Serious Sam is mindlessly dumb in the good way.

I doubt that’s deliberate (it’s probably depending on some other task or shit that you don’t even intend to use), but it’s exactly the kind of bloat that turns people away from Windows.

Windows seems to work alright for my work pc, where I’m constantly logged into their cloud, newer switch users, logged in long enough daily to get all the updates and have IT to roll out stuff, so I hardly ever have issues there.

My personal computer is a different thing. I have several users, use it about once weekly, making it basically unbootable. As soon as I open the lid, Microsoft starts bugging me to do a shit load of things and download gigabytes of crap that Microsoft, and not I, needs me to do before I can even use it. More often than not I simply close the lid again.

It’s not unusual to meet people who don’t even have a pc these days. Most people can solve their daily stuff on any cell phone browser. I find it kinda amusing that Microsoft is pushing people that way.

Yes Android Auto is needlessly complex. I don’t think the parking sensor is the cause anyway.

Perhaps there are some options on the phone to disable screen takeover or pop-ups or something. Deleting all app permissions is my best guess.

There is no good fix. It’s a Google thing. People have tried using roots and OBD2 fixes, but there is no easy solution.

I don’t know the Spotify app that well, but it should be possible to scroll through songs on a playlist using controls on the steering wheel or voice control. Those methods shouldn’t trigger the scroll warning.

Alternatively, he could skip Android Auto and use Bluetooth instead if it’s only connected for the music. That’s what I do for other music apps and the steering wheel controls also work just fine that way too as long as I have prepared a playlist in advance.

The music doesn’t have to be completely synthesized… Most early computers would simply reuse the audio snippets as “samples”, and program the pitch and timing in a “tracker”

Listening to the Flappy Birds music, which I admit that I did, then all of the music could be done in a tracker, even if it might not have been originally. It’s a bit of a lost art form, but there are several kilobytes to save!

Personally, I have been considering making a HTML5 game, including the sunvox DLL, to make it really easy to put tiny yet advanced music files into a cross platform browsable game. Haven’t gotten around to it though…

What’s the size of the music/graphics/game code/stuff that is needed for any app to run on Android?

I believe (without knowing for sure) that you could make a similar game much smaller by “rendering” the music and some of the graphics.

Perhaps someone could make a business of it then.

Chromebooks sold well enough. Google made $30 billion on that in 2023.

Anyone willing to put together a physical Linux machine, market and support it could take a chunk of that.

It would be nice if it was possible to simply go to a website, check off on the stuff you want and then get a full package.

I liked the idea of AV Linux, because it comes in a bundle of stuff that I need, but it also comes with a lot stuff that I don’t need, and I’m not sure the desktop is my choice. It also didn’t really work at the time I tried it.(Some years ago).

So… if I, a stupid user, could simply go to a website, check mark at the desktop, check off which office package, music apps, browser, etc.etc. and then get a download of that in one go where it’s all set-up and works, it would be a lot easier than having to go through the process of installing the OS and then installing/removing apps, and then making it work…

Like, let’s say I want a PC just for music creation, I should be able to download the the OS with the DAW of my choice, all the VSTis and potentially also the most common free sound banks. In one file.

If I wanted an office PC, I should be able to get the OS, the office suite of choice and all the misc. PDF tools, email client and whatnot of choice. All in one go.

Windows and macOS sort of came with everything before, but these days they’re just as annoying to set up as any Linux distribution. Linux as a whole could take advantage of that situation by offering a prepackaged but custom installation.

Of course it would also help if someone made a Linux installer for windows, so users didn’t have to use windows to create a bootable USB. I think this is the step that normal users hesitate on. I don’t know if it’s possible, but it ought to be possible from software to partion the disc and install dual boot or something.

Yes. Linux Mint works “straight out of the box”.

It comes with a preinstalled browser (Firefox), so if you only use your computer for online stuff, then you dont need to do anything at all. Just use it.

The only technical thing you might want to do is to enter the WiFi password and find the software manager to install any additional apps you need.If you can install apps on your phone, then you can also install apps on Linux Mint.

I actually found that it was a lot easier to install Mint than setting up a new Windows pc. The most difficult part was using a windows pc to download it and making a bootable USB stick. Your friend can help you with that or you can follow a guide.

I have had zero issues and I have never written a single command line. It just works.

Roblox is a mess, but in an alright way. There are many different games and investing into it is useless, because kids will move from one game to the next soon enough. I have never paid for Robux and never intend to. The kids keep playing it without the buy in. It’s something everyone in school does, so they play together and change game constantly to whatever is trendy.

