luciferofastora

@luciferofastora@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bazzite the popular SteamOS-like Linux gets NVIDIA support in Beta⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  because you don’t like a word

  I have no issue with the word, but with the spiteful mentality of “the more people suggest I change it, the less I want to”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bazzite the popular SteamOS-like Linux gets NVIDIA support in Beta⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, and if you click enough links on Wikipedia you always wind up at logic, math, or philosophy. At some point, you are going to have to read new words to learn new things. And it will get increasingly technical as you go deeper.

  Provided you’re willing to dig deep, yes, but Wikipedia usually offers a summary of the term at the top. In the event, I found Wikipedia’s explanation of cloud native much more useful than the link to the ublue page about it, or the CNCF’s definition.

  Scaring folks away to seek out another distro where they will almost certainly have to learn more to get started is hurting your stated cause.

  I don’t have an accurate sense of how much you’d have to learn about bazzite, so I’ll have trust you on this when it comes to the usage. I personally didn’t have difficulties with other distros, but I’m also not entirely new to the OS world, so my experience may be skewed.

  My proximate issue is the pitch, the entry point, the first impression. Evidently, there are people who come across that term and worry that it may mean what “cloud” in many other contexts means: “Your data is somewhere else you have no control over.” And how would they know they’re wrong? If they click on the link, they’re faced with a stack of technical terms they might not understand. Even if they concluded that nothing explicitly says their system will be running in the cloud, how could they trust that conclusion built on unknowns?That insecurity creates an entry barrier for those looking at the website, the impact of which we can’t measure, but that doesn’t have to mean it’s negligible.

  The underlying issue, however, is the philosophy behind doubling down on that. If you’re faced with evidence of misunderstandings, people pointing out that barrier, and make a point of not just ignoring it but explicitly saying “Now I want to keep that barrier even more”, that speaks to a mindset that I personally am strongly opposed to. Handing people guides and saying “here, climb over that barrier on your own” doesn’t fully mitigate that.

  Hence, in absence of personal experience on the usage, I’ll argue from a position of principle. It’s not a mindset I want to endorse, and so I attempt to steer people away from what I perceived as a higher barrier of entry.

  The Bazzite homepage also makes numerous references to it being “installable on all your favorite devices” so it becomes quickly apparent to most folks that it isn’t hosted “in the cloud”.

  Thin clients connected to some cloud-hosted VM are also installable on many devices. Microsoft 365 is available as apps, but still runs in the cloud (but it doesn’t even pitch that, it just says “all in one place” - the mention of cloud is further down the page, after some other feature pitches). How would I know “native” doesn’t mean “lives in the cloud”? It wouldn’t be the first time marketing fudges terms.

  And again, I advise against making assumptions about what becomes apparent to most folks. Most folks aren’t confident in their technical understanding and may err on the side of caution. I’ve tried guiding people through the simplest things, and if there was one detail they weren’t sure they understood, the immediate response was to abort the process for fear of breaking something. A message box pops up and they panic “Aaah what’s happening, what does that mean” because they don’t trust their understanding. I’ve watched people click on some explanation, get confused at some term and resort to fleeing the page back to things they know better…

  I get that you don’t like the term cloud native image

  I have no issue with the term. Technical terms are useful in their respective technical contexts, where people know what they’re a shorthand for. If I talk to a data analyst, I’ll use the term DFM. If I talk to a database engineer, I might use the term denormalisation. But if I talk to a sales manager and use either of those, they’ll stare at me blankly. And that’s what I dislike: Using the term in a context where I feel it’s out of place and is known to cause confusion.

  really a very small piece of a very user friendly pie

  …but may well be the first piece they taste.

  But like I said, my issue isn’t with the piece of pie, but the baking practice: “The more people tell me they don’t like raisins, the more I want to add raisins to spite them.” Their pie may otherwise be delicious, but I still wouldn’t recommend that baker.

  ---

  To put a line under all this, I might give Bazzite a try myself, see how I get along with it, but that won’t change the fact that I find such a spiteful mentality unfit for recommendation.

  I believe in the value of user-friendly presentation, not just systems, because the presentation matters to many users. I also believe that the Linux community at large should present itself more helpful and user-friendly, and comments like the one that sparked the thread don’t help that image.

