Cricket [he/him]

Let’s be honest now… Zuckerberg is building a globally-distributed, industrial-scale, disaster-proof spank bank for himself.

Where Google’s team put innovative effort into ChromeOS was in making it robust enough to be sold to the masses in the hundreds of millions of units, with no tech support. It’s immutable, with image-based updates. It has two root partitions, one of which updates the other, so there’s always a known good one to fall back to if an update should fail.

Vanilla OS also uses a two root partition system, called ABRoot, for its atomicity. The author should look into that, as it seems to be exactly what they’re looking for.

This is a more fault-tolerant design than SUSE’s MicroOS-based systems, which use the rather fragile Btrfs. It’s also much simpler than the Fedora Atomic immutable systems, including offshoots such as Universal Blue, which use the Git-like — for which, read “fearsomely complex” — OSTree. For added entertainment, Fedora also defaults to Btrfs, with compression enabled. If you don’t believe us about the problems of damaged Btrfs volumes, refer to the Btrfs documentation. We recommend taking the orange-highlighted Warning section very seriously indeed.

Stupid fearmongering about BTRFS (and OSTree, I presume). I selected an OpenSUSE distro precisely because it uses BTRFS and Snapper for automatic and transparent snapshots by default, which simplifies undoing most things that can break a system.

Very intentional. My recollection is that they hijacked the ISO committee to adopt their 6,000 page specification(!). This 2008 article briefly touches on some of the controversy, but I recall reading about the drama on Slashdot for months: https://www.ip-watch.org/2008/04/01/office-open-xml-officially-approved-as-international-standard/

When you go deep enough

hehehe

That’s wild!

As much as I’m pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft and anti-Apple, I have to say that I don’t think comparing desktop use to server use is appropriate when it comes to security. I don’t think server use of any OS translates to desktop use in terms of security at all. If nothing else, the end user is a major difference between the two. End users download, install, run, and interact with all kinds of random software, websites, etc. without thinking and this is the main source of desktop malware. The same is not the case for servers.

That’s definitely been a catalyzing factor for me. I had fiddled around with Linux and had been pretty ‘meh’ about Windows for years, but I was just coasting along the path of least resistance. Them telling me that I could no longer use my perfectly functional computer for Windows was the ‘last straw’ that finally what made me begin to take action and get ready to say goodbye to Windows.

If you think about it, Microsoft’s timing for this is really perfect. Wait until Linux is very viable for desktop use including gaming then tell vast numbers of your customers that they need to ditch a fully working computer in order to keep using Windows. I expect that this figure will probably double by the end of the year. There’s another article by ZDNet now that says that the share is more like 6% and rapidly accelerating. I’ll post it on the main Linux community if hasn’t already been posted there.

Thanks again. I’m not doing VR yet, but plan to eventually. I can totally see where multiplayer could be an issue too, especially if friends own the games on Steam instead.

I’m inclined to think that your IP provides powerful cross-reference potential. Imagine someone either buys the data off of all data brokers out there or a law enforcement agency obtains similar kind of data through warrants, etc. They can cross-reference IPs and time-stamps and determine, that you, Joe Blow, age 35, who works at X, volunteers at Y, and lives at 123 main street, browse for some kind of very embarrassing porn every night. It’s a drastic example to illustrate the idea, but I don’t think it’s far-fetched.

This could be taken further by imagining a wider net: say, a large portion of people who have donated to this political candidate or who work for this company browse for that same embarrassing porn every night.

I’m thinking birds-eye view of potential privacy violations here.

Awesome post, thank you! I’m a huge fan of rally in general and bought Art of Rally pretty much when it was released. Here are some other cool driving and rally games that come to mind:

GeneRally 2: top-down arcade racer in early access, sequel to a popular freeware game from the early 2000s. It has a track editor and probably nice arcade physics like its precursor.

Driver: retro Playstation 2 title that lets you be the badass getaway driver of 70s movies. If you haven’t heard of this, it’s so good in terms of emulating those types of movie scenes.

Rally Trophy: retro rally sim that focuses on historic rally cars from the 60s and 70s, i.e., mostly 2WD and RWD.

Mobil 1 Rally Championship: retro rally sim that was known from what I recall for having realistic full-length stages of the real British Rally Championship. We’re talking 20, 30+ minute stages from what I remember reading. I think that this is really cool and wish that there would be more games like this. There used to be mods that fixed issues with some aspects of the physics on it.

Xpand Rally: it seems that one unique feature of this retro rally game was that it included a track editor so that you could edit the game’s stages or design brand new ones.

Finally, a game that’s not about driving at all, but about being a rally mechanic: Rally Mechanic Simulator. I just discovered this recently and it looks interesting.

Note: this thread is on the Steam Deck community but I’m not sure about the compatibility of any of these games with that. Check before buying.

I agree with you, but I started thinking about this not even from a game preservation perspective but from a DRM perspective. This article was a timely reminder that if I buy any media with DRM, no matter how purportedly lenient and user-friendly it is, the DRM controls when and where I’m allowed to use that media in perpetuity unless I break the DRM, which I understand is illegal in some jurisdictions. Imagine having to jump through hoops or even break the law just to keep using the media that you “bought” with your hard-earned cash.

Thanks for pointing this out about multiplayer and VR games. I had wondered about this exact thing, so I appreciate your confirming it!

This seems like the wisest option for the long term. I just recently decided that any games that are available on both and don’t make use of Steam-exclusive features I will buy from GOG instead. Up until that point I had been buying games on Steam by default when they had sales, but GOG has equivalent sales at the same time. Unless the game takes advantage of some Steam-exclusive feature, there seems to be no good reason to buy it from Steam instead of from GOG.