Spyke

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Gamedev and linux

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I remember threads like this from back when Valve was pushing Steam Machines. Won't name names, but there were very successful developers throwing tantrums once the bug reports started to flood in. Many weren't prepared to actually provide support and spent years regretting it (according to postmortems.) I managed to get a refund on one game after the developer's Twitter rant went completely off the rails re: Linux being unfit for desktop. Weird that they were 100% fine with Linux when it meant getting my $15, $20, or $30. Makes you think!

linux

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Rust-Written Linux Scheduler Showing Promising Results For Gaming Performance

For those getting excited, It doesn't "boost" gaming performance. It prioritizes the game over the background process (in this case, a kernel being compiled.)

Schedulers aren't magic. As pointed out in the comments of the linked article, there are other ways of doing this. The more interesting tech here is being able to choose between schedulers under specific workloads, which is very nice IMO.

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The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

X11 is, to put it simply, not at all fit for any modern system. Full stop. Everything to make it work on modern systems are just hacks. Don’t even try to get away with “well, it just works for me” or “but Wayland no worky”.

I really don't know if there could be a more obnoxious opening than this. I guess Wayland fanatics have taken a page from the Rust playbook of trying to shame people into using it when technical merits aren't enough ("But your code is UNSAFE!")

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Much ado about "nothing" - Xe Iaso (==Goodbye NixOS)

The biggest red flag here is that someone is trying to derive meaning from Eva, an anime whose religious/philosophical imagery and themes were used "just because they looked and sounded cool" (not a direct quote.) I mean I like it too, but it's gibberish.

I'll say this about OSS and the community around it: It's painfully obvious at times that while the individuals working on these projects (often thanklessly) are brilliant people, they often lack the communication and project leadership skills necessary to make a project thrive. The last few posts I've seen on this particular issue have been extremely vague and for whatever reason just won't come out and say what they mean. They're verbose, go off on tangents, and beat around the bush. We must first have explained to us the plots of TV shows, movies, and other ancillary things in order to understand what likely boils down to "people with differing viewpoints cannot find common ground." I see the linked blog post as nothing more than someone trying to work out relatively complex feelings about the time/effort they contributed to a project they no longer have faith in more than an "expose-eh." Given that people in the comments of previous threads have boiled the issue with NixOS down to a sentence or two, I think this is an accurate view.

See: Soft skills.

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Why can't we spam the spammers

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I started doing this after my phone number got into some kind of crazy scam call database. At the height of it I was getting somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 calls a day, basically rendering the phone unusable.

So I started actually picking up and running these jokesters through the ringer. I'm talking 15+ minutes of pointless conversation, false info, tons of backtracking, and general bullshit. I refined my craft over a few months and would time how quickly I could make them scream at me for fucking with them. At the end of it my phone got taken off at least one of the bigger lists because the calls went to down only 10 or so a day. Now it's one or two a day at the most, probably from me not answering like I used to.

Favorite call was one guy who figured out I was messing with him and it turned into this general question and answer thing about life in the US. Dude wanted to know how easy it was to pick up chicks and whether or not I'd dated a lot/was married. Great guy, really into Counter-Strike.

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*Permanently Deleted*

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Why on Earth would we want to make (Lemmy) more popular? I want more people to leave. Things have noticeably gotten better over the last few weeks, but there’s still a ways to go. The people who are leaving are presumably mostly people who are frustrated by the relative complexity of decentralized forums and people who can’t find enough “content” to scroll through here, and good riddance to the lot of them.

You, two months ago. The quote perfectly encapsulates why niche communities aren't taking off and why the demographic here will always be nerdy and tech-focused.

Every single one of the Reddit communities I followed that tried to move to Lemmy inevitably went back. There's a ton of reasons why, like instances going down, poor moderation, unreliable servers, and general confusion as to how a Lemmy account works to name a few. The apps not being up to par at the time were a huge factor also. It's highly unlikely that Reddit will ever see an organized effort to seek out communities off-site ever again, so the chance to just transplant a community in its entirety over to Lemmy is gone. Now we're pretending it's going to be possible to take a niche site (Lemmy, compared to the wider internet) and somehow develop niche communities from an active pool of users a fraction of a fraction of Reddit's. It's not happening.

It's a tough pill to swallow, but if you have a problem with Reddit you're in the minority. I'm fine with maintaining a Reddit account to communicate with people who are still on Reddit. I go where the users are. I'm not going to sit in an empty community for months talking to myself while conversations are happening elsewhere. It is what it is.

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S&box will use Vulkan (Sandbox is spiritual successor to Garry's Mod)

His meltdown after he launched Rust on Linux and then found out his mouse wasn't supported by Ubuntu is one of the all-time greatest tweet threads. The fact that it was a mouse that ultimately sent him into the anti-Linux spiral that resulted in people being able to refund the game regardless of hours played is extremely funny to me.