  I want to see the Linux ecosystem grow, and I believe that requires a willingness to cater to the least technical users as well. Yes, some amount of learning will be inevitable, but the first contact at least should welcome users as simply and comfortably as possible.

  And as a side effect, being more willing to explain and help each other will also help the rest of us. Spite and elitism don’t help anyone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bazzite the popular SteamOS-like Linux gets NVIDIA support in Beta⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You mean the link that aays

  Universal Blue rests on the idea of bringing cloud native patterns to the operating system. We leverage standard cloud tools like the OCI standard images, Docker/Podman, and GitHub to build our images.

  and assumes those terms already mean something to you? Oh wait, cloud native is a link again let’s see…

  CNCF is the open source, vendor-neutral hub of cloud native computing, hosting projects like Kubernetes and Prometheus to make cloud native universal and sustainable.

  Great! Two more technical terms! Oh, there’s another text further down the page.

  As part of the Linux Foundation, we provide support, oversight and direction for fast-growing, cloud native projects, including Kubernetes, Envoy, and Prometheus.

  Nope, still no explanation, but we’ve got another link, this time to an actual definition:

  Cloud native practices empower organizations to develop, build, and deploy workloads in computing environments (public, private, hybrid cloud) to meet their organizational needs at scale in a programmatic and repeatable manner. It is characterized by loosely coupled systems that interoperate in a manner that is secure, resilient, manageable, sustainable, and observable.

  Cloud native technologies and architectures typically consist of some combination of containers, service meshes, multi-tenancy, microservices, immutable infrastructure, serverless, and declarative APIs — this list is non-exhaustive.

  Aaaand it’s another wall of technical terms.

  What is “easy to understand” about this, unless you’re already familiar enough with that specific technical field that it really isn’t an issue in the first place? A definition directed at experts is no explanation, and hitting a reader with a wall of terms they don’t even know how to classify, let alone understand, isn’t very accessible.

  And on that note, you said you couldn’t find a definition of Atomic on Fedora’s site… So I clicked just one link from your posted link there and found this.

  Sorry, I didn’t think I’d have to “Get started” on a particular distro to find a note on what the whole “atomic” thing they advertise is about. Wouldn’t have killed them to put that paragraph on the previous page already, just a small note at the top, to explain the selling point they’re using.

  Linux is going to have a LOT of terms a new user will have to learn. The idea of a cloud native image may cause a misconception, but no more so than any of the other myriad terms a new user will have to learn.

  That’s an issue I’ve complained about before: The entry barrier is too high still. People shouldn’t have to learn a lot of new terms, if at all possible. In that vein, it’s better to start out with distros that require less learning, and if the interest grips you, start learning and exploring from there.

  But if you have to learn terms, it should be ordered from most fundamental and universal to most specific, and I’d put “cloud native” in the back half of that spectrum. You’ll need to know what a file system is, for instance, may need to learn the term distro / distribution and many more, but for the immediate operation of a system, you don’t need to know what OCI, Docker, Podman, Kubernetes, Prometheus, deploying, workloads or “loosely coupled systems that interoperate in a manner that is secure, resilient, manageable, sustainable, and observable” mean.

  So I genuinely do recommend starting out with something less laden with technical terms, and working your way up from there. I started out with Ubuntu, now I’m using Nobara and plan to use my old spare drive to try some other flavours like Silverblue. It’s not that I don’t think the learning isn’t worth it, it’s just that it shouldn’t be frontloaded.

  I read your posted argument from earlier, and I want to believe you when you argue your goal is to push for Linux to be more accessible. But the reality of your arguments seem to tell a different story. You seem more interested in dying on a pointless hills while dissuading interested converts from trying what is one of the most stable and user friendly distros I’ve ever tried.

  My gripe with Bazzite isn’t whether it’s user friendly, but whether its maintainers are. The founder made a point of telling people “the more I see this whining the more I want to keep it on the website”, because it’s an accurate definition, no matter how useless. I like reasonable discussion, I can accept personal disagreement, but what I’m seeing here is a user providing a prime example of the confusion the word causes and the founder replying to the effect of “now I want to use it even more”.

  That’s the exact opposite of accessibility. That’s someone saying “By the way, this is a barrier” and getting the reply “Yes, and people complaining about it makes me want to keep it.” It’s not even “Sorry, this can’t be helped” so much as “I want this barrier to be there” for no good reason.

