Speaking personally. I had the same reaction. I realized I could sign in using my GitHub account for MCC, which was… weird. Since it was just their normal web/auth page you could click around and do it in that tiny little webview. -_- Ridiculous, but I wasn’t going to make a new account to play a single player game. I did nearly refund it out of spite, but didn’t.

Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X controllers are very good. I’ve had some incompatibilities on my computers with older bluetooth hardware though. Speaking practically, I’d recommend the Xbox one as it’s slightly cheaper, takes regular replaceable batteries. Subjectively, I prefer the PS5 controller (I like the feel, and the trackpad is really handy), but I’ve already had to replace the lithium ion battery in mine. (Had to do the same with my older PS4 controller too)

I really like plain “boring” vanilla Gnome. It’s straightforward, I like it’s workflow, it does everything I need it too, and looks nice too. I’m not a fan of “power user” UIs as I feel like they have too many features I’ll never use filling them up. You can always get more programs to do more things anyway. Like I use compilers and disassemblers all the time, but I’m not upset that Gnome doesn’t ship with those features built in when I’m in some weird 1% of users that need them. On the other hand, I think KDE is important to the ecosystem too, and I donate $100 a year to both the Gnome and KDE projects.

The way Unity announced such a big hostile change was executed unimaginably poorly. I’m not even going to say you are incorrect as they clarified it to include reinstalls, then reclarified it to be just the initial install. At the same time, they announced that the way they would bill it is by guessing how many installs you have using a “proprietary algorithm” and charging you based on that. So… everybody is wrong because they don’t intend to tell people how they actually count anything. The details seem really important, and they still don’t seem to know what they are. (eyeroll)

Hrm. Skim ahead if you already know some of this… So say you have a running program XYZ that loads libUseful.so to do useful things. Now you run some updates and libUseful.so gets replaced with the new version. Because of how files on Unix work, the old version still exists on the disk until XYZ closes it, but any new program will load the new version. So things generally “just work” when the system is updated in place, but on the rare occasion causes weird problems. Fedora (from the GUI) chooses to run updates during reboot to prevent the rare, weird problems. If you update from the command line, it just does them in place. Kernel updates always require a reboot to apply though.

Interesting. My laptop died a little while ago, and I needed to demo a game I’m working on at a local convention. My wife had a hybrid GPU machine and let me swap in my SSD to run it. The drive had PopOS on it without the NV drivers. It did seem to run wayland fine on the internal display, but the external display was picky. (I wanted to demo on a bigger display) The only way to get the game to run smoothly was to disable the internal display using X11, and run the game using GL instead of Vulkan. >_<

So yeah, kinda mostly worked if I wanted it to be a laptop. I can see how it gets to be a pain if your needs are specific though.

I’ve been using it for a few years now, and it fixes a lot of little issues I have with X11, and at this point brings very few of its own. ALTHOUGH, I don’t have any Nvidia GPUs, and people seem to think it works for crap on them. I keep hearing “Ah, this will finally fix it!”, but I don’t know what the actual status is. You have the hardware you have, so unless you are going to buy something different to try Wayland… eh… I guess it never hurts to try. It’s pretty trivial to toggle on and off.

Depends on what you want to get and how you use them. I have racing drones with batteries that only last 4 minutes, and a few planes that last 30-60 minutes. Lipos haven’t improved radically in the last decade, but they are a lot better than nickel batteries from a few decades ago though.

Ah racing yeah. I had a friend that was into that, and it seems to get pretty spendy. I do a lot of scratch built planes, so it’s quite a bit cheaper I think. Even a “spendy” store bought plane tends to only be $200 - $300. Racing drones cost about as much, but I don’t really race them, and rarely break them anymore.

There are a few directory structures I have memorized, like my programming projects for instance. For everything else, I use the GUI. That’s what it’s there for. Mixing and match to get the best of both worlds. Some handy tips:

• xdg-open will act like clicking on a file in the GUI, and is an easy way to open folders from the terminal when you want to browse them.
• Use sshfs or even just whatever is built into your desktop environment to connect to remote servers and browse them
• Most terminals let you drag files or folders into them to paste their paths

RC stuff, but only kinda? My dad got me into micro helicopters about a decade ago. I now have several dozen planes, drones, helis, etc. Not to mention multiple RC radios, batteries, chargers, and FPV goggles. Absolutely love it, though. To be fair, it’s been a few thousand dollars over a decade. It ads up sure… but quite a bit less than I spend on video games, and more satisfying. :)

Hmmm. So I think I posted on Reddit maybe a half dozen times ever? I didn’t get the appeal. It kinda felt like shouting into a thunderstorm… I’m not sure I “get” Lemmy either, though it feels more like talking in a crowded room than everyone shouting at a cloud. :p More seriously though, I’ve had a few interesting conversations here, but miss the feel of forums of the 2000’s where people just talked about stuff that they were making. Lemmy feels like everyone is striking up a conversation, but still trying to be careful about talking about their own interests because that’s “self promotion”. :-\ I dunno, maybe I’m looking for something that just doesn’t exist anymore.

