As someone who bought Half Life 2 when it was released …

I only remember people being excited about Steam, Web stores weren’t a thing back then and they were the future! (It was the following years of audio and ebook stores locking stuff down and evapourating that taught us to hate it).

Game/Audio CD DRM hacking the kernel and breaking/massively slowing down your PC was pretty common back then and Steam’ s DRM didn’t do that.

The HL2 disc installer didn’t require you to install Steam, once installed it asked you to setup Steam and there was a sticker under the DVD with the Steam code for you to enter.

You were then rewarded with a copy of HL2 Deathmatch and Counterstrike Source.

Steam wasn’t always on DRM, back then ADSL/DSL was relatively new and alot of people were still stuck on Dial Up modems.

Steam let you sign in and authorize your games for 30 days at which point you would need to log into Steam again. This was incredibly helpful feature for young me.

Basically Epic like every other publisher has created their own launcher/store.

They aren’t trying to compete on features and instead using profits from their franchise to buy market share (e.g. buying store exclusives).

The tone and strategy often comes off as aggressive and hostile.

For example Valve was concerned Microsoft were going to leverage their store to kill Steam. Valve has invested alot in adding windows operability to Linux and ensuring Linux is a good gaming platform. To them this is the hedge against agressive Microsoft business practices.

The Epic CEO thinks Windows is the only operating system and actively prevents Linux support and revoked Linux support from properties they bought.

As a linux user, Valve will keep getting my money and I literally can’t give it to Epic because they don’t want it.

If you signup to social media it will pester you for your email contacts, location and hobbies/interests.

Building a signup wizard to use that information to select a instance would seemto be the best approach.

The contacts would let you know what instance most of your friends are located (e.g. look up email addresses).

Topic specific instance, can provide a hobby/interests selection section.

Lastly the location would let you choose a country specific general instance.

It would help push decentralisation but instead of providing choice your asking questions the user is used to being asked.

Thats two hundred years and would cover the end of Plantagenet reign and the Tudor era.

Henry VIII reign happened during that period, at the beginning of your time period everyone would be catholic and at the end Queen Mary of Scotts was executed because the idea of a Catholic on the throne was unthinkable.

The UK is littered with castles and estates, normally they focus on specific historic events which happened at that location.

Nvidia drivers don’t tend to be as performant under linux.

With AMD instead of using the AMD VLK driver, you would use the RADV (developed largely by valve). Which petforms better.

Every AMD card under linux supports OpenCL (the driver is more based on graphics card architecture) and you install it very easily. Googling it with windows found pages of errors and missing support.

Blender supports OpenCL. I bet the 2x improvement is Blender being able to ofload rendering to the AMD graphics card.

Also this represents the biggest headache in Linux, lots of gamers insist they can only use Nvidia cards. Nvidia treats linux as an afterthought as best or deliberately sabotages things at worse.

AMD embraced open source and so Linux land is much nicer on AMD (and to a less extent Intel).

The results here will probably be a DxVK quirk, lots of “Nvidia optimised” games have game engines doing weird things and the Nvidia driver compensates. DxVK has been identifying that to produce “good” vulkan calls.

If its for work I would suggest picking a “stable” distribution like Debian, Kubuntu or OpenSuse.

A lot of people recommend Arch or Fedora but the focus of those is getting the very latest releases, which increases your chance of stuff breaking.

A lot of people will suggest niche distributions, those can be great for specific needs but generally you will always find Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL support for commercial apps.

I would also suggest looking at the KDE Desktop, many distributions default to Gnome but it is unique in how it works, KDE (or XFCE) will provide a desktop similar to Windows 11.

Lastly I would suggest looking at Crossover Linux by Codeweavers.

Linux has something called WINE, its an attempt to implement the Windows 95 - 11 API’s so windows applications can run on linux.

WINE is how the Steam Deck/Linux is able to play Windows games. Valve embedded it into Steam and called it “Proton”.

WINE is primarily developed by Codeweavers and they provide the Crossover application that makes setting up and running a Windows application really easy.

People will mention Lutris but that has a far higher learning curve.

There is an application database so you can see in advance if your applications would work: https://appdb.winehq.org/

Wikipedia lists all 12 subs as having Rolls Royce Pressured Water Reactors.

Your PWR reuse idea is is kind of where Rolls Royce is looking to go with Small Modular Reactors (https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx).

I suspect refurbishing decades old PWR reactors would be far more expensive than just building new ones, for example a SpaceX Merlin engine costs $1 million and a Blue Origin BE-4 costs $15 million. Nasa argued it would be ‘cheaper’ to reuse Shuttle components for the Space Launch System (SLS). Refurbishing Shuttle RS-25 engines has cost Nasa $50 million dollars per engine, restarting a production line is costing $100 million for each new RS-25 engine.

SpaceX are launching 26-52 satellites at a time and have sustained 3 launches a week for most of the year.

The satellites are in a Low Earth Orbit, without constant thrust, atmospheric drag will force them to re enter earths atmosphere within a few months. This means they aren’t adding to junk in space.

Unlike Nasa, ULA, Arriannespace, RoscosMos, etc… SpaceX have always performed 2nd Stage Deorbit burns, so they aren’t adding to Space junk by launching either.

The Low Earth Orbit is to ensure low latency and the need for constant thrust means the satellites have a short life expectancy by design. That is why SpaceX fought to keep the satellites as cheap as possible (e.g. $250k)

First stage booster reuse and fairing reuse means the majority of the launch cost is the second stage ($15 million).

The whole lot is privately funded

SpaceX have funded it privately. It apparently started operating at a profit this year.