  So that is a hill I will fight on, not because of the specific term but because of the culture behind it that plagues the tech sphere at large. We’re building walls of technical understanding requirements instead of bridges of explanations. Some walls are reasonable, some necessary, some harmless. Some gaps are too wide for a single bridge to cross, so you’ll need to take a detour over other concepts. But building walls out of spite, along with (not represented here, but also common) scoffing at those looking to build bridges or telling people looking for entry “just scale the wall”, are communication culture issues that serve to isolate rather than integrate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bazzite the popular SteamOS-like Linux gets NVIDIA support in Beta⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Cloud native is the end product too.

  What bearing does it have on use of the end product? If I am a German Native, but move to France, and someone asks me where I live, what difference does it make whether I’m German Native?

  Bazzite isn’t cloud based in the sense of “runs in the cloud”. If you install it on your computer, it runs on your computer. It’s not a cloud resident, in the sense of that analogy, no matter whether it was born there.

  Unless it does, in which case it would seem that the term isn’t quite so clear as you think.

  I don’t care about your issue with the definition of an already defined word.

  My issue isn’t with the definition, but with the implicit assumption that it’s well known or easy to understand, as well as the way it is used. We had that discussion over in the other thread already, but the gist of your replies has always been “I don’t care if the term is useless or can be misunderstood. It’s correct, so it stays.” That stance is my issue.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bazzite the popular SteamOS-like Linux gets NVIDIA support in Beta⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I advise against using Bazzite as a Windows convert, unless you’re happy to do a lot of reading to understand what you’re actually signing up for. The founder doesn’t really care about Windows Gamers (or anyone outside of the professional linux world), according to a comment they made earlier today in response to criticism of the description “cloud native”.

  To save you a click, the conversation was about the description of Bazzite as “cloud native” on the bazzite homepage* can be confusing or even misleading for people who assume it means “will run in the cloud”. The founder explicitly commented they’ll keep doubling down on the term until people no longer complain about it.

  Their argument was that there is an entire foundation for Cloud Native Computing and that the concept is “an incredibly common thing in any professional paid Linux job.” They understand that Windows Gamers in particular might have the aforementioned misconception, but they don’t care if you get it.

  That doesn’t necessarily make Bazzite a bad distro, but I’d be wary about the level of assistance you can expect from people who think that a technical word soup featuring terms like “build our images” and “deploying Linux environments to users” is enough to explain that “cloud native” actually just means the development process and the end product has nothing to do with the cloud.

  ---

  *Specifically, the homepage’s text opens with:
  “Bazzite is a cloud native image built upon Fedora Atomic Desktops that brings the best of Linux gaming to all of your devices - including your favorite handheld.”
  I don’t know why they’d lead with the development method, rather than describing what the OS actually does, but apparently that’s what they care most about.

  As an aside, I don’t see any obvious description what “atomic” means on the Fedora Atomic site either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doom on a CAPTCHA is the most frustrating though admittedly raddest way to prove your humanity to an algorithm⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Actually, can we do that IRL?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk says too many game studios are owned by giant corporations so his giant corporation is going to start a studio to 'make games great again'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I hope he loses everything he holds dear: Public respect, wealth, his entourage of yes-men, powerful allies…

  Not because I’d wish suffering on anyone, but because all these things enable him to keep doing damage and I want that to stop.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dragon Age: The Veilguard's impressive tresses feature '50,000 individual strands per character for over 100 hairstyles'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey, don’t apologise or defend yourself for loving something! I’m pretty sure you’ll find plenty of people sharing your enthusiasm, if not about this game then about others. Loving something is wonderful and I hope you have tons more fun with it 😊

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dragon Age: The Veilguard's impressive tresses feature '50,000 individual strands per character for over 100 hairstyles'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So ~80 hours for a completionist run? That’s decent

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'It even breaks my heart a bit': Denuvo pushes back on its haters, says Steam forums are a 'very toxic, very hostile environment'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The willingness to be responsible for consequences does factor in. If you round the corner and crash into someone, you probably didn’t intend to, but whether you’ll be an ass about it and yell at the other person or whether you’ll apologise and check they’re alright makes a difference.

  In a perfect-information-setting, intent equals result: If I know what my actions will cause and continue to carry them out, the difference between “primary objective” and “accepted side-effect” becomes academic. But in most cases, we don’t have perfect information.

