I wonder how much Musk will really be able to change, without getting into (more) hot water with pretty much every western government outside of the US.

Things like Hate Speech laws that exist here in Canada, *definitely* in Germany and the EU. "We're a private company, now" doesn't shield you from that. Those are big advertising markets he could find himself locked out of if he antagonizes them by letting Twitter degenerate into a free-for-all, because let's be honest, here: the 'free speech' being championed, even if it doesn't purport to be, on the surface, invariably becomes a vehicle for hate of anyone 'other'.

Not that I agree with the way Twitter's handled it up to now (again, ditched for Mastodon years ago), but there's definitely the paradox of tolerance [External Link] to watch out for. There is a reason most non-US democracies have moved to protect their minority groups in law.

But hey, Musk just *loves* getting in trouble with the law, repeatedly, it seems, so yeah - the irony of everyone talking about 'echo chambers' is that's exactly what Twitter is destined to become, after everyone sensible bails for greener (read: effectively moderated) pastures.

After seeing LGBTQ+ people and racial minorities *already* deal with being harassed off of platforms simply for existing in a mostly white, male, 'techbro dude' space, my only hope is that we get the word out about better alternatives for everyone before that space gets even more toxic.

Nevermind the various politicians on there - you have an office with a mailing address and phone number, and probably e-mail - you don't *need* to be publicly on social media exposing yourself to distracting vitriol from people who aren't even your constituents. I love tech, but mental (and physical!) health is more important.

Of course, many politicians just *love* hearing themselves speak, so sadly I don't expect that to change, either. ;)

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Deleted my Twitter & Facebook accounts many years ago at this point (I even had a Facebook account back when you had to sign up with a college/university e-mail) and glad I did.

Reminder that 'Mastodon' is not a single site, it's a software stack using a W3C protocol (ActivityPub [External Link], so the flagship/example mastodon.social site isn't any more 'Mastodon' than Yahoo Mail or GMail is all of 'E-mail' (though lots of people don't make that distinction in the latter case either).

There's a community browser for those that meet certain criteria [External Link] up at https://joinmastodon.org/communities [External Link], or if you're so inclined, you can host your own - standalone, with Docker, or leverage something like YunoHost [External Link].

You can opt to keep registrations closed on your own instance, and just have your own private vanity site, do it invite-only for friends, etc., and then you and any fellow admins can fairly easily moderate as you see fit, including the fun instance-wide federation stuff - a particularly bad actor / spammy instance harassing you or your users? Add its domain to the filter, and then your server simply won't accept any of their traffic.

Or, if Mastodon specifically isn't your thing, with it being an open protocol, there's other implementations [External Link] you can choose from, with of course varying levels of compatibility. You can also opt to run the Mastodon backend, but swap the front-end out for a different feel.

Unlike corporate social media being at the whims of shareholders, or the board, or private investors, advertisers, etc., we can have our own, independent communities, and choose who we associate with (or not). That is empowering by design, at the root of it all, way more than even the richest people on the planet can hope for with purchases like these.

Now, when do we figure out how to help get Matrix/Element up as a viable Discord replacement, next? ;)

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As weird as this may sound: distro hopping is good. (Provided you're not talking about mission critical production infrastructure, etc.)

You can gain experience with other packaging formats, other ways of doing things, and that broadens your understanding of how different distros come to the decisions that they do. It also gives you the opportunity to upgrade your technical know-how when faced with an unfamiliar setup - 'Oh, this server's running something RPM-based; I know that since I run Fedora at home / used to run Fedora years ago / etc.'

I started out with really old versions of SuSE and Red Hat back in the mid-to-late 1990s, got hooked on Gentoo for a while, used various Ubuntu flavours for years (mostly Kubuntu and Xubuntu), got frustrated with everyone moving to systemd and the way I had to manually pull + compile stuff like OBS from source because of nVidia's licensing at the time (the packaged versions didn't expose NVENC - you had to grab the source build script, add the flag to the configure part, and build the .deb yourself every time. Thankfully that's fixed now AFAIK and 'just works'.) and went back to Gentoo for a long long time because USE flags are amazing when you know you're compiling a lot of bleeding edge stuff, many times direct from git repos.