The issue is end to end encryption.

The law change requires messaging applications to be able to provide messages between people using their service.

In the 00’s, messaging applications would have a secure connection between themselves and person A and anouther secure connection between themselves and Person B.

Person A would encrypt the message, send it to the service, who would decrypt it, open a connection to Person B, encrypt the message and send to Person B.

So if the police got a warrent for communications of Person B (say the police think the person is involved in human trafficking), then the messaging service could provide all messages sent to Person B.

Message services have taken themselves out of the loop, Person A now encrypts the message and sends directly to Person B. So the police appear with a warrent and the message service shrugs its shoulders since it hasno means to get the data.

The law effectively requires messaging services to design the apps/service so they can comply with a warrent.

The issue is less encryption and more the balance between your right to privacy and states right to intrude.

This is why banks aren’t upset, they aren’t talking about back dooring encryption and bank encryption is between you and the bank so they don’t have to do/say anything.

I don’t think its aged well.

This game looked incredible for the time and introduced a rail gun sniper rifle you could one shot kill people with.

This map let you camp out and be a sniper but it was possible to overwhelm the sniper so the game stayed fluid and teams had to support their sniper.

Quake, HL2 Deathmatch, Counterstrike had similar weapons but quickly filled with people who could launch themselves 100ft in the air and headshot someone half a map away through a window which is why single shot weapons faded out of FPS games.

If you try multiplayer on some of these games, the skill level of opponents is even higher, they know every trick and execute them flawlessly. This destroys the reason the map was so good.

Playing the sniper in 4 player borderlands story is probably the closest you would get to the original experience.

Natural scrolling is the first thing I disable when forced to use a Mac, windows, gnome, kde, xfce, etc… all scroll in one direction.

Macos has a unique keyboard and a lot of unique non obvious and non discoverable behaviour. For example I use a lot of windows laptops, left and right click involve pushing the trackpad downon the left or right. Someone had to show me right click on a Macbook was a two finger touch. These deliberate non standard behaviours make switching devices really annoying.

I would argue KDE defaults should follow the most common behaviour across multiple platforms, with the option to implement specific quirks.

The move to default double click brings the KDE default into alignment with other platforms (single click isn’t the default anywhere else).

I would suggest a bigsur global theme that implements macos keyboard shortcuts, mouse actions, etc… would be a better compromise.

Doesn’t the fact you have to use a separate mouse tell you the design is poor?

The better approach would be to detect clicks on the left and right of the trackpad as left/right buttons and support two finger right clicking.

I have had a vareity of HP, Dell, etc… laptops. The trackpads will do gesture stuff but you can clearly feel a left and right button if you push down on the trackpad (e.g. push on left side for left button).

Tesla actually market it as a positive.

Car manufacturers have to setup different manufacturing lines to provide different feature levels. Tesla argue this makes them more expensive. Tesla cars have all features installed, just disabled and the optional extra packages are cheaper compared to their rivals as a result.

To be honest there is a certain logic, if you’ve ever been in a Ford Focus LX (bottom range) its pretty clear they had to spend quite a bit of money on more basic systems. I honestly thought each LX was sold at a loss

I have a Mac book Pro for work.There is just a lot of random weirdness.

There is no right click, your supposed to do a light two finger touch for right click.If you click too hard it opens the dictionary.

If you plug in a mouse you can get right click, but it isn’t consistent in working.

By default scroll is inverted (up is down, down is up), also windows can have scroll bars but they aren’t clickable, you have to do a scroll gesture.

Almost every Left control + Button action is now Meta key + button. But not everything, its annoyingly inconsistent also new random shortcuts.

For example lock screen isn’t Meta key + l like on Linux or Windows. Its Meta + Shift + Q, shut down is Meta +Left Control + Q.

The keyboard doesn’t match the your countries layout, so keys move around and is missing traditional keys like print screen. To do that you press Meta + Shift + 4 to switch the mouse to a screen cut tool and select the area you cut.

I could go on and on, none of it is obvious and I wouldn’t say any of it is an improvement at best its just different.

This is traditional British food, bangers is slang for Pork Saussage (Cumberland Saussage I am guessing)

Its a responsive designed website, why do you need an Application?

Activity Pub has a few parts, Lemmy implements the Threaded message part.

Mastodon implements a short messaging (posts) part. Meta’s Threads will implement this.

KBin implemented both parts, within KBin you’ll see microblog as an option for magazines (communities/subredits). This shows either ‘posts’ made to the magazine or posts with hastags associated with the magazine.

The posts and threaded message parts have overlap in how they work so mastodon users can see certain threaded messages and comment on them.

Github stars is not a good metric, firstly because KBin is hosted on codeberg but mainly because a healthy project has lots of unique contributors and regular updates/enhancements.

KBin has 79 open Pull Requests, while Lemmy has 29. From a visual check PR’s seem to be older than 2 weeks. Its hard to say one is “healthier” than the other, without scraping information into a spreadsheet.

Secondly Rust is new and has a lot of hype surrounding it, as a result you get a lot of people using it on random projects.

Languages have strengths and weaknesses and developer ecosystems build on the strengths.

For example if I was writing a web application with a database backend I would choose C#, Java or Node.js because there are loads of libraries, tools and frameworks to make it really easy.

Rust is gaining a lot of adoption by embedded system users (replacing C mostly). Lemmy is the only Rust based web server project I am aware of. Which means the level of work to do anything and to keep it updated falls on the Lemmy devs rather than spread out amongst a larger community.

Everyone loves to insult PHP but it has a niche in webservers and won’t disappear anytime soon. KBin effort will thus be spent on KBin.