  I feel like the intent-approach better accounts for the blind spots and unknowns. I’ll try to construct two examples to illustrate my reeasoning. Consider them moral dilemmas, as in: arguing around them “out of the box” misses the point.

  Ex. 1:
  A person is trying to dislodge a stone from their shoe, and in doing so leans on a transformator box to shake it out. You see them leaning on a trafo and shaking and suspect that they might be under electric shock, so you try to save them by grabbing a nearby piece of wood and knocking them away from the box. They lose balance, fall over and get a concussion.
  Are you to blame for their concussion, because you knocked them over without need, despite your (misplaced) intention to save them?

  Ex. 2:
  You try to kill someone by shooting them with a handgun. The bullet misses all critical organs, they’re rushed to a hospital and in the process of scanning for bullet fragments to remove, a cancer in the earliest stages is discovered and subsequently removed. The rest of the treatment goes without complications and they make a speedy and full recovery.
  Does that make you their saviour, despite your intent to kill them?

  In both cases, missing information and unpredictable variables are at play. In the first, you didn’t know they weren’t actually in danger and couldn’t predict they’d get hurt so badly. In the second, you probably didn’t know about the tumor and couldn’t predict that your shot would fail to kill them. In both cases, I’d argue that it’s your intent that matters for moral judgement, while the outcome is due to (bad) “luck” in the sense of “circumstances beyond human control coinciding”. You aren’t responsible for the concussion, nor are you to credit with saving that life.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'It even breaks my heart a bit': Denuvo pushes back on its haters, says Steam forums are a 'very toxic, very hostile environment'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I was responding to the “Look, they’re all nice people” defense you quoted, not contradicting you. I agree with you in principle.

  ---

  I don’t consider “misguided” a valid defence.

  My view of morality is largely centered on intent, so “I thought it would be a good thing” is a valid defence (though there is also a degree of responsibility to check assumptions; if you never made any effort to check if it actually is a good thing, that’s negligence)

  So it’s hard to be good when your salary depends on you being bad.

  …and by extension, when your livelihood depends on you being bad, yes. Not everyone’s livelihood depends on their salary, but for many people it does. If it’s hard to find a job that can pay the bills, I don’t fault people for the human reflex of justifying bad things to yourself in the name of survival.

  (But if they do have a choice and choose to enrich themselves at the expense of others, they’re obviously pricks - just saying this might not apply to all the devs involved here).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'It even breaks my heart a bit': Denuvo pushes back on its haters, says Steam forums are a 'very toxic, very hostile environment'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can be a great person and still write garbage software. Whether you’re just doing it because you need money or whether you’re misguided and think it’s actually good, that doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person (and remember: It’s hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it).

  Doesn’t make the software less garbage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Players are now less "accepting" that games will be fixed, say Paradox, after "underestimating" the reaction to Cities: Skylines 2's performance woes⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, your counterexample is already the epitome of exploitation, so I’m not sure citing it would exonerate Paradox here :D

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Players are now less "accepting" that games will be fixed, say Paradox, after "underestimating" the reaction to Cities: Skylines 2's performance woes⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, your counterexample is already the epitome of exploitation, so I’m not sure citing it would exonerate Paradox here :D

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor gets Denuvo DRM removed, plus performance improvements⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fallen Order ran well for me on my potato (GTX 970 + some 4th gen i5) back when I played it. I’m not sure how my new rig will handle Survivor, but I’m starting to be cautiously optimistic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Beta adds new shortcut key to save a clip of recent gameplay⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s not even correct. I said “not all that useful” and then “next to useless”. Never “absolutely useless”.

  It’s a simplification to condense the core point:
  People say “I like this! This is useful!”
  You say “It’s not all that useful”
  I reply “It is to me”
  You double down “next to useless”
  I say “For you maybe, but for me it’s very useful”

  The essence is that it’s not very useful to you, but it is for others. Yet you steamroll over that (subjective) take to double down on how shitty it is.

  The whole point of this feature is to provide something built into Steam that works without a whole bunch of fiddling like other recording software.

  It does. It’s a built-in utility to record gameplay clips. That’s neat.

  It currently fails at that on Linux because the implementation of it is half-assed.

  It’s lacking one feature, yes, but I’d not call that a failure if plenty of people seem fine without it.

  That is my position.

