I couldn’t find the specific reasoning for this change, but I feel like QEMU is probably just too holistic to be appropriate for this kind of project.

QEMU needs to be able to emulate all the ARM hardware with enough fidelity to boot a naive operating system. For the purposes of running userspace applications almost all of that is not required, you really just need to convert one ABI to the other and translate the instructions. No need to handle firmware, the MMU, interrupts, disks etc.

Yes! It used to be so hit or miss with Wine, but I played WoW in it around the same time and it was crazy that it worked (at least most of the time).

There’s just no reason to do this work. Even if you ignore the fork’s controversial maintainer, and just favor the fact that it’s maintained at all (which is what the proposal’s author is suggesting) just… Why?

X11 is basically over at this point, why throw a last minute wrench into the existing, working Xorg infrastructure?

When we dropped XFree86 back in the day there were license issues, packaging issues and a real alternative didn’t exist - all justifying the effort to switch. None of these are a problem today.

Unless you can launch offensive weapons at other racers or eat shrooms to speed up or literally launch your car off of a vertical ramp into the sky and it turns into a glider in Forza, I’m pretty sure these games aren’t even in the same genre.

I agree. I have become more amenable to things like Flatpak or Podman/Docker to keep the base system from being cluttered up with weird dependencies, but for the most part it doesn’t seem like there’s a huge upside to going full atomic if you’re already comfortable.

Hell yeah, congrats! I get back into DCSS every few years but I have only escaped with the orb once, a lucky MiFi run. Just getting there is huge!

GNOME 3 introduced the current shell paradigm where you don’t really have a start menu but a variety of searches, integrated indicators, per-app desktops with a dock etc.

Before, it was far more conventional experience like Plasma/Windows/Cinnamon are now. GNOME 2 was forked to be the MATE desktop if you want to check it out.

Basically just start with what you’re aiming to enable and work backwards (as you’ve started to do). With judicious use of grep find out where that symbol is defined. If it’s in arch configs for other arches but not your own, it’s probably that.

There may be better tools out there to do this, but in my experience just sleuthing it out a bit will answer your question. The Kconfig system can be complex, but the files are pretty readable.

It’s possible that it’s not supported on your arch.

The only thing Samba is really great for is interop with Windows. If that’s not an issue, Dolphin can browse SFTP directly by adding it as a network share (you may need to setup a password-less key pair to avoid having to login). SSHFS is a similar option and works even if the client is totally naive (it just looks like any other mounted FS).

Right. GCC -f optimizations are basically like “how hard are we going to try to be clever” and are, I believe, orthogonal to the actual instructions used. Machine dependent args start with -m, like -march or -mavx etc.

I feel guilty about it, but I appreciate the monthly pass. I played EUIV for exactly one month, at a total cost of like $7 (got the base game for free at some point) with all the bells and whistles. It seemed like a good compromise because you’d have to pay it for years at this point to cover the DLC out right, but it is a disgusting level of rent seeking behavior.

Now it bothers me that I’d need to put another $7-$10 into the machine to access those saves, but not as much as if I’d throw down hundreds of dollars on it to own the content for a 10 year old game.

For XP, the machine KVM presents as may be too new, but that isn’t an issue with non-virtualized QEMU.

TIOBE is weighted toward languages that have existed for a long time by virtue of counting lines written / skilled engineers etc. but the speed at which Rust is climbing that list is a better indicator. Also, a lot of the languages above it wouldn’t be appropriate for anything like a DE.

But you’re right, it’s hyped, I just think the hype is real.

This is a weird take. Rust is very popular and is the current heir apparent to C for systems level stuff. It’s a great choice to start a new DE/toolkit.

As for the rest, you’re right the end user doesn’t care about the language their graphical app is in, but the developers fielding their bug reports and making fixes/features sure do.

That trackpad was a game changer for playing KB+M games with a controller, but to be honest sometimes I really miss the right joystick. The trackpad can fake it, but it’s not the same.

If they ever do another standalone controller I’d want it to be like a screen-less Deck. Both joysticks and trackpads and a couple more grips.

Sims 3 was my favorite for the open world and freelance jobs too. Was nice to be able to secure an income without disappearing off the map for 8 hours a day. Was surprised 4 didn’t follow through on that as much but I only played it a little.

My wife plays Sims with cheats all the time and I get that it becomes a fancy interactive dollhouse in that case, but to me the game is all about that progression from bachelor in a one room box to old family man in a mansion.

John Carmack, author of the Doom engine, is a long time Linux user and for a while the policy was to open source the idTech engines once they had moved on.

However, Doom was hugely popular on its own before this, and was actually more pivotal for making Windows a gaming platform (over DOS).

The reason it runs everywhere is a combination of it’s huge popularity, it’s (now) open source and it’s generally low system requirements.

It does that everywhere, even on non .deb distros.

One thing I’d like to suggest is get most of their forward facing apps as Flatpak and let them install software that way instead of using the system package manager (even if it has a GUI). This jibes with others suggesting an immutable base system.

Obviously this may be more of a concern for older kids, but my kid started with Linux and it did fine… Right up until Discord started breaking because it was too old and they didn’t want to tangle with the terminal. Same thing when Minecraft started updating Java versions. Discord and Prismlauncher from Flatpak (along with Proton and Steam now) would have kept them happier with Linux.

As for internet, routers come with parental controls these days too, which have the added advantage of being able to cover phones (at least while not on mobile data). Setting the Internet to be unavailable for certain devices after a certain time on school nights may be a more straightforward route than DE tools.