Quoting: scaine(Community is in quotes because Linux is still weirdly tribal and I'm not sure there's a huge sense of community that binds us together. Although, maybe I am positively influenced by the GOL community which is largely superb.)

All communities are like that. Me against my brother. Me and my brother against my cousins. Me, my brother and my cousins against the village. Me, my brother, my cousins and the village against the world.

The Linux community is at the village level or so; within it we argue DEs and distros and whatnot, but we'll close ranks against Windows! :wink:

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Quoting: berarma

Quoting: Purple Library Guy"Potentially harmful" doesn't really sound that bad. It also sounds vague, like the kind of message you get when the computer doesn't really know just what you're doing or whether it's actually going to do anything important, but is just putting in the boilerplate because the command generally has the potential to do serious things. Especially if you come from the Windows world, where I think the OS bitches every time you do anything other than browse the web with Microsoft Edge . . .

The more I read responses like this the more I think it was intentional. There's no way no one else has had this problem in years but a famous and technically knowleadgeable youtuber doing a live test session.

Oh, come on. We know about this particular happening because it was a famous youtuber doing a live test session. Who knows how many trees fell in the forest but nobody was making a video of them?

But it was also a somewhat freak occurrence--the package failed in such a way that doing a perfectly normal command was going to cause this (if you were somewhat overconfident in your approach). That is not normal, but non-normal things happen and this one did. The package really was that way, this was acknowledged. What do you figure, Linus bribed the packagers or the Pop!OS people to screw up the package so it would cause that error?

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Quoting: RoosterSo instead of package managers having to expect that their users will not read Warnings (which imo is ridiculous), I would say that the distros aimed at new users like Mint and Pop should include a message when running the Terminal (with the option to disable the message for future) that the Terminal is a high level tool and the user is expected to read and understand potential Warnings.

So for people who don't read warnings, what you want is a warning, because that will surely make them read warnings.

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Quoting: damarrinLinux and apt have been fine before they came along and breaking one's system is part of the learning experience and now there will be people who will be denied that.

Oh no! How awful! They won't get to break their systems?! How could we deprive those poor people?

Here's a camp I am almost in: A computer is an appliance. I don't want a "learning experience" where I try to use my microwave oven and break it, I don't want it with my computer either.

Obviously, there are quite a few people, especially current Linux users, that that statement really doesn't work for. It doesn't apply to how they use, think about and work with computers.
But it's not wrong either, and I think some computer people need to be a little less purist and romantic about how their particular interest is the one that everyone in the world has to learn about.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: psy-q

Quoting: NeoTheFoxAFAIK the repo contained nothing owned or copyrighted by Take-Two, the reverse-engineering effort is clean room [...]

It wasn't clean-room, unfortunately, the team decompiled Take Two/Rockstar's binaries [External Link] to get there.

In a lawsuit Take-Two has to prove that the ones that uploaded the content actually decompiled the binaries or were aware of it (code being decompiled from binaries).
If X decompiles the binaries, send the code to Y without telling him/her that, Y publish it on, how exactly is Y guilty of something when X only told Y that he/she can do whatever he/she wants with the code received...
Y can't check a copyright claim in the case of a closed sourced code unless Y receive the code. And if X was smart enough to rename some easy to rename things (done with a simple search and replace) you end up in a situation where it's debatable if the code is stolen or not (history show us that more than one person discovered the same thing in same way).
Now if the decompiled code has been patched to fix bug situations changes dramaticaly because it's no longer looking like the original and it's no longer acting like the original... This can easily be explain by the fact that 2 people can think and code in a really similar way, but it's not identical way...
Take-Two has to prove some not easy to prove things and without providing their own code there is no real way to prove things. Once you provided that code in court things can easily go into even more similar situation showing up.

There is also another problem. What % of the code has to match to be considered breaking the law.
There are particular things that are coded in exactly same way (declaring variables, even variable names (some prefer a,b,c; others names, other a1,a2; but you will find code with same variable names doing the same blody thing), that part can't really be considered as breaking the law.
In fact it's open sourced code that you will be surprise to find out that can be found inside products that are being sold and nowhere they admit that they used open sourced code (breaking the license for that open source code. (I've found a browser game that used open sourced code and they were so dumb not to change the hardcode admin password; the admin page was exactly like in the open source code, the hardcoded admin password was the same. Illegal access if someone was going to troll delete players accounts or breaking the open source code license?)

Frankly, that all sounds kinda weak. I don't think I'd buy it if I were a judge. And there's discovery, which could require them to hand over stacks of emails and such which might well totally prove they knew all along.
They would have been amazingly better off going clean room and I think they were utter fools not to. To be honest, I think the reverse engineering thing leaves the defendants with two chances, neither all that great:
1. Rely on lack of prior case law and some impressive arguments to get a groundbreaking ruling that actually, reverse engineering code can under the right circumstances be fair use. But most judges probably don't want to be this activist.
2. Get a ruling that yes, it was copyright infringement, but because the resulting project requires one to buy copies of the game from the publisher in order to use it, and for that matter results in the creation of a community of enthusiasts of the game which would improve the publisher's reputation, all the publisher's damage claims are false and so the defendants should have no or minimal penalties.

