The thing you got to understand is that the energy of the crash has to go somewhere. The same energy will apply to both cars, the modern car will absorb a lot of it by deforming, the old car won’t absorb any in that way because it’s a hard piece of metal. And you have to wonder, what is more important to you, the car chassis or the people inside? You might as well ask “why do we put packing peanuts if nails are a lot tougher” or “why do we ship eggs in weird cardboard boxes if a metal square would be more resilient”

You’re completely missing the point. Discord is a chat app, not a package manager, therefore it should NOT update things EVER. You’re complaining that discord tries to do something it shouldn’t, fails and somehow you seem to think that’s pacman’s fault.

The “issue” doesn’t exist on flatpaks because discord probably checks if it’s installed via flatpak and runs an update using the flatpak command without your say so. The “solution” is to stop discord from trying to be “smart” and failing and let it be updated when pacman decides to.

The idea of a package manager is to let it manage your packages, if you want self-updating apps you don’t need a package manager, and good luck with dependencies and overlapping libraries.

I have only ever had this issue with discord on arch.

The issue you describe is not Arch specific and it’s not an issue. Using a package manager means using a program to manage your packages. Things can’t auto-upgrade, that breaks the point of a package manager.

Whenever discord has an update, it will not fetch the update, but it tells me that an update can be downloaded.

Of course, if you install discord through pacman, then pacman manages the update.

As for the JSON file that’s a very hacky approach, discord shouldn’t outright fail to launch if there is an update. And in fact the Arch wiki says it has a flag to skip the version check completely:

To disable the update check, add the line “SKIP_HOST_UPDATE”: true to ~/.config/discord/settings.json. If the file does not exist, create it and add the following:

~/.config/discord/settings.json

{
  "SKIP_HOST_UPDATE": true
}

More info on https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Discord

What is the air branch? Discord has a package on pacman, so it should just get updated with your normal system update, there’s no config or anything that could prevent that, pacman doesn’t care. What JSON do you have to edit and why?

All of the things you mentioned are annoying level problems.

ATMs

Card payment should still work, ATMs are more of a footnote in today’s world. I can’t even remember the last time I used one. If I were to use one and it didn’t worked it would be annoying.

There is a lot of industrial machinery running Windows 98 or XP to this day.

And there are lots that don’t. Plus, wine has excellent support for old windows versions, I would be very surprised if something didn’t just worked. So there would be some downtime while people annoyingly set things up with wine.

A lot of POS devices too.

And a lot of POS don’t, the ones that do would have to change OS, an annoyance.

Almost all accounting is done on Windows.

The ones that don’t would receive lots of new clients, and the rest would leave clients annoyed while adapting.

The amount of chaos if it disappeared would be immense

I think you’re probably exaggerating the proportions, nearly 100% of the hardware that runs Windows runs Linux. Yes, there would be some chaos until things migrate, but there are alternatives that are reachable and usable.

Linux is probably still worse because it would mean that more than half of smartphones are suddenly bricked,

That’s an annoyance. It’s not just some phones, it’s absolutely every network connected device that is not a Windows or apple thing. If you Google something on your phone yo go through possibly 20 different Linux devices back and forth.

literally all of the internet just stops working

This is the big one, removing Linux menas breaking the internet (and most intranets). And it’s not breaking one thing or another, it’s breaking every single internet service, the ATMs in your windows example wouldn’t work, nor would any PoS, since they usually depend on inventory management and card connectivity.

And it’s not a “until people reinstall their system” deal, it’s breaking in an essentially unrepairable way. There’s a very high chance that outside of a very small subset of devices there’s just no alternative to Linux. That’s the difference, Windows disappearing is a hiccup while things adapt, Linux disappearing is chaos without a foreseeable solution, 90% of electronics become e-waste.

Yup, that sounds like a good approach. I could even see people doing Pacman -> Flatpaks -> AUR and it would make sense to me.

What makes it confusing to you?

Your question is not Arch specific, it’s “should I use flatpaks?” And the answer in my opinion is probably no.

Flatpaks are a good idea to isolate certain applications and to provide a uniform way of installing packages. So there might be some apps that are not available in your native package manager, but do provide flatpaks. For those cases flatpaks are probably preferred. But Arch based distros have the AUR, so there are a lot of apps that aren’t packaged for Arch that you can still get as a native package. Sure, using the AUR is risky and if you’re not on actual Arch things might break sporadically because of mismatched dependencies (although I think CachyOS is full parity of packages with Arch, so that’s maybe more of a Manjaro warning).

But flatpaks are clunky, bloated, require annoying permissions to be set to do basic things, and require you to update two package managers to do a full system update. They are more appealing for systems where you don’t want to give users root access but still allow them to install programs, but for your own computer I have never seen the appeal.

