This looks really neat, but apparently the external editor that allows scripts and changes to the game is Windows only for now. The in-game map editor does work just fine on Linux, though, and I expect mods will work normally even if we can't create them.

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Wow, what I'm the most impressed is that it is actually under the GPL (and he says it is, at least in part I guess, to make sure they are compatible with OpenRA and CnCnet).

This is quite nice. It probably enables a lot of moddability, like Civ 4 did, and is huge for this kind of project.

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Quoting: The_Aquabatif game devs continue calling the southerne hemisphere down under, then I think I'll start calling the northern hemisphere "Up There"... lol.

It's not the entire southern hemisphere, it is Australia in particular which is known as "the land down under".

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Empire at War also works with Proton, last I checked, and it is a good game.

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I've been playing a lot of Northgard, especially since I got many of my friends to buy it and we are playing some light multiplayer.

I have also been playing lots of Civilization. Since 6 is a bit slow, I first went back to 5, but now I'm playing 4. All great games in their own right. For shorter sessions some Molek-Syntez (latest Zachtronics game), some Runefall 2 (nice match-3 game), and some Slay the Spire.

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Damn, those are some good strategy games I don't have (XCOM2, WH40K Gladius, Rise of Industry). If only my PC could run them, this would be a good month to subscribe... Well, I shouldn't be spending money on games anyway.

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Quoting: Para-Glidinghow does it compare to ubuntu? use apt to install also? Or similar?

Nope, that is one of the major differences. In Ubuntu (and other Debian-based distros), we generally use apt and packages are in the .deb format; in Arch-based distros like Manjaro, the package manager is pacman and packages are a different format - which means, among other things, we don't get access to software packaged for Ubuntu/Debian (which are usually the easiest to find). Manjaro also has, besides pacman, pamac which is pretty similar but intended to be slightly more intuitive to use. Pamac has both the cli version and a gui one, which is handy.

While there is no access to the trove of software made for Ubuntu (because it is the mainstream/newbie distro), one of the advantages to Arch's system is that it is relatively easy to create "packages" - and a lot of people have already repackaged most stuff, which is available as the AUR (the user repository - not as well curated/tested as the official repositories from the distro maintainers, and not as but generally ok). Note that AUR packages aren't simple binary files, but scripts that install the software in many possible ways - some just use normal binaries, some download code straight from github and compile it, and so on. You can see the scripts to check if it seems trustworthy (where it is downloading from, for example) even if you, like me, aren't that knowledgeable about software distribution. It isn't quite as simple as just pressing install, but still simpler than not having it, and complements the official repos quite nicely.

As for how it compares besides that, it is a different distro in a different family, so there are quite a lot of small differences. The big ones are the release system (rolling vs twice a year), the installation (it tries to give more options but still be user-friendly), and the default software and/or libraries that will come by default.

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One of the first things I noticed: if I search for strategy and exclude action, it removes all games tagged as action* from the search. If I search for strategy and exclude rpg, it removes all games tagged as rpg. If I exclude both action and rpg, it excludes games tagged as "action rpg" but leaves normal rpgs...

*Which means nothing, as people apply the action tag to Hearts of Iron and the strategy tag to Counter Strike, so searching by tags is still mostly useless.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: eldakingI'll wait a bit anyway and probably will update to 20.04 if it isn't too obnoxious to avoid snaps for most things, or if at least it works well.

sudo apt purge snapd will get rid of snaps entirely. Easy enough.

Sure, but will any default programs be removed by that - like say, the calculator? (I legit don't know what would happen to installed snaps)

And will the Ubuntu repositories contain non-snap alternatives for stuff? If they stop maintaining stuff in the repos because they now use snaps, it becomes impractical to use the distro without it. (While, presumably, other distros could still have those normally... at least for now)

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It actually looks like a meaningful improvement in most aspects; there were many important updates to hardware support and big applications since 18.04, which I mostly had to backport or install in some way (newer mesa fixed several games, newer KDE had some nice features and look for those of us that use Kubuntu, newer libre office had a few important features, and I expect the version of wine in their repositories will be less awful). Plus generally looking nice and bugfixes, as always.

But the way they keep trying to push snaps almost makes me want to not update at all, or switch distros permanently. I used to assume that snaps weren't that bad, but after actually having more contact with them I was shocked by how horrible it is. First, snaps had ridiculously bad performance problems; so it was not even a "non-technical users wouldn't even notice" - people did notice, for example how ridiculously slow chromium was. Second, as a system it is way too closed and centralized, which is particularly bad for something that is intended to work across distros (other distros can't just host their own snap repositories, the backend isn't FOSS, and it is entirely developed by Canonical without any cooperation with other distros). And third, Canonical are actively pushing for it to replace other alternatives, which means we can't even ignore it if we don't like it.

I'll wait a bit anyway and probably will update to 20.04 if it isn't too obnoxious to avoid snaps for most things, or if at least it works well. But frankly, I'm already looking to jump boat from Kubuntu, and particularly for something better to recommend for newbies.

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