LexiMax

I'm not really sure what you mean by "inherently" bad, but I feel very strongly about this, because to me, this is Linux's "original sin." It was probably initially done with good intentions, but has led to the status quo of today - where the #1 software distribution method on Linux is a distro repository, and if your needs fall outside that you are fighting an incredibly uphill battle, both against the ecosystem and the culture of Linux. I suppose what's most frustrating to me is the realization that it's not obvious that there's a problem if you haven't been in the sorts of situations where you run into its footguns. I ran Linux for quite some time as a daily driver in my webdev job - my tech stack was almost completely open source and it performed swimmingly. But when I switched industries and started shipping commercial video games on Windows and game consoles, I suddenly became very aware of how ill-suited Linux was for the requirements of that industry - closed source, distribute binaries, vendor the universe, and at some point having to call a game "done" and move to the next project. There's no technical reason why Linux couldn't be a good fit for that kind of development, but it's very much at odds with the repo model of distributing software that most of Linux userland seems to blissfully assume, and what ticks me off is that getting Linux users to even acknowledge that there's a problem worth solving is like pulling teeth.

Windows doesn't ship SDL. If you want to use SDL, you vendor it. Windows is set up for this to be the easy and expected way you handle your business on the platform. This approach does have consequences - for example, I have 87 distinct copies of SDL2.dll on my system. But do I care? Not really - my programs still work. Perhaps Linux distros shouldn't ship the entire open source ecosystem in its package manager if they can't fight their urge to tie dependencies together in a neat little bow.

And it's somehow even worse, because at the very least when I distribute my software in an app store the expectation is to vendor my dependencies. Linux distros want my software to become so intertwined with their OS that all of my dependencies are swapped out for their versions, so if someone files a bug I can't rule out mismatched dependency version as a cause. That's insanity. I cannot emphasize enough that it's literally the worst of both worlds and the dumbest way to distribute software possible. If I release a program that depends on SDL, I should not have to prevent myself from using - say SDL_RenderGeometry - just because some Linux distro is stuck on an older version of SDL before 2.0.18 that doesn't have that function. Or the opposite - maybe I'm using an old version of a library because the newer versions past might introduce spurious compiler errors or differing functionality that I don't have to worry about until I decide it's worth upgrading. You want to distribute my software for me and with your own changes to integrate it into your OS? You support it. But if that's the only popular way to distribute software on Linux, that's a problem.

And that's the most frustrating part. Linux could have reasonably been that alternative if the Desktop Linux community could have stopped being its own worst enemy for two seconds. It has had opportunities, but the problems preventing widespread usage on the desktop are footguns of their own creation, and not evil plots by Microsoft, Apple or Google.

And they still got screwed because popular distros started removing 32-bit libraries that the runtime depended on. But yes, the most painless solution for distributing binary software on Linux is to basically ignore 99% of the distro's libraries and roll your own environment. And until the Steam Runtime (and later Flatpak) came along, you basically had to reinvent this wheel yourself because the distros are certainly not going to help you subvert their gatekeeping. After all, their attitude is best summed up by Drew DeVault, which I think I can be fair in citing from one of his articles: As long as this attitude is the predominant attitude in the Linux desktop world, there will never be a year of the Linux desktop. If Linux users want this to change, they must advocate for change from within their ecosystem, instead of uselessly trying to badger Adobe into supporting Photoshop on Wine, or trying to convince people in forum threads that - for example - GIMP is a perfectly reasonable substitute for Photoshop.

No, you don't need to see how things play out. The problem with distributing binary software on Linux are problems the Linux desktop community needs to solve if they actually want to win over desktop users and developers on a large scale. Leaving it for corporate benefactors is how you get domain-specific half-solutions like Docker and Proton that don't benefit the wider ecosystem.

Valve used to actually encourage and promote native ports of Linux games, but they sold so poorly and bitrotted so quickly - leaving developers with a bad taste in their mouth - that once the incentives dried up, so did the influx of ports. Their support of Proton over native ports is an admission that the binary distribution ecosystem of Linux is so broken that the only way they could possibly ship a Steam Deck without Windows was to go with a compatibility shim that required almost no actual porting effort from developers.

Unless software explicitly and emphatically states their support for running under Wine/Proton, you cannot depend on it. Any problem or glitch that you run into with the software that you report, 99 times out of 100 you'll get a form response from the developer asking you to run it in a supported operating system instead - even if it's genuinely a bug in their program. Proton is not an acceptable substitute for native ports, and the fact that Linux has not been able to attract ports of many critical pieces of software due mostly to the myopia and self-inflicted gunshot wounds of the Desktop Linux community should be seen as a Failure with a capital F. Do you realize how embarrassing it is that the most stable ABI on Linux is Win32?

