Personally, New Atlantis deserves a side-quest where you either start a revolt together with the people from the the well to take on the bourgeoisie government (which might end up creating a fascist state), or change the system electorally, establish unions, social security and public healthcare, with its own risks. Or even play the part of a populist, or help one to take over the government. The “liberal utopia” in New Atlantis is just not a stable system, there would be too much disgruntled people. Being part of change here, would be very interesting.

But that would take too much courage from Bethesda. No, I have to support my parents there, because the government doesn’t care for their people.

I do hope so. However that also means that the base game needs to have a good base experience for people like to get back into it.

Personally I really like Starfield for what it is. I think it is a unique mix of RPG and space sim. I am not a big fan of pure sandbox games, and other space sims with quests often felt doing impersonal jobs. In Starfield you meet people and learn their individual story and can help them, etc. Which is just not something I have seen before in a space game. (Mass Effect is maybe the closest, but that isn’t really a open world space sim game)

Of course the game could be better. One of their error was relying on procedural content generation, which is often bleak, uninteresting and unexpiring. Also the main city, New Atlantis, is just too clean, too huge and very bland. It doesn’t look like it was build for people. It got a very MMO feeling to it. It looks like megalomaniacs build it, but that isn’t really addressed in game. Other cities/locations are better. But the political of societal critique, which is normal for the Sci-Fi genre, is missing or not apparent enough. The devs where IMO not bold enough there, to make a clear statement.

So IMO there is a lot to do for modders, we will see if enough of them are interested in fixing that game.

Well, I consume more open source software that I will ever produce, so I am in a dept to the community. If it means working a bit more to make my contribution useful to others and fit it into the bigger whole, I will gladly do so.

Valve contributed to Linux before, so the fact that they don’t have any direct upstreaming plans right now indicates that something is causing friction.

I would avoid reading too much into it. They and their developers are still contributing on other stuff. Also when working together, there will always be some friction, in any public collaborative project ever.

Nothing of this is a burden, it is just part of being a good contributor that reads and follows the rules. Contributing is pretty easy, when you have read and are following the guides. If you haven’t already, you should give it a try.

I am pretty sure that this isn’t the first contribution of Valve to the Linux kernel. It sounds more to me like “works for me, don’t care about others” attitude. Which is not a good attitude to have when working in any collaborative project. (Not necessarily against the developers, could also be management.)

Well, it is about code quality. And the same codebase should work on different hardware, which is not something that is required in downstream forks.

But it is sad to see that the driver was submitted in the past, is still actively developed and improved, but there doesn’t seem to be plans of submitting them again.

Also I don’t think that a platform driver is so complicated that it requires such a long time for mainlineing. It not a filesystem or VPN.

On a more interesting topic, the SteamDeck platform drivers are still not merged into mainline Linux… :'(

Last news about it: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Deck-Platform-Driver-2024

“Corporatism vs Capitalism” was invented by capitalists to create a strawman that they can blame instead of blaming capitalism for everything wrong with captitalism.

The rest of the world uses Corporatism for something else entirely, what you might mean is corpocracy or corporate capitalism, which are just manifestations of capitalism.

I started using Fedora Silverblue on a tablet, seems to work fine so far, but requiring a reboot in order to install new system packages is a bit cumbersome and the process itself takes a while, but ordinary Fedora also doesn’t win any races when asked to install a new package

I think switching to FCOS or Flatcar on servers that just use containers makes sense. Since it lessens the burden of administrating the base system itself. Using butan/ignition might be unusual at first, but it also allows to put the base system configuration into a git repo, and makes initial provisioning using ansible or similar unnecessary. The rest of the system and services can be managed via portainer or similar software.

I also do not have long term experience with FCOS, but the advertised features of auto-update, rolling-release, focus on security and stability makes it a good fit for container servers, IMO.

An alternative to Debian on servers might also be Apline Linux. Which also has more a focus on network devices, but some people use it on a desktop as well.

