Yeah I noticed that. I have a tendency to wave the cursor at something going “And then what’s this over here in this area?” and it’ll make the cursor grow, because I accidentally activate the Where’s The Mouse feature, and then I noticed that sometimes it would grow to slightly different sizes, so…yeah if you keep shaking it it just keeps getting bigger. I can’t seem to get it big enough to span my 1440p monitor’s height, but it will span my 1080p monitor’s height.

Yeah, and it outright isn’t documented.

Because common advice isbto use Mint for beginners.

I really got used to a space mouse with a piece of software called Geomagic Wrap, which we were using to take point clouds from a 3D scanner and turn them into solid models. Part of that process involves turning the model every which way to look for holes and whatnot in it to correct, and being able to use both hands for this really sped up the process. At this point I just cannot stand doing the Click-a click-a click-a click-a required to move a model around with the mouse. And if I’m modeling something large like a building or a landscape in a video game? Forget it. I want to be able to fly the camera around.

One of the things I would do if I had control of FreeCAD would be to reduce the number of workbenches it ships with. Why does every copy come with the Robot workbench? Who is A) working with industrial robot arms and B) using FreeCAD to do so? Especially since it’s “Currently unmaintained?” there was awhile there where it also came with a “ship” workbench which could generate a container ship hull with one click. For my purposes I end up hiding the BIM, CAM, Draft, FEM, Inspection, Mesh, Points, and Surface workbenches as I never use them, and it declutters things quite nicely.

FreeCAD has long had open source disease in that it is very powerful and yet a pain in the ass to work with partially through crap UI design.

1.0 includes a lot of changes that address this. They’ve modernized a lot of it, added a lot of missing features, and brought a lot of things up to modern snuff.

There are things I like about FreeCAD better than Fusion360, for example FreeCAD has a spreadsheet built into it. Fusion360, last time I used it, had a kind of underbaked Parameters list that you couldn’t even sort, the ability to have a spreadsheet for your dimensions and such.

All Parametric CAD software is complicated to use, you need to wrap your head around designing with rules, but once you get that basically all of them unlock.

yes

The only two games I have that much time in are Factorio and Satisfactory.

No probalo.

Fedora KDE, because my preferred distro Mint Cinnamon doesn’t at the moment have good support for things like FreeSync.

Sort of. What that page describes is in the same building as what I’m thinking about.

The thing I’m more nostalgic for was the time when everything had to be a glistening amorphous translucent blob, a bit like the Cingular Wireless logo or the MusicMatch Jukebox logo. And I’m in that era where you can just play MSN messenger sounds and you’ll get an OH MY GOD out of me.

I’ve seen a few seconds of gameplay, but I’m not sure what that game “is.” Is it fun?

I have persuaded The Sims to run on Linux; though if the game wasn’t purchased through Steam it can take some doing. No experience with Cities Skylines. Stardew Valley runs very well, I think ConcernedApe releases Linux native versions. My understanding is Roblox deliberately prevents itself from running on Linux. Minecraft Java edition runs on Linux and you’ll find launchers for it in most package managers. An open source alternative called Minetest or recently changed to Luanti exists, but I know it’s not the one his friends play and that’s mostly the point. Can’t say for Stellaris or Slime Rancher.

My understanding of things like the IME is that its reason for being is mostly benign, it lets enterprise-level IT departments do things like boot computers from across the network and stuff like that. It has no real use to home customers on their private PCs, but it’s included on all systems to simplify engineering; it handles a lot of the early boot process. And it’s always running. The privacy enthusiasts out there who carry a copy of TAILS on their keychains just in case aren’t fond of the fact that there’s a proprietary OS with unrestricted access to memory and networking just sitting there with no way of auditing or monitoring what it was doing.

This has been a thing for AWHILE now, and the whole coreboot thing…Intel, board manufacturers etc. keep their data so locked up that it’s a challenge to build anything that works, so it’s a miracle we have things like Coreboot at all. They largely concentrate on laptops IIRC, and it’s rare to see full fat desktop motherboards that work with Coreboot.

By “desirable motherboard” in this context I mean a standard ATX (or standard size variants) motherboard with a currently supported socket and chipset commonly available on the consumer market. To run Intel 13th or 14th gen, or Ryzen 7000 or 9000. I don’t know if you can just buy an MSI or Asrock etc. board and expect to run Coreboot on them.

What’s the advantage of coreboot? Soothes paranoia mainly. Both Intel and AMD platforms have little black boxes in them that run a separate little OS beneath Windows or Linux that has Ring 0 or similar low-level access to the hardware and could theoretically man in the middle anything done on the machine. Intel’s is MINIX based, it’s called the Intel Management Engine, and it genuinely is a little bit bile inducing reading what it has access to. AMD does have a simlar technology.

In terms of performance, system stability etc? Very little. Once the kernel is loaded and in control of the hardware the BIOS doesn’t effect much AFAIK.

I’m not very familiar with it but I’ve not heard much about even AM4 boards being supported. I think of Coreboot (or it’s completely binary blob free fork LibreBoot) and I think of either Purism or System76 and in both cases for their laptops.

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This kind of thing (the “main” operating system is built atop a secret basement full of god knows what) isn’t restricted to x86 either. On a Raspberry Pi, Linux running on the ARM cores is a second class citizen to ThreadX running on the VideoCore processor.

My understanding is there are few desirable motherboards that support Coreboot.

Don’t like Intel Management Engine? or processors that shit themselves? go AMD.

Mindustry looks like one of those games you’d find on those “1001 Games!” cds back in the 90s thatbalways had the Hugo Whodunit games and the shareware version of Wolfenstein 3D. It has that MS Paint look to it.

The one I remember being really weird was the PS3.

A lot of 2D games made their art that way; earlier I called Factorio “Age of Empires with a 3 pack a day habit” because AoE’s graphics are 2D sprites made from 3D graphics. I mean, think about it, would you rather draw the little villager walking frame by frame by hand in a pixel art editor in 8 or 16 different angles depending on if the model is symmetrical, or model and animate it in 3D and then frame capture it from several angles? Hell there’s probably tools to do the latter automatically. I bet Blender can just do that.