Well, I was already thinking we need to move away from localstack, I guess this gives me a deadline for when I need to have it done by. Open to recommendations to replace S3 and SQS for local/CI tests.
No. Please don't. Contribute to something like Heroic Launcher instead. Don't create something new just for GOG. Help make the existing tools better. It'll mean GOG has to do less work, and the programs people are already using will get better. Or even just sponsor Heroic so they can send more time we can working on it themselves.
GNU/Linux gamers are always decrying GOG, saying they won't buy stuff from them because Galaxy doesn't run on GNU/Linux, now we're getting people saying GOG porting Galaxy to GNU/Linux is bad!? By Taranis, GOG just can't get a break, can they?
Yep, luckily they represent a very small, albeit loud, minority of Linux users.
The vast majority of Linux users are very happy to get an official GOG Galaxy for Linux. I hope they will plug into Proton and collaborate with Valve, but we really need official tools and brands on Linux for common users to feel comfortable enough to come over.
Couldn't agree more! I have been purchasing on steam due to the lack of a native client, especially save game syncing. As a bonus, as a greenfields project, maybe we'll see less cruft than the native Steam client.
It is the same thing, just emphasizing that the OS is more than the kernel, and than the userland comes from the GNU project.
The latter had been designed to be a full OS but didn't have a functional kernel when Linux was released, and Torvalds adopted the GNU userland for his project.
Linux is definitely not a "full operating system."
Here's Linux built on GitHub Actions, with Grub[1], and you can't do anything with it. I include a reference init that does nothing, per kernel.org. 17.8 MB image.
GNU is by every practical measure, everything else. People memed on Stallman for the whole GNU/Linux naming, but he's basically right. There's also Android/Linux, that another user mentioned, and some distributions which don't use a GNU userland at all.
But the wide majority of people are using GNU/Linux, or some ecosystem derivative of it, like people using GNOME, which was formerly a part of the GNU project.
They're not creating something new. They're taking their existing tool (which - for all its flaws - is still far ahead of Heroic in many ways), improving it further, and changing it to also work on Linux.
If they then go add additional features like wine integration to that tool to make it overlap more with Heroic is something we're all assuming, but not actually a given.
Linux userspace is defined by fragmentation. Linux users can't even unify on a distro, such that significant swathes of software are incompatible for some users despite everyone using the same kernel. In that environment, and also just in general, why is anybody obligated to contribute to a specific existing project rather than building their own?
As much as i hate the pointless Linux fragmentation, I think them going down the path of steam/heroic games launcher and releasing one appimage/.deb file and letting others take on the burden for their distros should do.
I mean, the main issue with portability is the insistance on dynamic linking, far more than the distro situation.
If you use Linux like MacOS and only run static binaries and containerized programs via things like flatpak everything is fine.
It's totally possible to treat the distro simply as a thin base layer and get everything else from flatpak and the various container hubs. It does work great.
Said absolutely nothing about obligation, raising the same decades-long observation. The users will see strife [and joy], considering Heroic does decently but this will be advantaged. That's it. Forgive me if I don't want to go over it again.
> Cheapshot: Good Old Games (as long as our proprietary software functions)
False. That's literally the point of GOG. You can download the games directly from their website, install them, and run them without running any GOG software. GOG could vanish tomorrow and you'd still be able to play every game you purchased, as long as you backed up their installers somewhere.
What would you prefer? I couldn't edit it now if I wanted. Is GOG, the business entity, here to defend itself? Set me straight? If so, I'd like to first express my appreciation for their efforts. Then... repeat my critical statements to them shortly after.
Oh to be private/not beholden to shareholders, open to build for a ~small~ growing target [that has largely managed without them]. I'm envious, really. We're looking at the next Valve, I tell you! All it will take is the one hire for this listing, a penguin, Bellevue, and Codeweavers.
Minus sarcasm: I understand their interests in this and how it might even be a net benefit for all. I won't say it will be free, Heroic users paying the toll. Oops, there I go being loose with words again.
The issue here is that this is an existing "standard", by the logic of the comic. I wouldn't be surprised if there were already unofficial Linux ports of this launcher to begin with.
Also, even if it was fragmentation I'd prefer competition to ensue. I don't want another Steam situation, even if in theory a launcher isn't holding any valuable data hostage.
Like I'm not aware and it's sunshine/rainbows, actually. Competition in the GOG launcher space, huzzah. To the detriment of One Launcher To Rule Them All.
