• make a new testing account on it
• use for random browsing, using app, etc and you log your history, namely what did you actually do AND what ads you actually see
• test for something outside of your new habits with a search query, then log and compare again, seeing the threshold to change
• repeat the last step for something said using e.g. a voice assistant, log&compare
• repeat WITHOUT explicit search, log&compare

Yes this takes a of time but that will help you make YOUR own opinion on the matter if you genuinely care.

Thanks for the clarification. Unfortunately I’m no expert in the matter. I bet that some mods are compatible, I bet some aren’t. I bet some open source client/server pairing implementation might give more freedom but aren’t necessarily as popular. I have no idea how that impact culture or the size of projects. I imagine that the community of each project, e.g. Minetest, would know better if the limit itself is technical, e.g. mod compat, or not, e.g. network effect and thus a lot of people “sticking” to the “original” proprietary implementation not because it’s better but solely because their in-game friends are there.

I like risky sports (relative for some people it might be boring) but when I have to work or even play I want stuff that just works. I can’t imagine using a laptop and wondering every day if this is the last update to my OS I might get.

Sure Apple laptops might be great hardware, you might love the design, etc but just the fact that this question exists make it impossible to consider such hardware.

TL;DR: I don’t know and I don’t want to care. Please support OEMs who are not making money by selling locked hardware.

Yes I’m serious and I’m not a troll. I don’t know what in my questions or suggestions make it sound like that but feel free to dig deeper.

Anyway, AFAIK Minecraft has an official client which connect to official servers.

It’s possible to replace clients, as listed earlier, but they might still rely on official servers with their accounts as you pointed out. There are though, AFAICT, compatible servers too, e.g. https://glowstone.net/ so one could connect an unofficial client to an unofficial server and thus have a similar experience with no reliance on anything related to Microsoft, no?

No worries, if you want you can “test” that via a virtual machine, even a container e.g. https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/ and see what you would genuinely miss.

It feels like our computer is very unique, very customized, but often it’s done in very few key places, e.g. browser profile data, ~/.bashrc , etc and once you locate those, transitioning to any other system is way easier.

the sheer amount of content that was added over the years, and the enormous amount of mods, and the entire community, aren’t remotely comparable

Are they compatible though? Like can I load content, connect to open source servers, uses mods on any client? Please don’t presume I know anything about the topic, I’m genuinely trying to understand exactly why alternatives are not good enough.

How about any open source alternative e.g. https://www.luanti.org/ or Minetest or Terasology or Voxel.js or…?

Pretty much what nix (distinct from NixOS) is.

That being said I would recommend NOT to do that because you most likely need 10 specific packages at most. That should take you 15min tops to install with few minutes paying attention.

Just make sure /home is its own partition, or even disk, the distro hop if you want. You can also have in your ~ directory an apps directory where you keep binaries, AppImage, etc.

For most people this is not a real concern.

• get top recent commiters with https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pulse
• click on 1st link https://github.com/bluca and see https://github.com/microsoft in profile

Just 2 steps.

Yes Poettering isn’t at Microsoft but seems the person driving the project at the moment is.

Freedom is overwhelming.

You can change everything and anything… so that means a LOT of choices.