One of my favorites are the chains between Spanish and Portuguese:

• Garbage in Spanish is Basura
• But Vassoura in Portuguese means broom
• But in Spanish broom is said Escova
• Which in Portuguese means brush

Or

• Tea cup in Spanish is Taza
• A Taça in Portuguese is a wine cup
• But in Spanish wine cup is a Copa
• And in Portuguese a Copo is a regular glass
• But in Spanish regular glasses are called Vaso
• Which in Portuguese means vase.

Or

• Cutlery in Portuguese is Talher
• But Taller in Spanish is a workshop
• Which in Portuguese is Oficina
• Which in Spanish means office
• But in Portuguese you say Escritorio
• Which in Spanish means desk

Or a short one:

• Your last name in Portuguese is your Sobrenome
• But in Spanish Sobrenombre is your nickname
• While in Portuguese nickname is Apelido
• But in Spanish Apellido means last name

Another one I like is Vamos a chatear 1 rato which in Spanish means “let’s chat for a little while” but in Portuguese means “let’s bother a mouse”.

Sure, but “camera” doesn’t really mean room, it means chamber, which is a small enclosed space, and if you grab a box it is a camera by definition (just a very small one). And if you close every place where light can get into a small chamber you get a “camera obscura” which just means a dark chamber. And if you poke a hole on a camera obscura you will see an image of the outside being projected on the opposite wall. This was a very common trick in pre-industrialization, and became known as Camera Obscura, from then someone had the idea to put photosensitive material, also known as photographic, on the opposite wall and created the first photographic chamber, or “photographic camera”, which eventually was abbreviated to camera.

So yeah, they mean different things, but not really.

Yes, that should work, but as someone who went through that phase before BTRFS was a thing keeping /home in a separate partition helps quite a lot, because then reinstalling the system is just a 15 min afair and you’re mostly back where you were before except some programs you might have installed that you will need to do so again.

The next logical step for me was to keep a list of those programs, so I could just run a single command and get all of them installed. That eventually evolved into convincing me to use Gentoo, since it has this concept baked into the system. But compiling everything wasn’t for me, so I went back to Arch where I stayed for over a decade. And even though I almost never broke my system again, I always had that fear. I even switched to BTRFS when it became more stable, but never had to use a snapshot, so can’t help you on how much it restores.

Recently I’ve migrated to NixOS, and I’m very happy with it. The appeal of it for me was how the system is declared, which is a very advanced version of my packages in a file that also includes configurations. This makes it so that making changes to your system requires you to modify those files and rebuild your system, and at boot time you can select from the previous generations of the system in case you broke something. In short, this makes your system unbreakable because worst case scenario you boot into the previous generation that worked and figure out what you did wrong.

That being said, it’s learning curve is very steep, but the payoff for those of us who like to tinker is huge. If you’re interested I recommend checking vimjoyer’s YouTube channel, he has several videos about it, and since you’re already used to running things in VMs to test it should be easy for you to get started. And the best thing is that once you’re done with configuring the VM, almost the exact same config would work on your main machine out of the box and give you the exact same system (the only caveat is that there’s one file that relates to hardware which would have to be different, but it gets auto-generated during the install process).

I get your point, but here’s the thing, GoG has never given a cent to Lutris, Wine or Heroic, I know about those and the many others that came before such as PlayOnLinux. But those are not useful thanks to GoG, they’re useful despite it. If I have to use an open source tool to “emulate” a game, and another one to organize and manage my library, I’ll give those guys money and pirate the games and get the same experience a lot cheaper. Because, like Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem.

you can always play without updating if you want to

Can you? I never saw a straightforward way to do this.

I seem to remember a pop-up asking you whether you want to play without updating. Also I remember being able to stop a specific game from being updated by selecting the version to use in the settings, of course not all games use this, but the ones that accept mods usually do. I remember I had my CK2 pinned for a while because of mods.

I don’t think they do anything unethical but I don’t like having this private company’s always online closed source software running in the background on my computer.

I get that, but I only open Steam when I’m going to play something, so it’s not always online running in the background, and the vast majority of games I play are closed source so that’s a moot point

That reminds me of something I read once: If every copy of Windows were to magically disappear, some people would be annoyed. If every copy of Linux were to magically disappear, it would be utter chaos and absolutely nothing would work.

Second contact is the 2017 remake of the game I mentioned, GoG was not involved in that.

I know this might go against the flow here, but realistically if they’re using the tools in the way they say they are (which you should 100% check with your doctor to let him know about possible hallucinations) it’s not that bad. Speech-to-text is not prone to hallucinate, it can fail and detect wrong things but shouldn’t outright hallucinate. After that, LLMs are good at summarizing things, yes they are prone to hallucinations which is why having the doctor review the notes immediately after the session is important (and they said they do), so I don’t see this as such a big issue from the usability point of view.