To be clear: I'm for a first party solution. I support their efforts as much as I can. It will have considerable impact on the users. Both ways.
If you see it form the point of view of a Linux user it's more fragmentation, but if you look at it from the point of view of a gamer it's less fragmentation. Guess who their target audience is?
Everyone in the linux world insists on fragmentation, though? It's a part of what makes it great and a mess at the same time.
And what of it? Every time a for profit company uses open source they'll either create a closed fork, and if they can't they'll create closed source modules for it.
I'm not saying it's bad to wish for companies to support FOSS, I'm just saying it's an unrealistic expectation to have.
The impression I've had for a long while now is that just as the software side is fragmented so is the userbase in what they want, including a segment that want one true way and all that fragmentation to go away. The trouble I see with catering to all that variation is it's putting an onus for more work on the developer (which needs funding from somewhere, most likely the publisher) and while linux (and GOG) is a niche market in the present and near term it doesn't seem like a winning proposition.
There's definitely a desire for an appliance/console like experience where all the complexity is hidden behind install/play buttons, and steam has got most of the way there. As protondb shows that can't go all the way and tweaking is needed owing to the shifting PC compatibility in general and running software from one OS on a different one, it's the nature of the beast. Personally pushing towards monoculture on an open platform needs to be tempered, and there's a lot of debate previously for other places where that's relevant.
... and I'm concurring with the threadstarter. They could do nothing, donate to Heroic, or this. I'm not invested in this, just raised a keyword.
The arguments are tired, the word serves us well. They insist, yes, and forever remain hopeful that This Might Be the Year. Meanwhile, the reality exists for plenty already.
GOG's launcher team is presumably already familiar with their codebase, already has a checkout, already has a codebase that's missing 0 features, has a user interface that already matches their customer's muscle memory, and presumably already has semi-decent platform abstraction layer, considering they have binaries for both Windows and OS X. Unless they've utterly botched their PAL and buried it under several mountains of technical debt, porting is probably going to be relatively straightforward.
I'm not giving Linux gaming a second shot merely because of a bunch of ancedata about proton and wine improvements - I'm giving it a second shot because Steam themselves have staked enough of their brand and reputation on the experience, and put enough skin in the game with official linux support in their launcher. While I don't have enough of a GOG library for GOG's launcher to move the needle on that front for me personally, what it might do is get me looking at the GOG storefront again - in a way that some third party launcher simply wouldn't. Epic? I do have Satisfactory there, Heroic Launcher might be enough to avoid repurchasing it on Steam just for Linux, but it's not enough to make me want to stop avoiding Epic for future purchases on account of poor Linux support.
Alternatively, work on developing protocols for game launchers instead. Get the Heroic Launcher devs and devs from other launchers to work on a common interface.
It's intended for the other direction of other launchers (or third party integrations with other launchers) feeding data to GOG Galaxy, but it's still one of the more interesting attempts in the wild of a launcher trying to be a little bit more than just a walled garden.
I don't know if in an Official Linux port of Galaxy if they'll try to find more ways to integrate beyond what they've already done with their Python API and how much they would be willing work with other launchers, especially Heroic, but of the big game stores, GOG seems one of the few that actually wants to try. Maybe they will. It would be nice to see. It's interesting seeing so many comments assume the worst of them, as someone who has played around with that Python API a little bit. (I was toying with a third-party Itch.io integration. Didn't get very far, but it was neat what seemed possible.)
I wouldn't say you need launchers necessarily, but installers/configurators maybe. Getting the directory structure and the right WINE or Proton dependencies is a bit involved sometimes. Especially when what you have are really OLD DOS or Windows installer files.
Had various issues with Heroic and whatever the other popular one was (Lutris, maybe). I personally don't need official support for a single launcher that tries to integrate every gaming platform ala Steam, GOG, Blizzard, Epic, Amazon. A single-platform launcher with native Linux support would be good enough for me.
In both of the cases people criticize the Ladybird founder for, he was explicitly asking to avoid conflict. If you do not have time to read up on it, maybe temper these accusations with that knowledge.
He was first branded as a fascist when a non-contributor to SerenityOS submitted a bug or a pull request to change male pronouns to something else. Kling asked to keep the project contributions and discussion technical and not political. That is it. His crime was the classic “asking me not to be political is political” drama.
Next, and admittedly worse, he said something related to Charlie Kirk like “I hope more people engage with words and not fists”. Since Charlie Kirk was a massive douche, people do not like implying that there was anything good about him. While I get this, the idea that this comment confirms Andreas Kling to be a fascist is, well, a bit fascist for my taste.
