If you’re gonna do a Dan Simmons anthology series quit screwing around with us and give us The Terror: Drood or The Terror: King Billy, c’mon.

Lots of little extremely niche things people do on their computer on Windows are harder on Linux, I think the best example in general is video game modding. We can’t say it’s essential or barring anyone from making a switch and yet people like me wrankle. I’m disappointed no one ever put the honest time into cloning Mod Organizer and its amazing USVFS. Yes I know you can do it on Fuse, I know there are a couple other mod applications for Bethsoft games. The problem is ALL of these tools need a seamless way to talk between Proton instances, which would be a security risk I guess. And Mod Organizer was such a nice tool. The clone attempts I’ve seen have had shoddy UI, lacked core features you wouldn’t even bother calling it an MO clone without (Amethyst was not storing -downloads-, just running whatever FOMOD it found immediately and deleting the archive), or were done heavily with LLM AI which I don’t trust around proton instances.

It’s the absolute lowest priority right now and if you’re willing to accept a lot of potential suck you can eek by. I don’t use EMACs or I’d probably be the kind of person using that as mod manager, but hearing it described I’d liken my agony over lacking good mod tools to trying to use EMACs on a broken cellphone screen, or a keyboard missing half its letters. I miss the tools MO set the industry standard for.

This is a reminder to everyone to only install from the AUR for absolutely necessary stuff only, and only if you trust the maintainer.

Unfortunately not foolproof either. I have no infected packages that I know of because I happen to be on a new install, but I caught wind of the LAST AUR botnet infiltration and switched to flatpaks or source builds. Since then I drifted back to AUR for convenience. I thought I was being clever only using AUR packages when I could be “sure” the author of the original software package pushed to AUR, and this was easy since devs who build on Arch typically recommend AUR whether they maintain the package or not. Today I found out spoofing package ownership is apparently easy and so is spoofing git credentials.

I was on Endeavour and it was incredible, but I’m not That Power User and I feel like part of the problem. The worst part of all of this is its owing to an influx of users who want the same ease of use they used to enjoy, but in Windows SOP is installing whatever the fuck you want on Internet Explorer and bugging your sysadmin to fix whatever happens. Its probably really hard to be any kind of FOSS developer right now.

Is this a post just tilting the blame and impetus for escaping closed hardware on the user and nothing else? Because I’ll buy a Jolla or a Fairphone when my current phone dies, maybe, if I can afford it. All your post does is position true privacy as a hobbyists niche.

Oh, but somebody please fucking tell me how great being LGBT in China is, and how overblown the oppression is. Somebody please, describe to me how there is no problem because my personhood would be recognized and my healthcare provided for if I’m lucky enough to be in a ‘tier 1’ city in the wonderful communist utopia of the PRC. Someone tell me this woman from China is lying about having to put the clamps on her Chinese account because the Chinese government want her, generally, to shut the fuck up, don’t rock the boat. And of course, she’s not been torturemurdered yet. So, with the threat of her partner’s life. they’ve coerced her into giving up her white hat hacking career. Speak out, and we will throw your girlfriend into a death camp.

She was probably just unlucky she was born in one of those “backwards” places where the local police have unlimited power AND the tactlessness to use it. But she’s a good uplifted middle class girl, so she should culturally have access to the China I’m told is real where this shit doesn’t happen. Must be her fault for not moving to one of the good cities.