I recently switched to Artix [External Link], which is 'Arch-without-systemd' (stuck to OpenRC from my Gentoo days, personally, but you have choices!), which right now for me is working great for where I'm at. While Gentoo's prebuilt packages are... lacking, if they exist at all, forcing you to usually constantly compile everything from source, Arch-derivatives have the combo of 'actually relatively up to date packages' plus the AUR (and yes, AUR works with Artix, as long as the PKGBUILD doesn't force rely on systemd directly; usually something like elogind is enough).

I have a relatively new (at least in terms of Linux driver support) gaming laptop - one of the all-AMD 'Advantage' ones; an Asus ROG thing that's genuinely really nice... but I knew looking at the state of drivers that I'd want to perpetually be on the latest -rc kernels, KDE Plasma, and Mesa built from git. Yes, it was a pain to get set up and still has a fair amount of bugs and gremlins, mostly around PRIME, reverse-PRIME, and running it in clamshell/closed lid mode with an external display through the USB-C/DP port. But so, so many times, watching changelogs + recompiling the latest kernel + Mesa + Plasma / Wayland bits would fix something and whittle that bug count down.

I'd follow development blogs excitedly, because it looked like some of the devs have the same laptop I do (because hey, screw nVidia and not having a decent gaming dGPU in your laptop, so you have like... a tiny handful of all-AMD choices with decent performance to end up on right now), were hitting the same issues I was, but crucially, knew how to fix or work around them. As soon as their patches would hit upstream, I'd run yay and pull them to my system within a couple hours. Maybe a couple days (or weeks) later, the official packaging would catch up, and I could switch from my custom compiled version back to the 'proper' package one, easing up my support burden. That, I find, is the real beauty of the combo of a rolling release distro with real solid 'compile your own' support.

All that said, Linux distros (and UNIX in general) are not a one-size-fits-all approach, and should never strive to be. I wouldn't run this on a mission critical server (that's what my FreeBSD box is for). I wouldn't give this to my parents to run. Heck, even my partner's PC still runs Ubuntu, because she's more likely to understand how to update it through the GUI when I'm not around to SSH in and run them myself for her.

People on the outside like to call this 'fragmentation' and spin it as 'why Linux will never "win" on the desktop'. Nevermind that Linux has already won in the mobile, embedded, server, etc. spaces, honestly this isn't 'fragmentation', this is choice, and choice is one of the things that most other OSes simply don't give you. For many many people, that's fine - they'll keep running their Windows machines and Macs and deal with whatever new paradigm they have to learn when major updates happen. For us, we can't accept that - we want to tinker, to look under the hood, to say 'I really wish it did things this way instead', and in many cases, find a group of people who also wished for that... and then made it happen.

I don't want to be a 'winner'; it's not even a competition. We've already won where it counts - we've found the tools that work for us, and that's what counts.

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I've come back and played this off and on over the years - they started in 1998 on this(!) [External Link] and are still going, which in and of itself is some kind of testament to... something.

No, seriously - genuinely impressed with the commitment to it, and yeah, it can feel a little weird at first, coming from other Sonic games, but remember - Sonic Adventure only came out at the tail end of 1998 in Japan. Here in North America, of course, we had the 9/9/99 launch date instead (I still have the Dreamcast pre-order T-shirt and goodies from Electronics Botique, now GameStop).

