My own very humble recommendation:

Downwell -- currently at $0.49
https://store.steampowered.com/app/360740/Downwell/ [External Link]

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Microsoft already has a say in whatever direction Linux takes -- they've been a 'platinum member' of the Linux Foundation since 2016 (one of 12, which includes Oracle, Red Hat, and 'Meta' (facebook) - Google is a goldmember): https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2016/11/17/microsoft-joins-linux-foundation/ [External Link]
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members [External Link]

The executive director of the Linux Foundation has a many a piece where he's gushing about their 'great partnership' with Microsoft:

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/linux-foundation-and-microsoft-a-great-start-to-a-great-partnership [External Link]

The lines between open source and proprietary software are blurring. Increasingly organizations are building even in-house technologies with open source methods. This includes Microsoft.
From participating in Node.js, the Core Infrastructure Initiative and other Collaborative Projects at Linux Foundation to its recent partnerships with Red Hat and SUSE, Microsoft is demonstrating a sincere, smart and practical approach to how it builds new technologies and supports its vast customer base. Microsoft open sourced .NET; it open sourced key parts of its web browser; and it uses Linux for its Azure Cloud Switch. The Linux Foundation and Microsoft share a common, strategic approach to technology development: balance internal R&D with external R&D to create the most important technologies of our time.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/microsoft-buys-github-the-linux-foundations-reaction [External Link]

As we all evaluate the evolution of open source from the early days to now, I suggest we  celebrate this moment. In a recent letter to congress I wrote that “the multi-decade progression toward the adoption and continual use of open source software (OSS) in developing modern technological products, solutions and services is permanent and irreversible. The majority of the world’s economic systems, stock exchanges, the Internet, supercomputers and mobile devices run the open source Linux operating system and its usage and adoption continue to expand. Billions of individuals may not know they’re using OSS every day, but their modern television, smart watch, camera, automobile and smartphone rely on OSS.”
Open source developers changed our world. Microsoft gets that, which is why they purchased GitHub. I for one am excited to see the improvements they’ll make and will be shocked if Nat were to screw it up (no pressure Nat!).

... so whatever nefarious plan they may have about Linux, it's *already* succeeded, and the wsl business probably isn't very consequential to that plan.

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re:Libreoffice compatibility issues, especially with respect to sharing comments & such -- this is true, unfortunately; and it highlights, IMHO, a challenge for the free software movement which doesn't seem to get as much attention as it should.

pdf and docx are both 'open' formats, but they're incredibly complicated. For an application made by an independent organization to be *fully compliant*, a gigantic effort has to be put in place, essentially to reverse engineer an easy to use API for that supposedly 'open' format. MS and Adobe not only have the resources to deal with that complexity, but they're the ones who cooked it up in the first place; so their bloated software can deal with the innumerable 'edge cases' that might come up in actual usage, while the independent project is content to implement the bare minimum.

Just today I confirmed to myself once again that the disgusting piece of 'free as in beer' adware known as Adobe Acrobat is the only, well, 'free as in beer' pdf viewer that reliably exports annotations from a pdf, straight from the viewer, without writing into the pdf file first, in a well formed xml. There are other ways of 'exporting' annotations from a pdf, but they all involve writing inside the pdf, thereby changing its index, which is risky, because one program's changes on that fragile index may render the file corrupt for another reader. Exporting annotations is a crucial feature, because it allows the user to take his notes & highlights, and feed them into a full text indexer for later search; or, to produce a worksheet of quotes and comments for a course by simply applying an xslt stylesheet on said xml; or export all the notes into markdown, or org, an continue writing in a sane editing environment like emacs as opposed to the little textboxes on the pdf software.

I'd go so far as to say that the ultimate end of FSF's '4 freedoms' is the availability of properly intelligible APIs into programs that deal with *humanly meaningful* data -- the availability of the source isn't an end in itself, it's to allow us sovereignty on what the algorithms in that source *do* - control what we DO and DON'T want them to do. When it comes to desktop applications that deal with directly human-facing data, FOSS software is open alright, and we know at least that it's not stealing that data to train some matrix-multiplication cluster in some secret data center, so it allows sovereignty in the limiting, 'DON'T DO', sense; but control & sovereignty in the positive, or 'DO' sense ... well, it usually comes short.

I think we should be campaigning for the latter a bit more, is all I'm saying, I guess; otherwise it really sounds like the FOSS community is after some sort of ritualistic purity for its own sake.

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I hope eventually they will divert some resources to the iced toolkit.

The documentation for it has been improving (there's a really nice in-progress guide book; in addition to some outdated/deprecated cookbook type manuals), and there's a pretty wide variety of example applications, but especially with respect to widgets interfacing with external data, the examples are pretty limited to simple things, which really don't help with the intricacies of Rust's borrow, lifetime, etc. rules.

Earlier this year I worked through rustlings, and a few other Rust tutorials; I was under no illusions about my competence (?!) in rust, though nevertheless I was looking forward to building a new version of my simple pdf viewer using iced. (currently a version exists that uses bare opengl, in C, via glfw) It started out fine, and I was even proud of myself when I figured out how to add a function to mupdf's rust bindings to request some extra stuff from the C side -- but then I couldn't figure out how to load rasterized pages progressively into a widget, so I gave up. Granted, I'm just a silly amateur; though various forums show real programmers getting puzzled over similar tasks.

So anyway, I hope we eventually have resources to help app developers make better use of iced.

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Way less goofy looking character models, less potatoey heads; good job I guess.

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I've long been curious about these Mickey games, solely because they were directed by Warren Spector, of Deus Ex fame; and I saw an interview where he sounded very proud of them. The games don't seem to be im-sims in any way though.

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Yeah after installing to disk & running `dnf upgrade --refresh` the default fonts upgrade; though the Workstation Live CD comes with Cantarell.

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Hopefully by the time GNOME 48 & Fedora 42 are both out, the new system font will also be implemented: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-fonts [External Link]
The new beta still seems to have Cantarell; though the fonts are already in the repos.

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The price difference is kind of odd indeed.

From GamersNexus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAe50byQGG0 [External Link]

It's nice for the folks who can afford it, I guess.

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I'm definitely going to judge you if you do that though.

You absolutely should, I mean, that guy is sitting on the toilet with his pants on.

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