Don’t know anything about this particular case so while “social engineering to create a backdoor” is certainly a possibility, so is the more straightforward explanation that it is drama about real or perceived problems in the nix community. I think that it’s dangerous to dismiss this altogether because of the recent xz debacle.
You should, there’s a lot of cool stuff going on in the Morrowind community and now is a really good time to get (back) into the game. Province: Cyrodiil, which has adding cyrodiil as based on Morrowind-era lore to the game as a goal, is set to release have its first major release later this year. I’ve also been getting into tes3mp lately which is a fork of OpenMW for multiplayer.
As a big fan of the neverwinter nights community,
You might appreciate this April fools joke from the OpenMW team then :D
This might not be what you mean when you say “addictive”, but since I’ve been addicted to it for the last half year or so, I’m gonna suggest it anyway: Morrowind.
While the original came out in 2002 for Windows and later Xbox, there’s been a fan remake of the engine which runs on linux (and windows and macos) called OpenMW.
It’s an open world role playing game about exploring the island of Vvardenfell, which is a strange and alien place that’s easy to lose yourself in. Most of the wildlife is made up of insect- or dinosaur like creatures. There are forests made up of giant mushrooms, and ancient wizard lords who use magic to grow mushrooms into buildings that you have to be able to fly to navigate. It’s a world with a rich history, featuring several different religions, cultures and overlapping and competing political structures.
Despite its age, it is to this day a game with a very active modding community which can extend and improve the games mechanics and visuals. It also features what is probably the longest running active modding project, Tamriel rebuilt which seeks to add the rest of the province of Morrowind to the game. It’s about half way done and has basically another game worth of content in it at this point.
The problem is that when everyone is using their right to deny access to their works to make people give them money, and there is only so much money you can reasonably spend on entertainment and so on per month, people end up abstaining from a lot of things they could otherwise have taken part in for no extra cost.
I think that the things we pirate have a value: music, movies and games have a value because they are cultural products and vulture is important, software like photoshop has a value because it is a useful tool. Putting up barriers to accessing these things means destroying this value. Having a system where the main way to make money of e.g. music is to paywall it has the “destruction” of a lot of value as its outcome. In some ways streaming platforms like spotify are better in this regard but then that means giving the platform a lot of power over music discovery for example. Spotify doesn’t really do a good job of paying its artists either which is its supposed ethical advantage over piracy.
I think that a system where we should abstain from things that are basically free to reproduce (i.e. things you can pirate) is dumb. There are many movies that I probably wouldn’t pay money to but that I’ve pirated. The companies that own the rights to the movie don’t lose any sale they would have otherwise made but I get whatever enjoyment I get from watching the movie at least, so it’s a net win.
When I pay may bills at the end of the month I also put some money towards paying for things that I’ve pirated that I like, usually with a focus on smaller creators. It doesn’t really feel meaningful to pay for a marvel movie for example. It’s not really a perfect system but neither is artificially limiting the access to digital media.
Part of Linux culture is customizing your system. Linux allows you to do much more with your computer, but some of these things require tinkering or might cause you to break your setup. If you don’t tinker much things will most likely be stable, but having the ability to tinker is for me a major part of the appeal. What are you hoping to get out of using linux? It’s a good alternative if you wanna make an old computer run more smoothly, if you care about privacy or if you don’t want to have to pay for your operating system, and if any of those are your main reason go for it and it will probably work out smoothly. If you’re interested in linux because it seems “cool” or “fun” you’re probably gonna have to do some tinkering so in that case you should be prepared to edit some files, read some instructions and possibly ask for help online.
Download a popular movie and keep your computer on for a while 🤷♂️
Although, seeding stuff that isn’t popular is also important. I don’t know what you’re seeding but if no one is leeching maybe there aren’t a whole lot of other people seeding either. When someone does leech, they might be very happy that you’re there keeping that one torrent alive.
I can recommend fd to everyone frustrated with find, it has a much more intuitive interface imo, and it’s also significantly faster.
UltiSnips is fantastic
For work gitlab is fine, I’m sure your company can get the accounts verified for example. At least it’s not microsoft
Use the terminal mostly anyway, but navigating deeply nested folders when you have to double click is slightly annoying so I can see the appeal.
I agree, but you don’t need nixos if that’s all you want since you can get nix-shell on most linux distros
My laptop has a fn lock that you can toggle, it can be very convenient to switch to f-key mode when working with some applications but most of the time I’m using volume or brightness keys.
Rust can use all basic C data types, but it can’t use C++ classes, in any straightforward way at least.
It’s not that much of a strain since it only handles DNS traffic.
When you go to e.g. programming.dev, you computer needs to know the actual IP and not just domain name so it asks a DNS server and recieves an answer like 172.67.137.159 for example. The pihole will just route the traffic to a real DNS server if it’s a normal website or give a unkown ip kind of answer if it’s a blacklisted domain. Actually transmitting the website which is the bulk of trafic is handled without the piholes involvement.
I’d say that stuff like this happens less often on windows, but it’s also worse when it does because you have fewer resources to fix problems when you do run into them
I’m sure there are ways to make it more convenient to use a terminal with dyslexia but I’m gonna guess that it’s always going to be a bit of an uphill battle. It might make more sense to use a gui in that case for many applications. Conversly, it’s also good to make sure you have a proper terminal interface as well for disability reasons, but also for the convenience that a terminal interface can provide for people who are familiar with the terminal.
Fair enough, I’m not against people making guis as well for people who prefer them for whatever reason, my point is that people don’t just prefer terminals because of elitism or something. I imagine terminals can be better than guis for some disabilities as well.
Well right now most people develop apps supporting x86 and leaves everything else behind. If they’re supporting x86 + arm, maybe adding riscv as a third option would be a smaller step than adding a second architecture