themoken

joined 1 year ago
[–] themoken@startrek.website 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Surprised to see the opinions on V/VI not being as good. I've played every interation of this game and they all brought something to the table. VI and the districting gameplay added a lot to the game. One unit per tile in V also made combat more tactical than doom stacking around.

The big thing I'd like in a new one is less cheaty AI. It's just so boring that winning on Deity is basically exploiting AI foibles instead of... you know, building a stronger nation on an even keel. At the highest difficulty AI should get no bonuses but still be really good at playing the game.

[–] themoken@startrek.website 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It's easier to release tools for a map based game with no real story. Devs have tools to create content, of course, but making something (tools, APIs) safe and logical enough for the public to consume is a task that can easily get backburnered on the way to release.

[–] themoken@startrek.website 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

They don't, but they define the socket the processor slots into and probably did this to market the newer chips as more advanced than they are (by bundling a minor chip upgrade with an additional chipset upgrade that may have more uplift).

I see no other reason to kneecap upgrades like this when upgrading entails the consumer buying more of your product.

[–] themoken@startrek.website 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

John Carmack, author of the Doom engine, is a long time Linux user and for a while the policy was to open source the idTech engines once they had moved on.

However, Doom was hugely popular on its own before this, and was actually more pivotal for making Windows a gaming platform (over DOS).

The reason it runs everywhere is a combination of it's huge popularity, it's (now) open source and it's generally low system requirements.

[–] themoken@startrek.website 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

That review is bullshit. It's not going to tax your machine, but that's a good thing. The unit type thing is also missing that not the entire game takes place on the battlefield, there's multiple layers to it and you almost never win through pure domination.

EDIT: Also, ground vehicles? This is Dune, you can't cross sand in a vehicle, and they couldn't go up cliffs. No, instead you airdrop, which is way more flexible.

[–] themoken@startrek.website 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It does that everywhere, even on non .deb distros.

[–] themoken@startrek.website 13 points 8 months ago (3 children)

One thing I'd like to suggest is get most of their forward facing apps as Flatpak and let them install software that way instead of using the system package manager (even if it has a GUI). This jibes with others suggesting an immutable base system.

Obviously this may be more of a concern for older kids, but my kid started with Linux and it did fine... Right up until Discord started breaking because it was too old and they didn't want to tangle with the terminal. Same thing when Minecraft started updating Java versions. Discord and Prismlauncher from Flatpak (along with Proton and Steam now) would have kept them happier with Linux.

As for internet, routers come with parental controls these days too, which have the added advantage of being able to cover phones (at least while not on mobile data). Setting the Internet to be unavailable for certain devices after a certain time on school nights may be a more straightforward route than DE tools.

[–] themoken@startrek.website 6 points 10 months ago

For music I'm just sick of the apps streaming super compressed crap. It sounds like 192kbps MP3 sometimes and you can definitely tell the difference. Setup Airsonic and never looked back, although still have YT music for the fam and finding new music. It is a bit of hassle, but it's worth it and a FLAC collection feels way smaller than it did 10-20 years ago (both in terms of disk and home streaming bandwidth).

[–] themoken@startrek.website 7 points 10 months ago

This isn't a benchmark of those systems, it's showing that the code didn't regress on either hardware set with some anecdotal data. It makes sense they're not like for like.

[–] themoken@startrek.website 8 points 1 year ago

I read "The Idea Factory" about Bell Labs, focused mostly on inventing the transistor, but it included their consolidation into this lab and just how state of the art it was. The book implied that it was the first corporate "campus" designed more like a university than a factory or office.

The book really made me understand that AT&T / Bell Labs was the hot tech firm of the early 20th century, long before getting to computing advances (C, UNIX) I was more familiar with.

[–] themoken@startrek.website 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hello fellow ex-IBMer. I came to the corp from an open source background and I was happy that my LTC coworkers seemed to despise software parents despite the huge pressure from management.

I wonder how much of this is that IBM fell out of the patent lead and decided to just take their ball and go home. Or how much is RedHat influence shifting the mindset away from the patent Mexican standoff with everyone else.

[–] themoken@startrek.website 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I used (u)xterm for like 20 years before discovering that Konsole is solid and beautiful. My whole tiling setup is backed up with KDE apps now.

view more: ‹ prev next ›