I would figure their chances for (2) would be way better than their chances for (1). Although US copyright laws like the DMCA are pretty vicious and may have minimum penalties.

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: AussieEevee

Quoting: ObsidianBlkThose neon warning signs are there,

I think part of the problem was that there was no neon warning signs. The only warnings Linus got was an error from popshop that wasn't clear on what was happening... and a giant wall of text from apt.

That 'wall of text' ends with "you are about to remove essential packages, type exactly, 'Yes, I know what I'm doing' to continue."

I'm not sure what side I end up on in this, but I'd like to note that is not how it goes. The wall of text ends with "you are about to do something potentially harmful. To continue, type in the phrase". The mention of essential packages is eleven lines up from that part.

"Potentially harmful" doesn't really sound that bad. It also sounds vague, like the kind of message you get when the computer doesn't really know just what you're doing or whether it's actually going to do anything important, but is just putting in the boilerplate because the command generally has the potential to do serious things. Especially if you come from the Windows world, where I think the OS bitches every time you do anything other than browse the web with Microsoft Edge . . .

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Quoting: AussieEeveeIt sucks, and the community version was better… but that doesn’t make it legal, and this doesn’t sound like fair use to me. (Hashtag not a lawyer)

Just what constitutes fair use is frankly kind of hazy. I mean, I work in an academic library, and I scan bits of books for students to use, that they use under academic fair use. So OK, how much of a book is OK to scan? Turns out there isn't actually any direct legal basis for our practice. Everyone in academia uses a rule of thumb that says one chapter or 10% of a book, whichever is more, is OK . . . and since everyone's been doing that for decades without being hassled, we all figure it would stand up pretty well in court if it got challenged--like, if that was a problem, why did you wait until now to complain? But it's not actually in the law, it's just something that got adopted. And that's about the simplest case there is, so how fuzzy anything more complex must be I don't want to think!

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Humph. This simulator is totally unrealistic. In real space battles . . .

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The trailer looks to me like someone was putting out a quickie crap game to jump on that bandwagon, and said "OK, how do we advertise this? We can't make it look good, it's crap!" and someone thought "Hey, if we embrace the crappiness hard enough maybe it will look funny and clever!"
I mean, fair enough I suppose, it's not like I mind, I'm just saying.

Squid Game interests me because of the barely-veiled social commentary, but I don't see much point to a game just doing the mechanics of it--half the thing about Squid Game is that the stuff people are made to actually play is stupid and pointless, it's death being on the line (and just who does the dying and who gets to enjoy watching it as a spectacle) that makes the punch.

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Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: CatKiller

• developer promises Mac & Linux support


• developer breaks promise, demonstrating that they can't be trusted


• developer promises Steam Deck support


• ...

• Linux users happily buy developer's Windows-exclusive product


• …

Well I sure ain't gonna. Partly because this whole deal gives me a bad taste in my mouth about these developers. Partly because I only buy a non-native game if it's absolutely a max-essential game to me, because if it's anything else, well, I've already got a long wishlist of Linux native games I'll have to buy before I get around to non-native. And this, while it looks like it might be a good game, is not essential to me.

Note that this does not mean I'm against the existence of Proton. To the contrary, I think Proton is strategically important, especially in the context of something like the Steam Deck. But I think there are some misunderstandings about strategy on this.

Quoting: Felix"No Tux No Bux reeeeeeeee"
We have all seen what this approach has achieved over the years for linux adoption and we are seeing what Proton is doing for it in the Steam monthly reports. People seem surprised that the walls of their house keep collapsing when they are actively raging against anyone trying to build a foundation for it first.

First of all, at 1% it didn't matter what our strategy was--without some huge company having their own strategic interest in Linux gaming, and doing things like help juice up Wine to the point where it works much more reliably, persuade Unity and Real to make their engines do Linux, and release some kind of box that does Linux gaming and sells many units so the percentage increases, Linux gaming was going to remain toast no matter what the Linux gaming consumers did. Every single person who games on Linux could come to complete consensus about the best strategic approach and apply it religiously, and nothing much would happen no matter what that approach was, because 1% is barely noise. Luckily, we have such a company which is doing that stuff, so there's some point in even talking about it.

Second, the best approach is not for everyone to do the same thing. This is why the classic approach to getting prisoners to talk is not good cop/good cop or bad cop/bad cop. Just because Proton is a good thing does not mean the optimum approach is for everyone to use it. Proton is needed if new users are to be attracted to Linux, and those new users are needed for Linux gaming to become relevant. But if the long term goal is for Linux to be a fully equal platform that gets its own games, it's best to maintain some degree of preference for native games. So I don't think people who support Proton should be unhappy about passionate Linux people preferring native games--the strategic point of Proton is not to get existing Linux gamers to give up on native games.

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