That's great news, especially for the older Paradox fans among us. Now let's hope they're up to par and they don't flunk it up like they did with Imperator: Rome or EUIV Leviathan...

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Quoting: rustybroomhandle

Quoting: NociferAh, Mass Effect. That sci-fi game that had such an absolutely great first part, before somehow managing to turn into an absolute crapfest in its second and third parts. For anyone who not only cares about good game writing but also enjoys reading about good game writing (and writing in general)

Pfff, opinions. ME2 is the best of the three by a huge margin. Primarily due to the fact that it actually does a better job of establishing reasons to care about individual characters rather than just the clinical plot stuff.

Yup. And lots of people consider the Marvel films or the final season of Game of Thrones as the best thing since sliced bread, but... opinions. Totally agree. For the record though, as a game ME2 is indeed good enough if you don't overthink it and treat it as its own beast, especially when compared to ME3 which is the one that really, objectively sucks (and is what actually woke me up to the fact that I don't actually like ME). It's only when you compare it with ME1 and what it could have been that you begin to see the deeper cracks (and there's lots of them).

Quoting: DrMcCoy

Quoting: NociferFor anyone who not only cares about good game writing but also enjoys reading about good game writing (and writing in general)

I've been aware of Shamus for like 20 years now, and I wouldn't categorize anything he produces as good, but YMMV...

My mileage does vary, not the least because no matter if one agrees with him or not, the guy can produce actual arguments about the things he opines about, as compared to 99% of people on the internet. Also, being able to recognize and analyze faults objectively in others' work does not necessarily mean you're automatically skilled or talented enough to create masterpieces.

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Ah, Mass Effect. That sci-fi game that had such an absolutely great first part, before somehow managing to turn into an absolute crapfest in its second and third parts. For anyone who not only cares about good game writing but also enjoys reading about good game writing (and writing in general), I'll just leave this old gem here:

Mass Effect Retrospective (Part 13) [External Link]

I've linked part 13 of the series, which sits right at the transition from Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2 (where things started going downhill) and then goes all the way up to part 50 and the end of Mass Effect 3. But I do recommend reading the previous parts as well.

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Quoting: TheRiddick

Quoting: natis1I'll bite.

https://discord.com/guidelines [External Link]

Well these seem pretty normal to me. But some are pretty broad rules and will vary greatly depending on which country you look at them from.

For example what is considered extremism is in the eye of the beholder isn't it? For example CCP considers uighurs to be extremists. Allot of people consider Trump supporters to be violent extremists... but that is just one example.

Broad stroke rules.

The rules you linked to pretty much already answer your question: "no violent extremism". In other words, if the ideas you support are not hateful towards people or things that have done nothing to deserve such hatred, and if you can be civil while talking about them, then discuss away, no matter how extreme they may appear to be (provided of course that other people are willing to discuss them with you).

As for your examples:

Uighurs (or anyone else) supporting and fighting for their independence can hardly be considered extremist, no matter what the PRC may or may not say. Same as with the Catalans. People may disagree with the notion of independence for various reasons (especially the governing bodies that stand to lose a part of their power), or they may disagree with the means employed to pursue said independence, but that kind of disagreement is precisely the point of discussing such things.

"Trump supporters" (though tbh the problem is really not about Trump or the USA; this category includes all the sad and miserable little people that support ideologies promoting social segregation and happiness of the few at the expense of the many) are much of the time not violently extremist per se, but just extremely annoying, loud, and impossible to converse with. I can literally feel their spit hitting my face every time they open their online mouths. So they invariably end up in the "not civil" category.

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So Microsoft tries to buy Discord in order to further consolidate their unhealthy chokehold on the gaming industry even more, Discord ends up saying no, and then Sony, Microsoft's biggest competitor in the gaming industry, is revealed to have invested in Discord as a minority investor (i.e. a not-aggressive one).

Well, good for them. I much prefer a mostly independent Discord that is backed by Sony (and hopefully also others) and works as a universal tool for both PC and consoles so I can talk with my pals when playing games via crossover (which AFAIK is an upcoming feature that would 100% have been axed had MS actually bought Discord) than a Microsoft-owned Discord that would probably become abandonware (on purpose) within a couple of years. Makes for a much healthier product (and I don't even use it all that much, what with it being proprietary and all).

Now come on Sony, bring PS Now to more countries already!

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Quoting: bOrviS7000I just got an update on Debian stable with back ports today too version Nvidia 460.67.
I have been using Debian Stable with NVIDIA drivers for 10+ years, but I'm thinking I may need to switch. Does any one have any comments on Arch over Debian?

Well, it can be slightly different and it can be fundamentally different, but it will be different for sure.

Slightly: much more frequent updates (somebody said every second day; ha! try every second hour) but much faster updates; no user-friendly Debian provisioning and no preconfigured "sane defaults" (it's your own job to tailor your system and your installed packages to fit your own needs); newer app versions and many more apps in the repos; much more transparent folder hierarchy (e.g. there's only one /bin folder); etc.

Fundamentally (if you choose so): running parts or all of the Linux stack (GPU drivers, kernel, Mesa, Wine/Proton, Ffmpeg, or whatever else) at their latest and greatest (...and buggiest) git versions, and even patching/modifying them on the fly as you please before you compile them; creating new packages for whatever apps may take your fancy that do not exist in the repos (or do exist but irk you for some reason) and then managing them through the system package manager like normal packages; going Gentoo and compiling everything from source using Arch's "official" compilation options via the ABS; etc.