My motto is YOSPOS - Your Operating System is a Piece Of Shit. Which OS? Your OS. Yes, your OS. No matter which OS you use, you're going to run into problems. I've used all three OS's in anger for extended periods of time, and they all suck for different reasons. Linux has a cultural issue where it is expected that 99% of Linux software should be provided by the distro, and binary distribution of applications is an enormous pain in the ass. There is also a culture of forking and getting 100% of what you want instead of collaberating and putting more wood behind fewer arrows. The GNOME/Freedesktop ecosystem is actually very nicely put together, but last time I used it had some strange omissions in functionality - I couldn't set my default sound device and have it be saved from session to session. Apple's UI makes a great first impression and seems very well put together, but when things break they break in confusing, unknowable ways that are impossible to debug. They also deprecate API's way too quickly and if you are a crossplatform developer they don't give a single fuck about you and make your life difficult for no reason.

Didn't like it. The game certainly looks the part of a BUILD classic, and I always thought that there was some mechanic or signposting I was missing when I first played and bounced off it, but nope, turns out it just had issues.

I like them. The fact that they don't really "mean" anything imho is a feature and not a bug.

Phantasy Star Online is more of a Diablo-style ARPG than a traditional RPG, but my god the controls for this game are pretty dire. There are three major issues that conspire to make your life hell. First, you have almost no camera control - the camera sorta lazily tries to get behind your shoulder based on which way you're currently moving. The only button that does anything to the camera centers it over your shoulder immediately. Second, there's no way to strafe while keeping your current orientation. Moving the character also moves which direction they're facing. Third, the targeting system is pants-on-head stupid. Instead of having a lock-on system where you target a specific enemy and can then circle-strafe around it, you target whatever enemy happens to be in an invisible cone radiating from the front of your character - not your camera, the character itself. Any one of these issues would be annoying, but dealing with all three at the same time means that you have to re-learn how to play a third-person action game from scratch. When playing ranged characters, I often have to kite monsters together, then run to the opposite end of the room, turn around, and hit the camera button so all of the monsters are in a straight line in front of me and the targeting lock-on actually works. In smaller areas, I often don't have time to recenter the camera, and after running to the opposite end of the room I blind-fire towards the camera in the hopes of hitting something. It really sucks. Despite that, this game is still my favorite RPG and it's not even close. PSO was Sonic Team at the height of their Dreamcast-era powers, and it had top-shelf aesthetics and music that has aged incredibly well. Once you get past the control issues and some of the lower-level tedium, this game becomes the perfect "Chill out and grind mobs for an hour or two" game. The last of the official servers shut off in 2008, and yet there are still hundreds of people playing on private servers right now as I'm typing this - over 100 on Ephinea alone.

You might say I like D&B. One of my favorite mixes from back in the day,

Graf is right, but I always like to bring up a specific example of how different Doom and BUILD are, and the most obvious difference is how each game figures out what it can and can't draw. Doom uses prebuilt NODES lump containing a BSP tree to figure out what the player can see from a given view point. It's very academic, and more importantly, fast. On the other hand, BUILD doesn't use any sort of precalculated BSP and instead draws by brute force - it assumes that the sector the player is currently standing in is visible, paints it, and floods outward from that sector until the scene has no more unpainted pixels. The incomparable Fabien Sanglard has done a compare and contrast to the two approaches. https://fabiensanglard.net/doomIphone/doomClassicRenderer.php https://fabiensanglard.net/duke3d/build_engine_internals.php Just this difference alone has several deep ramifications on what you can do with the engine. Because BUILD didn't use a precalculated BSP tree, walls and sectors could move freely without the sort of spinning plates routine that you have to go through with the Doom engine. On the other hand, Doom was much faster on the machines of the time - I had a 486 SX that could play Doom at an acceptable framerate, but Duke was well into "seconds-per-frame" territory at any playable resolution. So to summarize, you can't really recreate a BUILD game like Duke3D with the Doom engine, unless that Doom engine was very advanced. Could you recreate Duke3D in GZDoom? Maybe, but you probably wouldn't enjoy it. For what it's worth, when I see people create their own toy Doom-style engines in modern times, they tend to go with the BUILD style of drawing, likely because it's easier to comprehend and we have cycles to spare these days.

PC Gamer just released an article about the deal. Nightdive reassures fans about the Atari deal: 'Not only will we be doing as much as we ever did, but we'll be doing more of it'

The underlying problem is that mainstream political discourse is shaped by people with loads of money who want to become de-facto kings that rule over fiefdoms, and it's really easy to distract people when you play to their deep-seated prejudices and fears. However, the real problem is that despite the rich playing this awful game, it's not really their fault on an individual level - if they try to be magnanimous, they will be out-maneuvered by other rich and power-hungry shitheads. The issues here are systemic, and ones we have yet to figure out the solution to as a species. It has been thousands of years since the agricultural revolution, and humanity as a whole has yet to figure out a stable and equitable form of government that lasts longer than a few generations. Recognizing that our political system results in electing the same grifters over and over again is a start, but there are tangible things you can do with that knowledge to improve your situation. The trouble is, most of them involve tearing down your own culturally-ingrained ideas of nationalism and being willing to leave for greener pastures. But recognizing when shifts in the political winds are out of your control is important for your own self-preservation, and you shouldn't be loyal to a state or community that has no loyalty to you.

