Quoting: SolitaryThe whole Covid situation in Europe is often misconstructed as EU acting late or not doing anything. EU has its limited competency and countries healthcare systems are not part of it, critics often like to bash EU for not doing anything or the opposite accusing them of overstepping their competency. Solving the Covid situation is national problem, so EU really has no say in here. Problem of Italy is that they have oldest population in Europe and they have lower amount of ventilators per capita than other countries. Italy is not a victim that got left behind by bureaucrats in Brussels. Nobody knew what to expect and they were the first that got hit hard, but not the only one (Spain for example).

What EU did and did it well was rescuing citizen from abroad that got stuck thanks to travel bans. What EU can do is to prepare some more coordinated effort in the future, but till then it is up to the countries themselves and that is not EU fault. This whole situation is unprecedented and makes sense there was no master plan for it. No country in the world, democratic or not really knew what to expect and how to prepare themselves. If anybody claims they have the answer (if only they had the power) they are most likely lying, there is no simple solution here. Lot of countries in EU solved the Covid situation fine though.

If anything I would say the migration crisis in 2015 was more of an example where we saw problems of such nature, but even that is not that simple, because it was Germany that initiated that whole mess with invitation and then acted surprised when other countries refused to participate. That whole issue is more political than anything else, because the solutions are already on the table.

I'm aware this is not really an EU problem, I really should have said Europe instead of EU as I actually meant the geographic region rather than a political body. Anyhow, maybe I am biased but to me it was common sense that a virus outbreak was coming. Sure, there was no telling where it would spread next, in our day and age, everyone is traveling from everywhere to everywhere, but that doesn't mean we sit about doing nothing until it actually becomes a real big problem. That's where Italy (and Spain, as you said) came in. Only once the red numbers came from those did I noticed governments taking action. Until that, no one thought of stocking up on medical supplies for the coming crisis. In my country I would call it a debacle - first there were no supplies to speak of at all and then, with a hoorah, medical workers received equipment that a) came late, b) was not of sufficient quantity, and c) wasn't even of the right kind. To me, that's not a government answering a crisis, that's a government trying to placate its subjects with whatever they could scrounge up until they fix their hot mess.

But I digress, a dictatorship could've underestimated the situation just as badly as democracy did.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: DorritOpen borders and, in the case of Italy, 300.000 Chinese immigrants is recipe for catastrophe.
What brought us here was too much government; only the fall of these so-called social democracies and the return to healthy individualism will return Europe to its former glory.

I'm not sure you can realistically close borders effectively enough to stop a virus from spreading. So, I don't mean "doing something about it" as preventing an outbreak from happening, I meant it mostly as being prepared for it when it inevitably happens. Which we weren't. We were required to wear respirators even though there were no such respirators available for quite a while. We were caught with our pants down even though it has been coming our way for a long time.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: SolitaryI am not sure you or I understand each other. I think democracy works wonders... because it basically limits the aspect of "people problem" that I mentioned, because nobody is allowed to have too much power. The system is designed to limit, slowdown and prevent any radical changes.

Meanwhile with socialism, where you have strong government you get that problem, because you are governed by people that inherently have more power thanks to stronger standing of the state. People with too much power = abuse of power.

The other side of that coin is that when stuff happens and something needs to be done about it, democracy can be slow to react. Take the Covid situation here in EU. Essentially, Italy had to take the punch for most governments to stop just bickering about the issue and start doing something about it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

So we're covering these kinds of games now? In that case, perhaps I should sign up as an author to lend my considerable experience to GoL. Heheheh.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Funny, I was just saying earlier on this site that one of the "imperfections" of switching to Linux was being unable to play Street Fighter V but I made a bold claim that it's only a matter of time before it will be playable. I didn't know it would be so soon, though. This is incredible!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I'm surprised the comment section went as far as it did with no shamefur display memes. Outstanding display, guys.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestI am willing to bet Cyberpunk 2077 will be Platinum day 0, or at least pretty soon after day 0. The main reason is that it won't be using any DRM (this is huge for compatibility) from GOG, or a minor Steam DRM at worst. It will probably still support D3D11 and DXVK will probably make short work of that game, given that Witcher 3 is one of the most compatible games around and even though i heard they changed the engine for CP2077 it won't be much different i think.

Yep, the chances are good. It's a Stadia game. Also I was under the impression their engine uses Vulkan. We'll have to see, but hopes are high that Wine will have no problems.
I know some people who will have to pickup their own jaws from the floor once I tell them I'm playing CP2k77 on my Linux desktop :whistle:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: ZlopezThere is no better prevention to leak, than having the code open. :-)

That's some fortune cookie wisdom from enlightened open-source gurus :D

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It's truly remarkabale how mostly effortless Linux gaming is nowadays. I've switched to Linux with my new gaming desktop PC, for various reasons - privacy concerns, and Windows 10 being genereally a junk OS. I figured out I don't need to deal with Microsoft's bullshit anymore, so I said why not, let's give Linux a try. I have to say it was one of my better decisions in my life.

Sure, not ALL games work yet on Linux. I haven't been able to play For Honor, Street Fighter V or the new MK11 (notice a trend? Fighting games tend to do poorly on Linux. SFIV and MKX work flawlessly though, so it's only a matter of time before the new ones are playable), but with the fact there's tons of other games to play anyway, the individual incompatibilities really stop being an issue. Game doesn't work on Linux, natively or with Proton? Guess I won't buy that game, then. It's really not my loss in the end.

Microsoft itself really isn't an OS company anymore, nowadays they are mostly a cloud provider. Guess what OS runs in the cloud? There we have the source of the 'we love Linux' policy they've been having lately. Windows really became a liability to Microsoft's own operations, which is a bit comical.
My point is that in the coming years, I think we can expect Linux to grow significantly; there are several trends going on right now that push people to improve the Linux state of things every day.

The big test coming up is Cyberpunk 2077. I really wonder if that one will be playable on launch or close to launch date. If it is, Linux is truly a viable gaming OS.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Hori

Quoting: LungDragoI'm afraid to look at and calculate how much energy credits it would cost me to buy in the missing DLC/expansions at this point. :(

IKR I have had the same problem with EU4 for years... and it's only getting worse and worse as time passes. At this point I've given up on the idea of getting into it and would rather wait for a EU5... whenever that comes

Looks like Paradox heard us. There's a sale on Humble Bundle now with lots of Paradox DLC. :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments