teawrecks

the main mechanic to get more commissions is to become more popular

Similarly, there are many popular games who started as a mod for another mainstream title, gained support, and pivoted to their own independent game.

And the whole copyright thing is way less of an issue in fan arts, I regularly see a lot of people freely taking money for doing commissions of popular characters like Hatsune Miku

But you recognize that is always illegal, right? The only reason it happens is because they're too small and distributed for lawyers to go after every single one. But if one started gaining traction selling custom work featuring copyrighted IP, they should expect a lawsuit just like Turtle WoW. Mods are fan art, Turtle WoW is fan art, they just got popular enough that blizzard lawyers now care.

The only difference here is that, as I said before, technically if Turtle WoW did it right they would never have to distribute any blizzard assets, and never make money from blizzard IP. They could theoretically be completely independent from blizzard and still distribute the exact same content. Meanwhile fan art is always dependent on the IP it references. So ironically, all your criticisms of about work being dependent on the corpos always applies to fan art, but only maybe apply to Turtle WoW if they messed up.

I wouldn't want to waste my time doing...mods myself to support [corpos]...

Fan art is in much better place because it's a mutual benefit: artists benefit from working with popular franchise because it draws attention to them.

Doesn't that seem like a double standard? Mods that support "corpos" are a waste of time, but somehow fan art is mutually beneficial? But "mods" are literally "fan art", the only difference is the word you're using using. Fan art is limited in all the same ways Turtle WoW is and vice versa.

So I take it you're also not a fan of modding or fan art?

Again, if they've covered their bases, they don't need to distribute any game client, blizzard assets, or blizzard-owned IP, they only need to run their own server code, and distribute a patcher for the official client (which could optionally add any of their own assets). But there was never any option that allowed them to charge money to use blizzard IP.

rebuilding its systems, network stack, and filling massive databases by hand...making the game accessible and endlessly customizable (to the point where private servers could even create entirely new content)

That's all reasons why the community was deliberately not dependent on blizzard IP. If they had roses tinted glasses, they would have never done any of that and just played the blizzard version.

IMO if Turtle WoW covered their bases correctly, they shouldn't have anything legal to worry about (aside from corporate bullying). Their servers should be running original code, they shouldn't be hosting any of blizzard's binaries or assets, and they shouldn't be charging money for any game content based on blizzard-owned IP.

If so, then they messed up...

This should just work if your Android device's USB mode is set to Mass Storage, no extra software needed on the PC. It'll just show up like a thumb drive.

The best counter example I've seen is Shintoism.

But on a separate note, i believe religion has an evolutionary advantage vs logic and reason, as evidenced by it being so prevalent throughout human history. So in the most literal sense, i believe humans wouldn't have any progress without religion.

In order to survive, humans need to build societies that can adapt to the ever changing environments we find ourselves in.

One possibility is to use pure science, logic, and reason: educate every child on the scientific method, teach them how to not fall for logical fallacies, to be skeptical, to demand extraordinary evidence to support extraordinary claims, to repeat experiments and engage in peer review, to create ethical frameworks, and have a logical justification for the actions you take...

Another possibility is to use religion: brainwash a kid on what "good" looks like, and show them how to put on blinders to anything that might threaten that. Johnny down the street is "sinning"? Make him stop, that hurts our society. Father Dale is touching kids? Don't lose sight of the goal, Father Dale is a great man, this is a personal struggle that we can help him through.

Which of those two methods of adaptation requires less energy? Because when an organism has to evolve, the organism that can do it using less energy will have the advantage. Religion, or the concept of morality in general, is a society's selection pressure on itself. The best we can do is acknowledge this, and learn to wield it as a tool. And I believe that many leaders throughout human history, both political and religious, understood this well.

Note: Gaming performance is purely based on money spent. There's no fundamental reason windows would have better gaming performance, it's just that there is more money being paid to engineers and vendors to support DirectX and related tooling.

Then there's the self-fulfilling aspect that, windows has the largest marketshare, so devs are going to spend the most money targeting it, so that they can get the most money in return, which means more people will use it, which leads to the high marketshare.

The ONLY reason Linux use is seeing the few percent blip in gaming is because Valve has dumped truckloads of cash into making it viable.

The better comparison is that distros are the operating systems (like "windows", "macos", and "android"), while "linux" is the kernel under the hood that end users likely never interact with (like "NT", "XNU", and..."linux").

A distro represents an intended user experience. If you want a distro that has an intended user experience that is similar to windows, go with Mint or OpenSUSE. If your desired experience is like the SteamDeck, install bazzite (with an AMD GPU ideally). If that's all you care to know, then that's all you need to know; go use your new system how you would any other.

But if you want to dig deeper, yeah, the fact that all the distros are based on linux (and more importantly, are posix compatible) means that a lot of the software is portable across distros. But that doesn't mean your experience on all distros will be the same. Different distros organize their filesystems differently, they might ship with different versions of core utilities based on the stability testing they've done, and they likely offer varying means of installing and managing new packages.

The tl;dr is, go use one distro, and then later try doing the same stuff in a different distro, and inevitably at some point you'll go "oh, this didn't work exactly how I expected because the other distro I'm used to handles this differently". That's the difference.

The performance is relative to the user. Could it be that you're a god damned genius? :/

Man, we're gonna have to change the name of the AUR because bad journalists keep thinking this has something to do with the distro.

"Arch Linux Users who go out of their way to install RAT at risk of installing RAT"

Ah, I think you mean non-free or just non-open source.

Something being "native" means it's compiled for your specific hardware, ex. an x86-64 binary running on an x86-64 CPU. An example of non-native is an x86 binary being emulated on an ARM CPU, Java bytecode running on a JVM, or Python code running in an interpreter.

But your drivers are all definitely all running natively on your hardware.