No one commenting on your playlist? You’re cathartic music experience is showing :)

That reminds me…

In circa 1995 I was running a dial upBBS service – as a teenager. So if course, it was full of bootlegged video games and such, and people would dial in, download a game, log off.

Someone uploaded Descent or something like that. But they had put "deltree /y C:" or similar into a batch file, used a BAT2COM converter program, then a COM2EXE program, then padded the file size to approximately the right size with random crap (probably just using APPEND)… And uploaded it. Well, fortunately for the rest of my users, I say the game and said: oh, that’s neat, I should try it and copied it to another computer over my internal network and launched it. It started deleting files right away and I hit CTRL-C to abort. I lost only a few dozen files.

Banned the user, deleted the package. Got lucky.

Keep going, I’m almost there

I bet this is a falling out with Hasbro execs on royalties. BG3 royalties were a cash cow this year for Hasbro, pushing Wizards (as a division) to be quite profitable, while almost all other divisions in their company lost money.

So now the agreement is over, and Larian is like: we will own the IP on our next project instead of paying $90M to Hasbro… And fair enough – they’ve shown they can kick ass. Hasbro is probably gambling that it’s the IP that made the money, and not Larian being magic in a bottle as a developer. So they’ll kick tires on selling BG4 to another studio.

BG3 will go down in history as the legendary game before enshittification. Larian will make a few great games that don’t sell as well – before selling out to a whale that dumps money on the owner’s front lawn (see also BioWare). The devs who made BG3 will found indie studios and make cool shit for a decade or two. So the wheel turns.

I still go to Reddit for some communities that don’t have critical mass on Lemmy. Sure you can talk about programming or Linux here, but the more niche ones (like specific mods for specific games) are entirely absent.

But when I want to post something or create content, it goes here.

I’ve met the devs in person. They keep turning down literal suitcases full of cash from people who want to bundle adware and crap in one of the most popular programs ever. Don’t assume VLC is going down that road – they’ve stuck to their ethics for decades.

I mean, python has pickle and people use that to store config. It’s a weird practice, and totally unsafe, but it works well enough. This wouldn’t be that different.

Your a wizard Harry

KDE had a policy editor back in v2.0… honesty I never really followed whether those features stuck around. But the simple version is to lock down write access to folders in $HOME, such as .config or similar. Linux already prevents most users from installing programs over the system directories without root, but I’m not sure if you can restrict new programs with +x in $HOME unless you write-lock the whole folder… Someone with more network admin experience probably knows this :)

Congrats on taking the plunge. I suspect there are others like you.

I’m actually kind of envious. The joy and frustration and joy again of exploring something new was something I relished in my early Linux years. Back then you had to use a text editor to configure your video card before even getting started, so it was kind of insane haha. But totally worth it later, as all of those skills translated.

The kindness of admins is a requirement of pretty much all internet infrastructure. Email servers are the same, no? And it gets even harder with proprietary networks – if the admins are being unkind, you can just switch discord servers or whatever. Anyway, I digress.

Very cool as a tech demo. Terrible as a product.

Ouch. I know Bandcamp isn’t owned by its founders anymore, and the new owners in theory are sketch… But it’s still close to the best webstore ever conceived for music. The payment processing alone is worth it. What is Faircamp in that space?

They are speaking truth to power at the moment, but people still play MTX mobile games so…

I hate to alarm you but… What is a file system except dynamically allocated memory. ;)

KDE always gives you enough rope to hang yourself. Like, set the transparency of all windows to 100% and wonder why the system is fucked, or whatever haha.

Working blind, and from memory (I didn’t check my system): depending on your system, there will be a kwin config file in .local or .config or .kde or similar in your home directory. Assuming you have console access, df -h | grep kwin will probably find it for you. Take a peak in the file first to make sure it’s reasonable that this is the right file to nuke. Rename it something like kwinrc-backup and restart KDE.

As a long term slackware aficionado, I agree that it meets the criteria. But it also is significantly different from other distros in enough ways that you may find yourself relearning things you took for granted. And that is off-putting for a lot of users.

All six people who still play Diablo 4 probably bought it though…

Not a shill. Don’t like Nvidia. But, this drop-in replacement is more like a framework for a future fully compatible drop-in replacement than a fully functional one. It’s like wine from two decades ago to windows – you might get a few things to work…

Any esoteric computer use to a layman can be misconstrued as hacking. Even hacking. ;)