An excerpt from Masters of Doom, a book that covers the early days of id Software. Romero is interviewing Sandy Peterson for a position on the team, who is a practicing Mormon: Just a little food for thought. 😊

Given recent out-of-bounds tricks, I could see "No out-of-bounds" being a reasonable category. As in, no going into the void.

Not quite the same thing, but every time I play Wolfenstein 3D Episode 1 Floor 1 or a game that recreates the level I keep expecting the Doom II secret area to be there, or at least some other easter egg in the same place, and it's always a dead-end.

I have a Pixel 5a and I am very happy with it. Before that, I had a Nokia 6.1 that I was also quite happy with. I bought both phones directly from Google and Amazon respectively and activated them with AT&T, so I am not under contract or paying extra per month. When I next need a phone, I'll likely do the same thing again, as I've been quite happy with the results. Of all the phones I've used in the past, the only company I would never purchase a phone from again is Samsung. I had a Galaxy Nexus that had a pitiful battery but was otherwise okay since it was mostly vanilla Android. My Galaxy S5, on the other hand, not only had a pitiful battery, but an set of UI tweaks and preinstalled applications so awful that I hope I never have to experience again. The battery cover also had a bad habit of popping off if dropped, and it also crashed all the time, sometimes sucking the rest of my battery away with it. Never again.

Linux could have the best of both worlds - the security of macOS but the user control of Linux. It just doesn't, either because of ignorance, a false sense of security, or a lack of acknowledgement that these are even problems worth solving in the first place. Which is kind of par for course for Linux, if I'm being honest.

Let me stop you here. This line of reasoning you're going down doesn't really address any assertions I have made. The chain of security that begins with secure boot all the way to critical functionality is better than nearly any Desktop Linux distribution, and certainly any that is in wide use. Sandboxing and MAC, when implemented properly like how Apple does it, is effective at controlling application access to parts of the computer a user might not want a program to have access to. These protections don't cover all threats, but I believe it's possible to reason about security in an absolute sense without getting mealy-mouthed about threat profiles, and I think that "macOS is a more secure OS than Desktop GNU/Linux" is a completely fair statement to make. Believe me, I have no love for Apple. But Desktop Linux has a reputation of being a secure OS that I feel is undeserved, and there are several things about security that Linux could learn from Apple, but refuses to due to fragmentation and cultural myopia.

That might be true, but what is Desktop Linux's excuse for not taking the best parts of macOS's security hardening and sandboxing while leaving out the bad stuff? Apple has been giving away the answer key for decades and Linux still fails the test. Better still, if a distro is going to task itself with distributing software, why doesn't it patch in proper sandboxing and permission grants at the same time? Why is Fedora (and Ubuntu, but they don't count because Snap sandboxing doesn't work outside Ubuntu) the only distro that's even remotely concerned with this, and why don't Linux users seem to care - that is, if they're not outright conspiratorial over Flatpak. This is perhaps the biggest fallacy I see Linux users repeat. The fact that you can, in a strict technical sense, peer into all parts of the stack doesn't mean you're capable of doing so, and at some point you have to trust another party, be that your distro, your compiler, people distributing Linux software (no sandboxing, remember?), or your unprotected initrd that may or may not have been drive-by exploited by persistent malware that Linux generally doesn't protect against.

The Desktop Linux community seems to skew conspiratorial in general. Somehow, the fact that the Linux Desktop isn't more popular is always Microsoft or Red Hat's fault. Somehow, it never occurs to people that the fact that there are so many distros is an indication that the Linux community would rather fork and get 100% of what they want instead of collaborate on fewer distros and put more wood behind fewer arrows. Or the fact that binary-level backwards compatibility does not appear to be a major priority for most of userland, and the most stable API on Linux seems to be, ironically, Win32 through Wine/Proton. Or the fact that prioritizing distro-level packages is utterly at odds with the way most software on other OS's are distributed - as binaries with their own vendored dependencies.

If you actually care about system security, Mac >>>>>>>> Windows > Linux. Macs actually protect the system against tampering even by the root user - it's called System Integrity Protection, and that protection extends from Secure Boot all the way to critical binaries and services on the root volume, which means your system is protected against modification by malware with root access and even by miscreants who has physical access to your computer. It also has sandboxing/MAC that actually functions properly and is wide use by its applications, and it also had the good sense to abandon X11 a long time ago as the X server is a gigantic security hole that also happens to draw graphics. On the other hand, I am unaware of any Desktop GNU/Linux distro in widespread use that properly secures its boot sequence or prevents root from blowing the system up in the same way that Macs do. I also don't think most give desktop applications meaningful sandboxing - SELinux and AppArmor are only really used on the server, and since Flatpak tried to make it easy to port software to their runtime, they don't mandate the use of Portals, or even do much to prevent overly-aggressive up-front permission grants. Windows only has sandboxing for UWP apps and doesn't have the leverage to force the issue like Apple does, but at the very least it leverages secure boot and has very aggressive update settings. Microsoft actually has the know-how to make a secure operating system (see: Xbox One/Series system software) , but it also has the good sense to not yank the rug out of 37 years worth of applications.