You might still have issues from a privacy point of view and that’s a much more complex discussion with them about what kind of contract they have with the LLM company to ensure no HIPAA violations (as from the LLM point of view it’s just making a summary of a text it might store it, and then the whole stack is suable). They need to understand that just because they haven’t kept a copy around doesn’t mean the other party hasn’t, and because they shared it out without your agreement (you’re only agreeing to AI note taking which can be done locally so them sharing information with third parties is entirely up to them) they would be liable. I’m not a lawyer, so you might want to double check that, but I would be very surprised if that’s not the way it works, otherwise Drs could get away with a bunch of HIPAA violations by having you sign something that says they use a computer to store data and then storing things in shared Google drive.

What? How is a game from 2024 old? Also how is GoG involved in that at all?

Edit: I’ve been reading on the story of that game, and I think I know what you meant.

While Outcast: a new beginning is a new game, you probably meant the OG outcast game, which is from 1999. There was a 4 year window where the original game was only available on GoG because they patched a community mod into it. But in 2014 1.1 version was released for Steam with some more improvements, and in 2017 the game was remade. GoG doesn’t seem to have been involved in either of those, only on the original 2010 re-release including the community mod as a built-in.

Edit: It’s amazing, GoG PR is so good that they get credit for removing DRMs from games they didn’t (and are DRM free elsewhere), being anti-DRM (while allowing DRM content and even producing some by some standards), and now they take credit for remakes and rebuilds they were not even involved in. I like GoG, but people give them way too much credit and it gets annoying.

The interests of Linux users and Valve merely coincide.

I’m not naive, I don’t think that Valve is doing anything out of the goodness of their heart. But they’re investing on something I care about, so me giving them money is an indirect way to invest in that.

As for me, with a 99% single player games library, the most important thing is no mandatory launcher and no updates. Click, boom, I’m in the game.
So using GOG when possible.

Mostly agree (except I don’t mind updates, you can always play without updating if you want to), and the fact that that’s my experience with Steam is a big part of why I buy from them. I can go from not owning a game to play it with just a few controller buttons, whereas with GoG I would have to:

• Plug a mouse and keyboard to my gaming rig
• Install a browser on that machine
• Navigate to the website and download the installer
• Figure out a good wine version to use and create a new profile for the game
• Install any needed wine tricks to that profile
• Manually create a shortcut for that game using that wine profile
• Add the shortcut to some third party UI to be able to navigate to it with a controller

So yeah, the whole “click, I’m in the game” only works on Windows, which is why I said I can understand Windows users preferring GoG.

It’s not just that, but I thought that replying to every single point would be too verbose. But you might be interested:

On the spesific spects computers they use.

On a big studio Dev’s hardware can be as varied as on the real world, and while yes they’re usually beefy PCs, they’re not at all uniform.

They need things like support for different resolution.

Which for the most part is just natively done by changing the render size of the canvas. Only some games, and almost never ports, take resolution into consideration for other things like menu layout and even then it’s usually just 2 or 3 different configurations.

Work arounds for the controller only features.

Usually the answer to this is “fuck it”, the only things a controller can do that KB+m can’t is rumble, and pressure sensitivity. Pressure sensitivity you get away by mapping two different keys, and rumble you get away with adding audiovisual queues (which you should already have because the rumble might be broken in the person’s controller). Also, controllers work on PC.

If you want to make things like mouse control feel good, it needs lot of fiddling.

Yes, but actually no. This is a solved problem for the most part, there might be some small tweaking needed but a mouse is very intuitive and usually just adding a couple of sensitivity sliders makes it so every person can control their experience at will.

Optimizing for million different hardware possibilities,

If only we had developed standards for hardware like OpenGL/Vulkan, and the OS abstracted most of the other things away for you.

error handling,

Do you think errors don’t happen on console? Error handling is error handling.

launching

Does the game not launch on consoles? Do you think every game needs a separate launcher on PC?

settings

Most of those are already there, the extra ones added are just about graphic control for performance reasons, so it’s usually just using downscaled versions of things or disabling features. And I guarantee you that most of that was in the game already because otherwise it wouldn’t run on Bob’s machine, they just needed to make a pretty UI for it.

key bindings

This is accurate, there might be a considerate amount of effort needed here depending on how lazy devs were. Most people know not to use input directly and abstract it through a layer of actions, but sometimes things slip through.

and propably million other things i cant think right now.

There are other things to consider, things like network stack and input handling are very specific for console development, and if you’re not abstracting them through your own APIs you’re going to have a bad time porting the game. But there are reasons to do this even if you will only ever use one API, so most games should already do that. Also, this is an engine level fix, once you do this for one game, every game using that engine gets that fix.

But hey, what do I know? I only work in the low level network stack for games.

Yes, but making a port of a game to a console involves using the console’s APIs for things. Things like input, network, graphics and others can’t use generic libraries in consoles like you can on PC. If you’re making a game on a modern game engine a lot of that is abstracted away for you, but if you’re working on a game engine or a game written from scratch you need to take these things into consideration.

I’m not saying it’s just flipping a switch, but it’s also not the monster that people make it out to be. Porting a game to a console is usually a lot harder, but the vast majority of things should work on a PC already as they were probably developed and tested on a PC.