If you give this guy money then I don't know what to tell you. He detests Linux users and has said as much while still taking money from them.

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Why are trending posts on Mastodon mostly negatively politically oriented?

The front page of lemmy.world has a similar tone. Frankly I have enough problems to deal with in my own life - to willingly browse something designed to piss you off and remind you that people you disagree with exist is just pointlessly distressing. Yet this is what the majority of Lemmy and Mastodon people are choosing to do if the numbers are to be believed.

The best way to follow news is RSS or via an aggregator. I recommend SPIDR, which organizes stories from different publications under one shared headline. You can click the flag in the top left to pick the news from your country.

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I know that recent drama has caused a bit of uneasiness in the community for this platforms future, but I am optimistic for lemmy. It might be helpful to look to mastodon to learn how to move forward.

I would like to see Lemmy used like PHPbb or vBulletin was back in the early 2000s - interest/hobby-specific instances designed to house a set of users with a few general discussion boards outside of the main topic to aid community-building. A lot of people seem very focused on joining instances that federate with as many instances as possible, but there's a lot of value to be found in going the opposite direction, I feel.

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FFmpeg Explorer

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I was just listening to a podcast recently where one of the (tech illiterate) hosts somehow stumbled upon ffmpeg and went direct to ChatGPT to get instructions on how to use it. They said after a bunch of time plugging different commands into the terminal they realized ChatGPT's output was just close enough to look right but was ultimately "complete gibberish" compared to the actual commands they found via some other resource.

I've already stumbled upon a few different help posts on various Linux-related forums where people have messed something up after following ChatGPT. I don't doubt that it can sometimes come up with useful output, but it's a real roll of the dice.

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Is it only me, or do you find all those "I deleted Windows"-posts annoying too?

This was a solved problem on other sites via wikis and weekly threads. There's no value in another "what distro should I use?" post. It's great that people want to contribute, but there should be a more centralized resource we can refer people to where people can focus this energy.

As for the Windows threads, they've been a staple of every Linux-focused community for as long as I've been browsing them. I guess if it makes people feel better then I suppose that's enough of a reason to keep them around.

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*Permanently Deleted*

If linking to a Wiki entry counts as toxic then I don't know what to tell you. Users need to hear that their problems aren't unique and aren't worth anyone taking time out of their day to handcraft a response to. This isn't Ubuntu - you are expected to be able to DIY, and if you constantly need someone to hold your hand through the process then you need to uninstall and start over elsewhere until you understand why Arch exists. It's like declaring you're going to build a shed to keep your mower in, but you call your contractor buddy every five minutes asking where to drive the nails and place the studs. Your time is best spent driving to the hardware store and buying the shed outright.

If someone is contemplating installing Arch, they need to be asked why. If they can't explain it or give a poor answer ("I saw a video" etc,) direct them somewhere else.

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SDL Developers Weigh Reverting Wayland Over X11 For SDL 3.0

To have this laundry list of negatives get a reply basically saying "yeah, it's bad, but we need to impress the stakeholders by forcing a Wayland default even if it doesn't work correctly" is baffling.

I use SDL so this hits a bit closer to home. Hopefully they can arrive at a conclusion that isn't harmful to us devs. It's already kind of a tossup whether it's even worth it to provide a native Linux build when Proton works so well anyway. I can't imagine this will help.

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Ricing Linux

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Horribly offensive term. Webster's Dictionary defines ricing as a tiling window manger with 64px gaps, minimalist Naruto/anime background, useless bouncing bar EQ meter, entire window dedicated to song lyrics, obnoxious monospace fonts, nonsensical colors, task bar showing time/date/IP+MAC address/GPS coords/moon phase/crop yield/barometric pressure, and a Vim buffer with Rust's "hello world" tutorial.

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Content Nation Backlash Highlights Mastodon's Toxicity

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An unfortunate part of the fediverse is that it attracts people who were too obnoxious for even the more annoying parts of Reddit/Twitter/etc. I've made plenty of attempts to "get into" Mastodon and can confidently say that's a miserable experience across the board if you aren't willing to do the work to curate your feed. Even if you do get a feed that is free of bad actors, conversations rarely veer off-course from Linux, programming, computers, tech, etc., at which point that's fine, I guess, but it's hardly diverse. Also, for all the complaining about "techbros" ruining the fediverse, it sure is full of them.

I have more faith in Bluesky currently. If they're able to achieve their own kind of federation then I'll gladly jump ship since their userbase is a lot friendlier and more diverse that Mastodon IMO.