If Sonic Adventure was the herald for future mainline 3D Sonic games, SRB2 feels much more firmly rooted in the 'what if we just took Genesis (MegaDrive)-era 2D Sonic and made it 3D?' that even Sega / Sonic Team kind of went back to later, theme-wise, with stuff like Sonic Generations and Sonic 4. (Nevermind Sonic Mania being an amazing love-letter to that 2D world, of course)

Anyone who has fond memories of 90s Sonic and wondered what an alternate universe where Sonic Team didn't... do whatever they did in the transition to 3D, should really check this out, especially now that it's had 20+ years of polish. :)

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I mean, has Destiny 2 even been relevant since they started removing people's access to expansion they paid for and then went hard on the monetization bent? I know I stopped playing around the whole New Light F2P thing. :/

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So, this is just big spitballing on my part, having not tried to do this (yet):

After reading Ars' Linux breakdown on this, too, with the SteamOS filesystem being read-only (though Valve does give you the command to flag it read-write, with the expectation that if you then update, your changes get overwritten)... I wonder if there's a way to leverage something like OverlayFS [External Link] to then mount your own additions to /usr, /etc, and such so you can then run standard pacman and other commands that expect a fully read-write filesystem, and have those writes + new files live in your separate image (on the microSD, even?) so that a SteamOS upgrade doesn't necessarily blow that away...

Technically the same thing LiveCDs with writeable tmpfs use, but instead of a tmpfs, back it to its own folder in whatever persistent read-write storage you have?

Now, there's the issue of 'what if the SteamOS upgrade changes a library/file you didn't account for in the overlay and now your stuff broke', but still - this might be a nice medium between wanting to run official SteamOS while also getting a full Arch experience - your changes are just a delta overlay on top. Screw something up? Unmount the overlays and you're back to stock SteamOS.

Similarly, I'm sure we can do something like resize the SteamOS partition and put our own distro on there to dual-boot - yes, even Windows :sick: :grin: ... I would be surprised if that's not just... straight up your favourite partition editor + grub2.

Pipewire support is nice - Wayland I'm curious to see if we can install (maybe using that overlay idea) and just switch to, especially since KDE Plasma's Wayland support has gotten way, *way* better lately.

Even though I've got a shiny new all-AMD gaming laptop here as a surprise present, I'm still excited for this to be a good replacement for e.g. my partner's aging desktop that's getting hardware gremlins.

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Just confirming that the combo of up-to-date kernel, mesa-git, Plasma 5.24, and now this XWayland update means SteamVR seems to work with my Vive under Wayland, though I'm getting this bug: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/issues/430 [External Link]

Kudos to all the teams involved here, but... that's it. I literally have zero reason to ever use the Xorg session again; Wayland's just better. :D It even works better with my DisplayPort monitor with 10-bit colour that used to come up with a very psychedelic rainbow artifacting in the previous version of Plasma.

Now we just need Wayland-native SDDM (or for me to try a different greeter). ;)

But yeah, going to try a couple different VR games (getting into VTOL VR lately) and see if they work under Proton here too.

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Quoting: GuestI never said that.

Apologies - I must have fumbled trying to trim down the quote on my phone :p Meant to be a reply to this one further up I think? https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/02/retro-x86-based-machine-emulator-86box-32-brings-linux-support/comment_id=220331

Either way - more just general info for anyone who might think their AppImage is the only route.

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Quoting: GuestNope.
At least, not for me,thanks.
This is GPL 2.0 code that can be packaged by your distribution and installed and uninstalled by your package manager.
I can understand that for proprietary apps, or if you just need to test the software.
More appimages mean more bloat/useless duplication, more memory use.

Someone's already got a PKGBUILD in AUR [External Link] (and -git version) I might try later; just because the 86box team offers a distro-agnostic AppImage doesn't prevent everyone else from doing the 'right' thing with their distro of choice. I'm sure someone'll have a PPA for Ubuntu users, too, in time, etc.

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Going to give this a try with my Vive later - I believe the just-released KDE Plasma 5.24 added the DRM leasing bits to Kwin, I'm running `mesa-git` (and just did a fresh rebuild this morning), and the latest 5.17 kernel RC. Been running purely Wayland for months, now, but VR was the one thing I kept going back to Windows for.

The 'fun' part will be figuring out if I need to use the HDMI port hooked up to my laptop's APU (and reverse PRIME), or if I can use my USB-C to DP adapter that's hooked straight up to the dGPU, as my lappy is MUX-less.

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