I’ve only barely played it myself to see what it is like and if the chat was problematic. It seems safe enough, but there are limits to the gameplay when not paying. Most of the games are pretty pointless anyway and don’t require Robux, but the kids are still entertained for a while in each game. Robux might make sense in the more complex games, but I refuse to pay for it.

As for paid games, I’ve paid for Minecraft for pc and android and that’s worth it on both platforms. I have accounts for the entire family so we can join each other and they can have friends over who don’t have their own accounts or don’t know the logins. It’s relatively cheap and only a one time purchase. It can be tricky with the Java and bedrock editions not playing along, so that’s why I just bought more accounts. There are free clones of Minecraft for android that are soo close that my youngest didn’t even realise that it wasn’t the original.

My oldest has also herself paid for the horse game Star Stable for pc, which is a great game, but also expensive. This is more like buying an actual game. It’s basically an 3D adventure game with horses. No microtransactions if fully paid for. The account also works for android, but she uses the pc mostly. Again, this is because her best friends are playing it. She has no interest in horses, but the game is good. It’s sort of like GTA but instead of driving cars and shooting guns, they ride horses and run errands for the stables or something. It’s possible to play for free, but only until it gets more interesting.

Depends on age a lot.

My girls have mostly played Toca Boca World and Roblox (playing Adopt Me or Brookhaven).

This seems to be jumping to conclusions.

I only played the original. I didn’t really like it at first, thinking that the augmentation and mod stuff was needlessly complicated for this kind of game. Also the graphics weren’t all that great in comparison to other games using the same engine. There were a lot of attention to details in comparison to other games so I gave it a chance. The turning point came after completing the first part of the story and getting hooked. The story really carried the game and touches on some interesting topics.

A game with a similar feel would be Omikron: The Nomad Soul. It was released the year before Deus Ex, has worse controls and graphics, but the story and setting is somewhat similar.

That’s not exactly the take I was expecting, but alright.

The person who posted it is apparently addicted to abusing other peoples labour. Now, as a labour dealer, I can’t provide them with one guy with 10 years experience. That’s too high of a dose.

However, if they’re willing, I can probably find 10 guys with 1 year experience, but the price is going to be 10 times the going rate, because that’s how much it’ll cost me to hire and manage those 10 people off fiver.

Am I cutting the shit? Go find another dealer then. It’s not my “need”. That’s a “your problem”.

This might be pedantic, but the use of the word “need” pisses me off more than the unrealistic requirement. It’s so needy.

Looks fine. You have better screen estate, 7.5 posts while I only have 6 posts on a screen.

I think the reason why I changed from Jerboa was the data usage at the time (July last year). It’d download the entire picture instead of thumbnails. Sometimes it lagged.

The reason why I liked RiF was basically only that I had used it so much that I knew where everything was. I’ve been using Connect long enough that I’m not eager to switch at the moment.

Posts:

Connect.

I like to have posts and comments as small as possible, without large pictures being downloaded before I click the post, and it must have a dark mode.

I also tried Jerboa and Voyager, and while they’re also customizable, I couldn’t get it exactly right. Maybe it’s possible now, but I can’t be bothered to keep up to date on three apps when Connect does it just fine.

I’m not sure what any of them look like by default. I basically set out to recreate the way I used RiF for Reddit, which also wasn’t the default.

Of course it’s brief. Lots of stuff happened, but saying that XP was the first is also wrong. Adobe Audition used to be a freeware program for Win95 called CoolEdit… in the 30+years that Adobe has owned it, they have only added VST effects…

As of today, you can make music on any kind of hardware, even obscure handheld devices from before smartphones, and they’ll perform better than the original Logic. There’s nothing technical setting Apple’s “industry standard” apart from freeware these days.

What he said is that he does the majority of his hobby on a Mac, but also installed music apps on Linux.

Apple managed to grab a good chunk of the market by making some well-functioning creative apps early on, but I’m not sure if they really have any advantage over Windows anymore.

Music production on Linux is still somewhat behind, due to limited software. People get paid for making that stuff on other platforms, so Linux developers are scarce.

Some of it is also moving to tablets and phones these days, so the kind of person to buy a Mac only for easy music production will probably just get a dongle for their iPad.

You’ll still need a pc/mac for the full studio experience. Not because of software, but because its difficult to rig an entire music studio into a touchscreen with a single usb port. I mean, sure it’s possible, but you don’t want to. Latency, multiple monitors and a shit load of controllers make it physically impossible unreliable.

On the bright side for Linux, music production is actually very low demanding, so it makes perfect sense to run an old laptop with a low spec distro and still have the same options as the state-of-the-art rig. Young starving artists will probably go that way instead of buying Mac.