The biggest thing with Arch Linux is that it forces you to become involved with your system in order to make it function correctly, at least for the first few months before everything is set just the way you like it. Whether you like that or not is yours to decide.

A simple example for what "involved" means: a couple of years ago I was annoyed that KDE's Dolphin wouldn't display thumbnails for WebP images. Well, after spending an afternoon or two googling for the solution and finding nothing, I eventually discovered that my system was missing a package called qt5-imageformats which is an optional dependency for KDE to display WebP thumbnails; but because that package is not part of the KDE group, I never saw it and so I never knew I needed to install it in order to have a fully functional KDE system. And there was nothing on Google when I looked it up because most distros come with such stuff already preconfigured, and so they already include qt5-imageformats when you opt to install their KDE version; so for most people out there, WebP thumbnail support in KDE has never been an issue!

Lesson learned: always check the optional dependencies of packages you install (I've since caught me a few more occasions like this where an "optional" dependency turned out to be absolutely required for full functionality).

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: NociferSomebody should inform them post-haste about a certain little thingy called the AUR.

(j/k, I know that this is all marketing, and marketing describes the world how you wish it to look like for your target audience, not how it really is.)

Granted, AUR isn't exactly an official repository, and I wonder what percentage of them are unmaintained or duplicates. That's always been my problem with AUR, it's convenient in many ways, but at the same time you shouldn't blindly trust installing things from it (though you can argue that you shouldn't blindly install stuff anyhow...), and most of the time need to look at patches applied, and hope that the person who made the PKGBUILD will continue to support newer versions / build reqs. It can especially become messy when you always have $pkgname and $pkgname-git, I've even seen it where some still are $pkgname-svn with all three in the AUR...

That's very true, I maintain a few AUR packages myself so I've been frustrated with what you describe multiple times, both as a user and as a packager. But even if you remove all the unmaintained, duplicate or just plain badly packaged packages from the AUR, it still contains tons of stuff that you can't as easily find in most other distros. And in my opinion, since the AUR itself as a repo is a creation of the Arch developers, and since it operates through Arch's own server infrastructure, and since it utilizes Arch's own package building process (the PKGBUILDs), and since there's even official guidelines on the Arch Wiki on how to properly build and package an AUR package, I'd reckon it's integrated enough to count as an official part of the distro.

Now let's see: Zorin claim they have "support for Snaps, Flatpaks with Flathub, the Ubuntu and Zorin OS APT repositories and that's on top of supporting installs from .deb and AppImage packages too". Snaps, Flatpaks and AppImages all work across practically every distro out there, Arch included, so they're nothing special. Ubuntu APT repo and .deb packages? Well, Zorin is an Ubuntu derived distro, so of course they're going to be supporting Ubuntu and Debian packages, so nothing special about that as well. Zorin APT repo? Wow, so they even have their own private repo, color me surprised!

So I maintain the position that when it comes to the amount of packages, Zorin is just like any other distro, and like most other distros it still lacks the AUR :P

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Somebody should inform them post-haste about a certain little thingy called the AUR.

(j/k, I know that this is all marketing, and marketing describes the world how you wish it to look like for your target audience, not how it really is.)

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Of course, the real question here is whether we're gonna be getting a remastered Europa Barbarorum along with the remastered main game, otherwise there isn't much point in playing this.

(And of course, the real real question is whether or not we'll still be alive and kicking if and when the mod's developers -which are probably not even around anymore anyway- finally release Europa Barbarorum III to the public.)

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Quoting: scaineInteresting, Nocifer - I wasn't aware of Super+A at all. Gnome probably need something like Ubuntu's old shortcut-popup that taught you all this stuff.

That said, just pressing the Super key is decent enough generally. Hit it once, then type what you need. It acts like Krunner in that regard, or the old gnome-do (loved that app!) in that it's basically invisible, but is a very quick keyboard-based way to navigate around. Combined with the PopShell extension for tiling, Gnome could almost compete with i3 for a tiling environment.

Gnome has, with enough extensions, grown on me.

Indeed pressing Super and typing on the keyboard is much faster, and that's how I use Gnome as well, like KRunner (which I love). But Dash on steroids (Super+A) can be very useful as well for the more mouse-oriented people among us ;)

Quoting: Purple Library GuyFor me personally, the "do the typing" thing leaves me kind of cold. And I say that as someone who usually navigates the web by typing the first couple letters of the url. But I have launchers for my most commonly used apps--one click. If I'm starting most other programs I probably can't remember just what the dang thing is called and I actually do want to look in the menus until I see what I want there and say "Oh yeah, that was it!"

That's exactly why it's so important for a project to support more than one workflows, especially when we're talking about an Open Source project where freedom (be it user freedom, code freedom, monetary freedom, personal freedom i.e. privacy, or whatever else kind of freedom) is supposed to be king. And so it's exactly why Gnome is disliked or even hated (and IMHO deserves to be so) by many users who don't use it, and even only tolerated by many users who do use it: because Gnome as a project (and despite its many technical merits) does not respect its users and the ethics/values of the Open Source community it claims to be a part of.

In fact, Gnome is the perfect example of how a world would look like where Linux is controlled not by a thriving community of free coders but by cold and detached corporate entities who only care about their bottom lines, and where the only difference between "open source" and "closed source" is that in the first case the code is openly available for people to read (but not touch unless they're part of the corporate decision-making clique).

Now I think about it, Gnome is the Cyberpunk version of Linux :P

But unfortunately, as already mentioned, Gnome is in some cases miles ahead of the competition, and for my particular use case it's simply the only choice.

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