Feigned enthusiasm/friendliness. “Thanks for catching that problem!”

Whenever I have something to say, someone has already said it. People are always on the ball here.

Wow you weren’t kidding lol. I watched the 2.0 demo and at this timestamp there’s a CSAM-related room title that Matthew was invited to (at the top of the right window). Granted it’s probably someone stream-sniping, but it goes to show that there’s apparently active bad actors trying to interfere.

FWIW at my job using Slack threads are critical. I’ve never used threads anywhere else though. I think it just depends on the nature of the community.

The previous person was worried that Valve wouldn’t be able to convince “a sizable chunk of users” to move to Linux because all of the software they sell is written for Windows. If we apply a little bit of critical thinking, we realize that Valve has actually already thought of this(!) and applied a different(!) solution that solves the same problem(!) without requiring “everyone to write software for something that’s not the platform nearly all users are running”. If you want to see Valve’s attempt at getting everyone to switch to Linux without using compatibility tools you should look into how successful their Steam Machine campaign was.

Nice, I’ll have to watch this. A quick skim through the YT comments says that it’s AMD drivers which is the only thing I could think of. Linux Mint 21 actually has an “EDGE” iso which has a newer kernel version, and Linux Mint 22 is instead going to track the latest HWE kernels, so my understanding is this type of hardware problem should be a thing of the past at least in Linux Mint’s world. I don’t know if Ubuntu has their own plans or not.

They’ve more or less already done that with Proton and DXVK. Nearly all Windows games “just work” on Linux without developers needing to change anything. TBH whenever big studios develop Linux versions of games they’re usually not well-done anyway; for now it’s better if people develop with their comfy Windows tools and let compatibility tools take care of the translation. When the balance shifts to Linux dominance we can start pressing on them to learn how to use Linux SDKs.

Mint uses the same kernel version as Ubuntu, so that’s not really a point in favor of Ubuntu in any case. Do you remember what video it was?

“Escape hatch” specifically refers to the speculation that Valve is positioning themselves in a way that they can’t be forced into paying fees for existing on the Windows platform, and that if push comes to shove they can say they only support Linux now. This hasn’t happened yet, but it’s a strategic stance which will likely prevent it from even beginning to happen. This doesn’t have to do with the Steam Deck specifically; it was also part of their intentions with the Steam Machine and etc.

Maybe it needs to be more obvious that there are many ways to do things in Linux, and give new users a short “learning to learn” primer on how things operate differently in Linux-land, and where/how to look online for help. There are always first-boot popups but I imagine most people are conditioned to click out of them without even reading; forcing people to confirm a couple times that they want to skip “very helpful reading” may cut down on people that play the search engine lottery on what information they use for their first steps.

Also semi-related, I hope that mainstream Linux eventually “un-stupids” computers for regular people again. I get the distinct feeling that Microsoft and Apple have, at least somewhat intentionally, imposed ‘learned helplessness’ onto average computer users. “Oh computers are magic no one knows how they work. We are the only wizards that could possibly understand them and we will sell you the solution.” Windows/OSX/iOS/etc are so locked down that people have rightfully learned over time that if they run into a problem, there really is no solution. I suspect that’s permeating into the new user experience on Linux where people will encounter one problem and throw their hands up and say “fucking computers” instead of using basic problem solving to try another approach.

Their rough new user experience is concerning though. From what they described I suspect many of their “problems” are not actually “real”, but it doesn’t really matter because they still ended up in a scenario where they thought there were problems. How did they end up thinking that everything must be done with terminal while using Ubuntu? I know in the last ~10 years there’s been a big focus on the new user experience, so what more can be done to prevent this? My gut says there are too many online resources that are confusing new users when they try to onboard themselves - especially resources that are old, written for other distros, or written for people who just want to find the command they can copy-paste to do something.

Gaming has been the only pathway to mainstream desktop since forever. I’ve been around for a hot minute and I remember that consistently, the “real Linux users” for years repeated “we don’t need gaming this is an adult OS go back to Windows and play with your toys” and then turned around and whined that no one wanted to use desktop Linux. Valve stepped in and casually created the year of the Linux desktop as a side-effect of just wanting an escape hatch for their business model. Now the casuals and elitists alike will have a better experience via the magic of Marketshare, and all it really took is not listening to people that don’t know what’s good for them.

So doesn’t that still mean that they think gender-neutral pronouns are political, i.e. they don’t accept them? I’ve also noticed the dev in question is Swedish, so I’m not sure where German language quirks came from?

I don’t understand how a German grammar situation would elicit the response from the PR. Are gender neutral pronouns “political” in Germany? Why did the dev say “personal politics” specifically?

That’s why I didn’t say “transphobia” anywhere in my comment. Real weird vibes is what I’m personally sticking with until I see more. The ‘transphobic’ and ‘misogynist’ claims are a leap without further evidence, but there’s a very strong clue about the type of person someone is when they say pronouns are “political”.

From last time. TL;DR real weird vibes. This is a PR where you say “oops, that makes sense”, click merge, and go on living your life. Not whatever this ended up being.

On a related note, I’ve found Dockge to be powerful enough for my usecases. Worth a try if you don’t like the adversarial relationship of Portainer.

This video (series) is so cathartic. Love when people reach that moment of frustration with a company and break it off completely, instead of just eternally bending.

I recommend a dead man’s switch like Healthchecks.io, which can be selfhosted for free. Whenever you have something that’s regularly occurring, add an extra callout to your unique Healthchecks callout UUID as part of the automation, and Healthchecks will send you a notification if something misses its callout schedule. You can also attach whatever data (e.g. a log) to the callout so you can look back through the run history. IIRC Borg will give you a non-zero return code if it detects problems, so you can send e.g. https://hc-ping.com/your-uuid-here/$? and a non-zero code will signal a notification as well (more examples here).

Also, Borgmatic is really easy to use for managing Borg repos. There’s a lot of configuration options (including Healthchecks.io integration) but you can delete like 90% of it for normal usecases.

Here’s a link if you want to investigate it.