  Rich, coming from “You’re wrong when you say it’s useful”.

  End of conversation.

  “I’m right, you’re wrong and I refuse to hear otherwise”

  Alright then. I figured you were genuinely confused and thought maybe seeing the other perspective could help clear things up. Guess you’d have to actually look for that to work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Beta adds new shortcut key to save a clip of recent gameplay⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Your opinion is posited as an absolute: “This is useless” suggests you consider it useless in general. People arguing otherwise are challenging that general claim by providing examples where it can be useful.

  They’re not invalidsting your subjective perception that it’s not particularly useful for your primary use case. In fact, I’ve seen explicit acknowledgements that your use case will require different tools. If anything, your doubling down on the assertion that it is useless invalidates those that do find it useful.

  For contrast, consider the more personal phrasing “This isn’t really useful to me, because I generally clip conversations and it doesn’t capture my mic.” This both respects that other people may find it useful and makes it clear why you don’t.

  ---

  Aside from the semantics, you might be able to work around the issue by customising your audio setup, which is something I don’t know if Windows lets you. I don’t know what exactly it captures and what audio server you use, but if it can be pointed at a specific virtual device, you might be able to loop back your audio input to that device and use a combine-stream to route your other audio both to that virtual and your actual pysical output device.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Beta adds new shortcut key to save a clip of recent gameplay⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you talking about in-game voice chat, that should be available to the game to record, or a third party tool that probably shouldn’t? If the game doesn’t need your mic, it shouldn’t access it; if it doesn’t access it, it’s not part of the gameplay recording.

  That doesn’t mean it’s “not all that useful”, Linux or otherwise, just because it doesn’t cover your specific use case. I can definitely see myself using it to record brief clips - on linux - without having to run OBS in the background.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Deadlock from Valve may need this quick-fix on Linux⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To save you a click: Crashes on connecting with servers may be related to the default vm.max_map_count being too low. You can increase it temporarily with sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=1048576 or permanently set that value in your “/etc/sysctl.conf” file or “/etc/sysctl.d” depending on your distribution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vanguard takes screenshots of your PC every time you play a game⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How would that invalidate their findings?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fortnite will let you hide "confrontational" emotes, including the game's most popular⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In SWTOR, there was a similar thing where max level players from one faction would camp out near story objective areas of the other. Eventually, someone would go back to the fleet and call for help, you’d get the same counter-posse, they’d duke it out and it was a lot of fun…

  …for the max level players participating in this. For my lower level self just trying to advance my storylines, getting barricaded was fucking awful. All I could do was sit there until hopefully some help arrived or the opponents would get bored. Or, of course, I could do something more fun with my time.

  Like quitting the game and playing something that doesn’t allow some assholes to stonewall my progress.

  Yes, I could have started over on a PvE server or played a different character or looked for something else to do in game, but none of that fixes “I want to advance this character’s story and can’t because some people think shooting down defeneless noobs is fun”.

  They did eventually introduce a patch that capped your max level and equipment power based on a planet’s intended level range (e.g. if the planet had quests in the 16-20 range, your level would get scaled down to 24) which made camping and killing noobs less viable and seemed to have fixed that (though I never really checked, I didn’t play as much anymore by that point).

  If the fun of assembling a counter attack gets sacrificed for the sake of that counter attack no longer being needed, that’s a win in my book. People who enjoy PvP can play PvP matches (though idk if WoW has that) and the rest of us can deal with the occasional “encounter a hostile player and stare at each other, silently trying to determinr whether you’ll both go your ways or whether you’ll pull a proper FOR THE EMPIRE and hope they don’t have any friends nearby that you didn’t see”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨$70 titles are doomed to go “the way of the dodo” says Saber Interactive CEO⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Isn’t it a recurring pattern with rapid growth in kew industry sectors? The industry eventually outpaces the actual market, is carried on for a bit by momentum, and then finally the bubble between what they’re investing to get and the actual earnings grows too large and starts deflating, so investors start trying to cut the losses. And it’s the workers that pay the bill, because they suddenly need a new employer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨$70 titles are doomed to go “the way of the dodo” says Saber Interactive CEO⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Palworld copies so much from Pokemon that I’m just waiting for Nintendo to finally bring a lawsuit

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Last year's top guilty favourite action game has received a big free combat update⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wouldn’t have been hard to name the game in the title, at the very least