I kinda like Flatpak, but it seems to me like a useful secondary thing rather than something that can or should kill .deb or .rpm and apt and so on. Like, it could be handy for exactly this kind of thing--closed applications not interested in packaging themselves for different distros and who, since they're closed, the distros can't package themselves. Of course, one significant kind of closed source application like that is games. So Flatpak could be a great thing for our purposes.

Aside from that, it could be handy for things with specific and weird dependencies, like on library versions significantly different from whatever is more or less current; you could keep the distro overall cleaner by doing Flatpaks of such things and keeping the weird versions separated from everything else. But for the most part, I think solid dependency management allows a much leaner system and enforces a kind of quality control that's probably a good idea anyway. And apt and similar things for non .deb distros work very well for the most part, as do most of their gui front ends. I'm not sure I think the duplication that would come from Flatpak-for-everything would be worth whatever advantages it would be supposed to have.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: lucifertdark

Quoting: BeamboomCommunism doesn't actually fail hard.

Tell that to the 100Million people killed by Stalin.

I never wrote that??

No, pretty sure that was me. You are being unjustly impugned, my friend.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: meggerman

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI'd agree that there seems little chance the uberwealthy are going to be willing to share any of their stuff, that they will in fact go to extreme lengths to avoid having to do so, and indeed are already demonstrably willing to live with the recessions and instability that accompany lack of demand in the economy as long as their share gets more lopsided.

indeed. Capitalism is just a tool that once again is corrupted by human nature via Corporatism. No system is perfect.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyCommunism doesn't actually fail hard. It's not a system I support but there's no reason to be unrealistic, pretending it failed hard is just American mythmaking

Communism is an idealistic system which on paper offers many things that other systems do not. But the issue is that the paper is burned by the basic desires and drives of human nature which cannot be avoided. Even an ideal system can be flawed if everyone is not willing to play by the same exacting rules.. it's the enforcement of those rules that has caused many millions of deaths and low standards of living.

There is no perfect system.

I don't think I have a huge argument with that. I would want to claim that there can be systems better than either Capitalism or Communism, although these would still not be perfect.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: lucifertdark

Quoting: BeamboomCommunism doesn't actually fail hard.

Tell that to the 100Million people killed by Stalin.

Niggling about ludicrous totals aside, Stalin was certainly a very bad dude and certainly a boss of a Communist country/empire.
Hitler was also a very bad dude who also killed lots of people and was certainly the boss of a Capitalist country.
I don't infer anything in particular about the characteristics of Capitalism from Hitler, it would be silly. Similarly, it does not tell us anything about the characteristics of Communism to shout "But Stalin!!1!"

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: LeopardI hope that can prevent shovelware on Steam.

Steam was becoming the ultimate garbage in terms of games.

I think it underlines the importance already of sites like GoL that I never actually became aware of this. I basically never buy anything I haven't seen reviewed here, and I don't bother browsing around on Steam for more because really, my hands are full just from the GoL-reviewed stuff that looks good.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: meggermanI like that you have such a positive and idealistic world view, it's endearing and I read this belief a lot on the web.

But we don't live in a digital-socialistic utopian society, we live in a "late stage" (i.e the winners have almost already taken all ) capitalist industrial society . Right now the average citizen does not control the means of mass production, only smaller business and the self employed have a future by offering a niche human service with boutique products but that won't fill the wage gap.

So we have a 'solution' called UBI and this is mostly just glorified word for State benefits / welfare. This poses the problem of where you actually find the money to fund hundreds of millions of people with tens of thousands of $ per person.. is the private company going to pay for it ? Is the foreign company going to pay for nationals to live for free in other parts of the world with different sovereignty ? Are billionaires and soon to be trillionaires going to share their wealth ?

What you describe or are hoping for is some sort of utopian quasi-communism to save the day, in a reality where communism doesn't fail hard .. Good luck.

BTW this game looks awesome, love the aesthetic ^_^

I'd agree that there seems little chance the uberwealthy are going to be willing to share any of their stuff, that they will in fact go to extreme lengths to avoid having to do so, and indeed are already demonstrably willing to live with the recessions and instability that accompany lack of demand in the economy as long as their share gets more lopsided.

And actually a paternalistic solution in which current trajectories of automation and dissociation of people from the economy proceed apace but we make up for it by giving everyone a wage unrelated to anything doesn't really appeal to me. But that doesn't actually mean it wouldn't work. Communism doesn't actually fail hard. It's not a system I support but there's no reason to be unrealistic, pretending it failed hard is just American mythmaking. It just lost, but that's not the same thing. Traditionally backward Russia and some ramshackle Eastern European and Balkan countries even making things look like a contest for decades against all the big colonial industrialized powers on two continents is pretty surprising. Sure, the USSR had some stagnation happening in the later years--but that was to a fair extent down to the Cold War, which ate up ridiculous amounts of their budgets and talented people. And despite that, most of the countries from the USSR have, after 25+ years, seen things get significantly worse, rather than better, under capitalism. Meanwhile Cuba, despite an intense campaign by the US to nobble them for over 50 years, is to this day clearly a better place for the average bloke to live than any other island in the Caribbean or little Central American country. When you consider that not only does the US refuse to trade with them but it also comes down on anyone else who does, Cuba's economy, let alone education system and so on, is really pretty amazing. Does a bureaucratic, central-planning-based model have its problems? Sure, ask anyone working at a megacorporation. But can it work? Yeah.

Still not my cup of tea. I prefer something more bottom-up, more "protagonistic" as the Bolivarians would say. But I'm not going to pretend it can't work.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This parrot is once more. It has begun to be. It would voom if you put ten million volts through it!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

So can I be Canada and conquer the US in this? Always kind of wanted to do that. ;)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestAnd Linux (e.g. Debian) is also a more stable system than Windows 10.

Probably not when it comes to issues relating to games, to be honest. Linux graphics stuff is under fairly heavy development these days (Wayland and such, drivers) and Linux sound seems to be complicated, finicky, and a source of frustration for many. Now on the plus side, I think by the time the graphics side has settled down it's gonna be pretty good, but for now . . .

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Finding it hard to care about a tiny fluctuation in a statistic I don't trust at all. Even if it's an upward fluctuation, on a meaningless stat that's still meaningless.

The conversation about Linux as a gaming platform: It certainly would still be pretty unreasonable to switch to Linux in order to game. The best that can be said is that, unlike in the past, for most casual gamers, gaming is no longer a barrier to switching if you wanted to for other reasons. This is important; there are lots of reasons to switch to Linux, and one common thing that used to hold people back was "Can I play games?" "Well, um, basically no." Now it's "Can I play games?" "Ehh, about as well as on a Mac." To the extent Vulkan takes hold, within a year I suggest the answer will be, "Better than on a Mac."

Somebody mentioned Asia as a potential reason behind shrinking Linux percentages on Steam. I still have this pipedream where either China gets serious about security from US government hacking or Microsoft makes a big push to stop Windows being pirated in Asia. In either case, we'd see some sudden, massive Linux adoption spikes.

View this comment - View article - View full comments