If you have many different systems, and just want to learn to operate them all, maybe NixOS might be interesting. Using flakes, you can configure multiple machines from just one repo, and share configurations between them. But getting up to speed on NixOS might not be so easy, it has a steep learning curve.

Hmm… Gordon Freemann having no lines was much more jarring that the silent protagonist in the Portal series.

Gordon is supposedly a brilliant scientist, but gets ordered around by NPCs that do nothing.

Portal protagonist has likely brain damage from being in stasis for a while, so I can assume they are just mute.

So it really depends on the game, setting and story, if a silent protagonist works or not. But having some character with emotions and agency would be good anyway, without requiring them to speak.

I would wish if some standard mod download, update and collection API would be established, then having multiple mod sites where everything works slightly different, some mods are exclusive and you might have to pay each service separately for a fast download.

I have a lifetime premium nexus account, so I was there when the enshittyfication started, before it was great, now I see that newcomers have it more difficult there. But I am not sure that multiple competing mod sites will be better, because there is no standard API yet.

I would be willing to pay one provider, which pays for hosting and also gives some to the creators, but then I want to have full and convenient access to all mods.

Steam has a long history of breaking mods, by forcing game (and mod) updates.

Users and Developers have to actively work around that on Steam.

But while GOG doesn’t force updates, they also could do a better job and allowing fresh installs of old versions.

Well said!

There are other games, where you play the bad guys, like Payday. Now I am not knowledgeable enough about the Helldivers or Payday lore, so I cannot compare if similar points can be made there. For all I know Payday could be a group of freedom fighters against a militaristic fascist police state.

Or are there any other games of that genre, where you play the bad guys, and it is made more clear on which side you are on?

I like RPG games, however I don’t like it when the company has the ability and incentive to bate and switch my game into a worse version after I bought it.

Denuvo forces me to be connected to the internet, which makes playing the game on the move difficult or even impossible. It also allows them to make sure that the most current version is played. MTX means they don’t have incentives to fix the game and instead sell you the fixes, or even enshittyfy it, to squeeze out more money.

This gives me the incentive to wait a couple of years, until the game doesn’t receive any updates anymore, and then decide if the final product is worth it. And hope that I will get a good experience out of it, before the Denuvo activation servers are shut down.

So you have to wait for a few years, in order to know if the gameplay is (and stays) any good.

Only really nice when not CLA is required and every contributor retains their copyright. Ente doesn’t seem to require a CLA.

Otherwise it allows the owner to just take the changes from their contributors and change the license at a later date.

Or other standard archiving formats like WARC.

There also is https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox which looks a bit similar.

I think with BG3 it worked quiet well as well. It let the devs get feedback on the game mechanics, but limited the story so that the full release still offers something new. It was a good demo, that let people see the direction of the game. And it also let people get familiar with the game engine so modding tools and some release compatible mods where available very early after the release, that allowed to customize the game experience somewhat.

I have not read anyone serious stating that the game was dead, while it was in early access, but maybe because that is a bigger title.

I mod my games on my PC and sync it to my SteamDeck. I also sync the save files back and fourth, to continue playing on different devices. Mostly non-steam games.

I also sync my eBook collection to my eink reader with syncthing.

Everything is also mirrored to my always-on NAS, so syncing always works.

Game developers seem to be very afraid to change core features or the story of the game in a major way (even if the actual work would not be too extensive) after release. But there are enough examples where games improved a lot after release.

Sure, the initial impression of the game might be ruined, but that is more a consequence for the producers that most often where responsible for the rushed release, than for the gamers or developers, of the game is fixed afterwards.

Environment variables isn’t a concept of just docker, but general native app programming. So look into the docs of your language.

I have setup a mail server for my employer, and doing it manually yourself is difficult. I didn’t want to do it for myself as well.

However I looked into mailcow, and tried that privately and it works great so far! However, i would dedicate a separate VPS for just that.