Kling is famous for starting his videos with “Hello friends”, he has hundreds of good natured videos online, he is very open and humble of his experiences with drug addiction, and he lives in a country that is almost exclusively left wing by US standards. He seems far better behaved than his critics. I am going to have to see a bit more evidence than the above to start boycotting Ladybird over his politics. But that is just me I guess.
Not sure I'm at the regret stage, but the 3D printer has been sitting mostly unused, and I'm not sure that'll change. There have been a few things that were good to print, but mostly used to print fidget toys for the kids and their mates.
I’m actually surprised I didn’t hit this problem. My 3D printer has been wildly useful.
I seriously thought it would be another fad hobby that I drop immediately. But now I’ve gone as far as learning 3D modeling which I never really expected to do. I actually have more projects going on than I have printing capacity for sometimes.
I wish I had perfect advice for getting the most out of it.
Maybe this one will help: remember that even cheap plastic products are often more expensive than printing your own. That $10-20 doodad from the store is still more expensive than a LOT of filament. I’ll list out some stuff I’ve printed:
- Planter pots
- Knock box (for espresso)
- portfilter stand for tamping (espresso)
- espresso machine mod kit enclosure
- A loom for a friend who weaves
- “neon” LED signs with custom words (designed by me based on YouTube tutorial)
- Same concept but used to make might up address numbers for the house
- A triangle-shaped piece to guide the extending kitchen sink sprayer hose so it stops getting caught on stuff under the cabinets
- A replacement clip for a Packit reusable container
- Designing your own wall or under-desk mount for any custom size object is trivial
- Tea bag organizer
- Bookmarks
- Name tags/3D labels (you can pause prints and change filament colors at a specific layer even without an automated material system)
- Bag clips
- Toothpick dispenser
- Toothpaste squeezer dispenser thing to keep the tube neat
- storage organizers, including a whole pegboard system hanging up all my tools and junk
- Contact lens storage boxes
- Replacement latches for plastic bins
I haven’t printed them yet but I’m very interested in some of the cool mini-racks, mini NAS systems, and small form factor PC cases you can print from scratch rather than buying them. For example there’s a design on makerworld where you grab a cheap mini PC, an nvme to SATA adapter, and an AliExpress SATA 3.5” backplane, and boom, you’ve built a consumer NAS alternative for a fraction of the price.
Hopefully some of these ideas inspire you to get more use out of your machine!
I’d use it all the time but the workflow is obnoxious. Download a model, manually run the slicing software. Load it onto a usb. Plug it into the printer.
If I could click print from my phone I’d be running it constantly.
Like many others here, I was excited to hear pebble return, and have a Time 2 on preorder, but will be cancelling it if I don't hear a positive outcome from this.
Been using Yaak for 6-9 months now, initially built from source, but now a paying subscriber. Recently saw that you post open metrics[1] on subscriber count and revenue, and love getting a little look behind the curtains.
Killing ZFS on Linux would basically make Linux unsuitable for lots of usecases. What would you use instead? Btrfs, which keeps having stupid data corruption issues? Bcachefs, which is not yet stable and now it's being struck out of the kernel? LVM2+thin provisioning, which will happily eat your data if your data overlap? I hope some industrial players will force the kernel to drop this nonsense.
Heck no native filesystem besides btrfs has compression, I'm saving HUNDREDS of GB with zstd compression on my machines with basically zero overhead
Wait, there's a setting for this? I've lived in Australia for over 16 years now but everything is still in miles instead of Kms and I have never been able to find a setting to change it (although it sounds like even if I did find itz it would be mostly useless).
Ive lived in Australia for 45 years, everything is in km.. never had to touch it for miles. However i did go to the US and it showed units in miles on my phone which made no sense.
In Gmaps, Tap your profile picture, then select "Settings" and "Distance units". Choose between "Automatic", "Kilometers", or "Miles".
I got the app wrong, it was Uber. I have my phone set to English (UK) and change the measurement system to metric. Uber doesn't respect that though, so it keeps using miles.
Ah, thank you, this was it. I had the language set to English (UK), but changed the distance setting to KM. I got the app wrong, it was Uber, and Uber doesn't respect the override, so it always uses miles. Changing it to English (Australia) and Uber switches KM.
With the number of interstellar objects being detected only going up, it would be amazing if we could get some probes to hitch a ride on them. Imagine something lasting as long as Voyager 1 but travelling 3.5x the speed as it leaves the solar system.