~2017-2019 I used Ubuntu. It was fine, and I had no complaints. All the games I bothered to try including VR worked great. It was my work machine and a Windows update imploded everything. I tried Pop OS on a whim when reinstalling, and I had no complaints about that either. I barely noticed it was different to be honest. When upgrading the SSD last year I installed Fedora on a whim. It works fine and I have no complaints. I type dnf instead of apt now… that’s the biggest difference. I haven’t tried VR on it though. (I do VR for work and rarely want to use it during non-work hours nowadays)

I’m pretty happy with “Console” myself. It works exactly like I expect it to, and it’s new look is pretty clean. I thought “Terminal” was fine too. I use dozens of terminals a day when working, but I suppose I’m not enough of a power user to care to configure them. :)

I went through the 68k -> PPC -> OS X -> x86 transitions, but eh… That was right about when they lost me too. I rather liked OS X, but they were trying to turn it into iOS, at the same time they were making their machines non-repairable/upgradable, and losing 32 bit was just one bit more than I could stand. It was also right around the time when Proton made Linux gaming explosively viable. I could have all the Unixy tools I wanted combined with all the improvements the DEs have made while still being able to play games. I haven’t looked back yet.

So I’ve used the Pop Shell extension. It’s really neat when you have a bunch of little windows like terminals and file browsers open. 95% of the time it’s actively annoying though. I appreciate that it’s on a toggle so I can use it when I want it. The proposed mosaic mode doesn’t seem terribly different, and has the same problem where it just randomly moves things around breaking my association of “where I put that”. Most of the time I really need the spatial aspect, and am willing to manage a few windows by hand to get it.

Also: Joining half screen windows into a single unit?! Please don’t do it! D: Augh! Apple did that on OS X about the time I left and I absolutely hated it. It was so actively bad. :(

I have, but it doesn’t show the MS extensions like the C or CMake tools which is kind of a dealbreaker. None of the alternatives really work well enough in my experience. I’m fine with opting out of the telemetry.

I do game dev, and I’ve been loving VSCode. I used to use a mishmash of stuff, but VSCode can do kinda everything. Working on retro-dev C/asm for NES or Genesis? Lua projects? Shaders? Debugging a native Linux/SDL game? Doing some math in a Julia notebook? Unity3D development? Working on Windows/Mac? The answer is VSCode to all! I still use vim for some light stuff or working on remote machines, but meh… VSCode has nice defaults for me without having to fiddle.

For my native Linux gamedev, I’ve just been using the MS Cmake and Cpp-tools extensions. They work great, and you can script up the rest with actions. The debugger isn’t great, but it’s convenient and good enough for simple crashes. I switch to GDB when things get interesting though. I suppose I have an extension for shaders too, but it’s just syntax highlighting.

I pre-ordered the 13" AMD, and here’s my 2 cents: In 2013 I bought a MacBook Air. The i7 version was pretty decent for dev, and it had all the other ultrabook niceties (small, light, all day battery, etc). I was still happily using it in 2020, though it was starting to show it’s age. In 2023, Apple still makes MacBook Airs in the same form factor. They look almost identical. Several thousand days of active use mine is practically still in mint condition too. If I could pay 2/3rds the price of a new one to upgrade the internals+screen I would totally have done that! I don’t expect to change out the modular IO much, but it is nice that I have the option to get an SD card reader or to choose the port layout to match my desk. I’ve also got what I need to make a magnetic charging adapter for it, so that’s awfully nice. So is it worth the extra cost? Maybe not, but I’m an idealist sometimes, and I like their ideals.

Yeah… I’m really conflicted about it. I think my Lemur was a lemon, and I’d be perfectly happy with it if I never had to deal with support. It’s not secret that the hardware is rebranded, and what they do is to make the firmware/software work well. That part was honestly great! Their also pretty RTR friendly and publish a lot of information about taking things apart and whatnot. On the other hand… I’m not equipped to fix a motherboard, and why would I want to when it’s still in warranty? Spending weeks to convince them that the hardware did in fact fail was… Augh! Having it returned without the power supply and missing screws, then being told I was mistaken was straight up insulting. :(

For as grumpy about RTR as Apple is today, in the past at least I found their service to be pretty excellent. On multiple occasions I got free repairs or battery replacements on machines that were out of warranty and frankly just… worn out. The one time I actually had to send one off for repair it was back on my desk in a matter of days. I haven’t been their customer in 10 years, and it sounds like it’s probably changed though. (shrug)