Definitely give Ruthless a go, I love it… reminds me of early game ARPG’s on higher difficulties. Positioning really matters, you have to adapt based on what you get. It seems to have been the proving ground for PoE2’s new tempo.

I was going to do an origin character as a solo play-through and a custom character for a group play-through with my mates, but now I might do it the other way around… which means hours in the character creator! Ha.

Often the question marked as a duplicate isn’t a duplicate, just the person marking it as such didn’t spend the time to properly understand the question and realise how it differs. I also see lots of answers to questions mis-understanding the question or trying to force the person asking down their own particular preference, and get tons of votes whilst doing it.

Don’t get me wrong, some questions are definitely useful - and some go above-and-beyond - but on average the quality isn’t great these days and hasn’t been for a while.

Google’s first quarter 2023 report shows they made massive profits off vast revenue due to advertising.

It is about control though. The thing that caught my eye is that they’re saying that only “approved” browsers will be able to access these WEI sites. So what does that mean for crawlers/scrapers? That the big tech companies on the approval board will be able to lock potential competitors out of accessing the web - new browsers, search engines, etc. but much more importantly… Machine Learning.

Google’s biggest fear right now is that ML systems will completely eliminate most people’s reason to use Google’s search, and therefore their main source of revenue will plummet. And they’re right to be scared, it’s already starting to happen and it’s showing us very quickly just how bad Google’s search results are.

So this seems to me like an attempt to control things from that side. It’s essentially the “big boys” trying to consolidate and firm-up their hold in the industry and not let newcomers rival them, as with ML the barrier to entry has never been lower.

Red Hat saying that argument in-particular shows they’ve pivoted their philosophy significantly, it’s a seemingly subtle change but is huge - presumably due to the IBM acquisition, but maybe due to the pressures in the market right now.

It’s the classic argument against FOSS, which Red Hat themselves have argued against for decades and as an organisation proved that you can build a viable business on the back of FOSS whilst also contributing to it, and that there was indirect value in having others use your work. Only time will tell, but the stage is set for Red Hat to cultivate a different relationship with FOSS and move more into proprietary code.

Don’t roll your own if you can help it, just use a distribution dedicated for use as a thin client. I was co-incidentally just looking into this last week and came across ThinStation which looks really good. There are other distro’s too, search for “linux thin client”.

I personally found Fedora to be rock solid, and along with Ubuntu provided the best hardware support out of the box on all my computers - though it’s been a couple of years since I used it. I did end up on Ubuntu non-LTS in the end as I now run Ubuntu LTS on my servers and find having the same systems to be beneficial (from a knowledge perspective).

I hear they have improved performance now though

It’s still not great. Better, but still slow enough to make you question whether you’ve actually launched the app or not.

I did start with it and use it on a laptop, honestly I think that’s where it shines the most - but I guess the more windows you open the less useful it becomes. I think if there was a way to do the expose-like “view all things at once” (Super key) that worked across all workspaces, I’d be all over them. But as there’s no easy way to live view everything on all workspaces, I just don’t use them.

Yes, I love it! Really it’s the MacOS-like “Expose” feature that I find to be essential.

I would advise against using workspaces though, I find those actually sort of go against the core idea of it IMO. There are a few things I’d really like added to it, but for the most-part when you get into it it’s great.

My main desktop I have 4 monitors (I know, but once you start a monitor habit it’s really hard to not push it to the limit - this is only the beginning!) It roughly breaks down into:

1. Primary work (usually a full-screen editor)
2. Terminals (different windows, some for the project, some monitoring)
3. Browsers - documentation, various services, my own code output
4. Communication - signal, discord, what’s app (ugh), etc.

The key, literally, is you just press the Super key and boom, you can see everything and if you want to interact with something it’s all available in just one click or a few of key presses away.

On my laptop with just one screen, I find it equally invaluable, and is actually where I started to use it the most - once again, just one press of Super and I can see all the applications I have open and quickly select one or launch something.

It’s replaced Alt + Tab for me - and I know they’ve made that better, and added Super + Tab, but none of them are as good as just pressing Super.

The things I’d really love added to it are:

• Better tiling (including quarter tiling). It’s a sad state of affairs when Windows has far better tiling than Gnome.
• Super then Search, I’d like it to filter the windows it’s showing and shrink/hide the others, along with a simple way to choose one using the keyboard.
• Rather than having an icon for each window, I also want the tooltip information to always be shown (e.g. vs code project) and for standard apps to expose better information for that (e.g. Gnome Terminal to expose its prompt/pwd) and/or have a specific mechanism by which apps could communicate.
• Adding Quicksilver-like functionality to the launcher/search would be amazing. e.g.
  • Super
  • Sp… (auto-populates Spotify)
  • Tab
  • P… (auto-populates Play/Pause)
  • Return
• Session restoration - it just doesn’t work at the moment for some reason. Some apps do, some don’t. Some go to their correct position/size, some don’t.

Are there any good alternatives?

We’ve started using Jitsi for video/screen-sharing and that’s going well so far - but it’s based very much around the “corporate meeting” concept, rather than “playing D&D with mates” or “online gaming with people”.

Mumble is decent enough for voice comms, but of course lacks video, which for my friend group is a deal-breaker. While the audio quality is noticably better most of the time, its noise suppression is not as good as Discord. It does have text chat, but lacks the utility of Discord’s chat - which we use in D&D for sharing information, images, note-taking, etc.

Things do game tracking/voice like Steam, Xbox Live, PSN, etc. but then each only supports their own platforms and services - whereas Discord is common to all.

I think what DIscord does well is bring together a few really established, tried and tested technologies, under one roof and integrates them seamlessly. There is definitely value in that, and I would be really interested in an open source/self-hosted equivalent.

My main concerns with Discord are:

1. They inevitably ramp up income earning opportunities and therefore eventually compromise the system.
2. It can’t be catalogued/searched easily.
3. It seems like a near-perfect platform for harvesting data for ML (and the platform has some traction with the ML community already).

I don’t think consolidation, compromise, and coming together in one common direction are the hallmarks of open source at all!

Filesystems, service management/startup, audio output, desktop environment, package formats/management/distribution, programming languages, shell, and so on, and so on - all have many, many options.

Open source is, if nothing else, fractured… it’s about choice, flexibility, and re-inventing the wheel not because it really needs to be re-invented, but because it’s fun to do so and useful to have something that perfectly fits your requirements.

We’ve made room for many package formats for decades, and will continue to do so for decades to come I’m sure.

Tim Berners-Lee would be interesting I think, given the direction he’s gone into personal ownership/control of data.

Same - for Windows it’s by far and away the best PDF reader for me. It’s shocking how far down the bloat rabbit hole Adobe Reader has gone!

It does feel like there’s been a shift, especially in organisations that use the work of others for their own benefit (e.g. open source, community produced content, etc). It seems like there’s been a real move to have their cake and eat it.

Oracle has just made an aggressive move with regards to Java licensing too, they’re now charging as much as $15/month/employee to use their Java runtime on the desktop/server. Their FAQ even points you to OpenJDK if you don’t want to pay, which is strange - it makes me think the relationship between Oracle and the OpenJDK will be ending sometime in the not-so-distant future. There are several Java projects I’ve done where that would just become non-viable as it was a project for a single department in a large company.

Software developers are one of the most altruistic groups of people - it’s amazing just how much time and effort they put into things that they get no financial return on, only the love of actually doing it. And people that dedicate their time and effort to online communities, education, and so on are equally amazing.

But I think it’s time to stop being so naive and realise that many large corporate entities are abusing this relationship for their own gain.