stevecrox

The splash screen (boot screen instead of text)used to get me. It provided by an application called 'Plymouth'.

You used to need to install it and configure grub, however I think if you go into 'System Settings' and type 'Splash' KDE has an option to install and choose the screen

Wine attempts to translate Windows calls into Linux, its developed by Codeweavers whose focus is/was application compatibility.

Valve took Wine and modify it to best support games, the result is called Proton. For example:

Someone built a library to convert DirectX 9-11 calls and turn them into Vulkan ones, it was written in C++ and is called DxVK.

Wine has strict rules on only C code and their directx library handles odd behaviour from old CAD applications.

Valve doesn't care about that, they care that the Wine DirectX library is slow and buggy and DxVK isn't. So they pull out Wines and use DxVK.

There are lots of smaller changes, these are 'Proton Fixes', sometimes Proton Fixes are passed on to Wine. Sometimes they can't but discussion happens and a Wine fix is developed.

I thought server side anti cheat was the most effective. Since it can't be modified by clients and tracks clients for impossible behaviour.

Pirate Trainer & Uru: Ages Beyond Myst

I remember trying Pirate Trainer in a Nvidia game booth when VR was new. It was incredible, years later I get a VR headset and its the free game. I don't understand how no one has improved upon it.

Uru was the first puzzle game I thought struck a good balance between physical and mental puzzles. They were set at a level that felt challenging but not impossible and laid out so you alternated really nicely. Myst Online actually went backwards in this

You could probably stay on the magic roundabout until you ran out of fuel.

But I doubt you could go all the way around a mini roundabout .

The UK Highway Code is focussed on good behaviour when using one. There doesn't seem to be a rule.

I wish a company would build 4.5"-5.5" and 5.5"-6.5" flagship phones, put as many features that make sense in each.

Then when you release a new flagship the last flagship devices become your 'mid range' and you drop the price accordingly, with your mid range dropping to budget the year after.

When Nokia had 15 different phones out at a time it made sense because they would be wildly different (size, shape, button layout, etc...).

These days everyone wants as large a screen as possible on a device that is comfortable to hold, we really don't need 15 different models with slightly different screen ratios.

I actually researched my list, most the technologies were used internally for years and either publically released after better public alternatives had been adopted or it seems buzz reached me years after Google's first release. So I am wrong.

Between 2012-2015 I used to consult on Apache Ivy projects (ideally moving them to Maven and purging the insanity people had written). As a result I would get called in when projects had dependency issues.

The biggest culprits were Guava/GSon, projects would often choose to use them (because Google) and then would discover a bug that had been fixed in a later patch release (e.g. they used 2.2.1 and 2.2.2 had the fix). However the reason they used 2.2.1 was because a library they needed did. Bumping up the version usually caused things to break.

The standard solution was to ask'why' they needed Guava/GSon and everytime you would find they are usually some function found in one of the Apache Commons libraries. So I would pull down the commons library rewrite the bit (often they worked identically)

Fun side note in 2016-2017 I got called to consult on a lot of Gradle projects to fix the same kind of convoluted bespoke things people did with Apache Ivy. Ivy knew the Gradle 'feautres' were a massive headache in 2012 and told you to use Maven for those reasons. Ce La vie.

We tried using Protobuf in 2008 and it was worse than the Apache Axis for JSON conversion (which feels too harsh to say), similarly I had been using AMQP or Kafka for years and tried gRPC when it was released (google say 2016 but I am sure we tried in 2014) and it was worse in every metric I still don't understand why it exists.

I was using Vaadin in 2011 and honestly thought GWT was released in 2012. I had to use it in 2014 and the workflow, compile time and look of GWT is just worse than Vaadin.

The FAANG companies have an internal kind of elitisim that would make staff less effective.

If you look at any Google Java library, GWT, GSon, Guava, Gradle, Protobuf, etc.. there was a commonly used open source library that existed years before that covered 90% of the functionality.

The Google staff just don't think to look outside Google (after if Google hasn't solved it no chance outsiders have) and so wrote something entirely from scratch.

Then normally within 6 months the open source library has added the killer new feature. The Google library only persists because people hold FAANG as great "Its by Google so it must be good!" Yet it normally has serious issues/limitations.

The Google libraries that actually suceeded weren't owned by Google (E.g. Yahoo wrote Hadoop, Kubernetes got spun away from Google control, etc..).

I wouldn't use "certified" in this context.

Limiting support of software to specific software configurations makes sense.

Its stuff like Debian might be using Python 3.8 Ubuntu Python 3.9, OpenSuse Python 3.9, etc.. Your application might use a Python 3.9 requiring library and act odd on 3.8 but fine on 3.7, etc.. so only supporting X distributions let you make the test/QA process sane.

This is also why Docker/Flatpack exist since you can define all of this.

However the normal mix is RHEL/Suse/Ubuntu because those target businesses and your target market will most likely be running one.

I suspect they mean around packaging.

I honestly believe Red Hat has a policy that everything should pull in Gnome. I have had headless RHEL installs and half the CLI tools require Gnome Keyring (even if they don't deal with secrets or store any). Back in RHEL 7, Kate the KDE based Text Editor pulled in a bunch of GTK dependencies somehow.

Certification is really someone paid to go through a process and so its designed so they pass.

Think about the people you know who are Agile/Cloud/whatever certified and how all it means is they have learnt the basic examples.

Its no different when a business gets certified.

The only reason people care is because they can point to the cert if it all goes wrong

Debian isn't old == stable, its tested == stable.

Debian has an effective Rolling distribution through testing than can get ahead of Arch.

At some point they freeze the software versions in testing and look for Release Critical and Major bugs. Once they have shaken everything and submitted fixes where possible. It then becomes stable.

The idea is people have tested a set baseline of software and there are no known major bugs.

For the 4-5 releases Debian has released every 2 years (Similar to Ubuntu LTS). Debian tends to align its release with LTS Kernel and Mesa releases so there have been times the latest stable is running newer versions than Ubuntu and the newest software crown switches between Ubuntu LTS and Debian each year.

For some the priority to run software that won't have major bugs, that is what Debian, Ubuntu LTS and RHEL offer.