Visiting one with a probe would surely be amazing in it's own right...but hitching a ride would mean matching velocities with them. And if you can do that...you're already in the same orbit, so the comet doesn't really help.
There's disposable FPV drones that launch with 50km spools of kevlar cable. Seems like smart people could work out a way to "hitch" a probe on a comet without fully matching velocities first.
i mean aren't we talking like km/s of speed difference? idk of any kind of material even 50km long that could absorb that kind of stretch/sheering like that...
Question: I know that our planetary probes often use planetary gravity to boost their speeds. That only works for prograde speeds, right? Because you're subtracting a miniscule amount of orbital speed from the planet and adding it to your spacecraft's speed. You couldn't whip around a planet and somehow use that to give you retrograde speeds, could you? (Presumably an airless planet, like Mercury.) Or what about using a large moon during the retrograde (relative to the planet's motion around the sun) part of its orbit?
Problem is another. To got additional speed from other body, you need to move very close to it and in perigee use some powerful acceleration to increase rotation speed fast, so could not use slow acceleration engines, like ion engines.
Idea of gravity-assist acceleration, mechanically is just rotation of pair tightly tied bodies (and cut tie in right moment, so one body got acceleration and other got deceleration), but as it is impractical to tie for example to Moon with rope, used gravity force.
What also interesting, gravity-assist could use not only orbital speed of large body, but also got some acceleration from rotation of large body, as for gravitation, large planet is not just one material point, but system of few smaller (sub)bodies, and closer (sub)bodies give more acceleration than others.
I’m not an expert on orbital mechanics, I just want to provide some data points.
The voyager craft, which not only had very good acceleration early on (the best we could do, really), combined with exceptional gravity slingshots and a lot of time - and are by all accounts some of the fastest man made objects ever - are going 15.4 km/s and 17 km/s relative to the sun.
3I/ATLAS is going so much faster than these objects they might as well be stationary.
Even ignoring the limited amount of time we have to intercept, catching up to 3I/ATLAS would be incredibly difficult to do. Perhaps impossible with our current technology*. Like catching up to a semi-truck going full speed on a highway with a bicycle. After it’s already passed us and is a couple miles down the road.
*barring theoretical (and kind of insane and dangerous) tech like Orion drives.
When you achieve speed in space, after acceleration, the speed won’t change forever unless you encounter some other force, like a celestial body gravity to change it. So if you achieve interestelar comet’s speed, you can shutdown the rocket and just travel at that speed for eternity like the comet does.
Even better: you can forget the comet, accelerate, keep accelerating until there is no more power or even a working motor while also extending a big sail to let solar wind accelerate you a little more.
No it wouldn't because once you've matched speed with it, you stop accelerating and therefore need no more fuel. The comet isn't doing anything except following gravity.
The comet probably doesn't have a great amount of fuel. Even if it's all ice, how are you going to split the water? Only if you have a fusion reactor that can do H-H fusion, or you can scrape enough dueterium out of it, can you use that. You will find no tritium as it has a short half life, and He-3 (probably) won't have been implanted by solar wind in interstellar space, so if you need that, you have to bring it or breed it somehow.
It does have a great amount of mass, so you could rendezvous, construct a mass driver or ion drive and start taking it apart and using chunks of it as extra reaction mass. That would allow you to essentially get a free reaction mass "refill". You will still need a lot (a lot) of power, and solar will be near zero.
At first I thought, "no silly, it has to gain matching speed first, what's the point". Then it occurred to me - if we can make something which can survive the impact, we "just" have to place it in the path of the comet and it will be swept with it.
The whole thing would be like something like shooting a bullet at a moving target, but it's an idea.
That hypothetical probe will not look anything like any other space probe before it, but more like an artillery shell. (They can survive pretty damning Gs and still run that little embedded computer, so it's not a completely insane idea, I guess.)
We would also have to detect the interstaller object plenty in advance, so the probe can be launched "comfortably" in a trajectory which will intercept at exactly where the "object" is going to be.
Some quick prompting seems to say a G force of somewhere between 16-160 billion Gs, for a CPU-equivalent object getting hit by a solid object moving at 3I's escape velocity. Compared to a "typical" artillery shell of 10-15 thousand Gs. Not sure you're manufacturing anything that could survive 6-7 orders of magnitude more Gs than an artillery shell.
Of course the G-load would lessen based on how much you sped up to match its speed beforehand, but still, I think you'd need to be pretty much sped up to near the same speed as it before you could remotely possibly survive the impact.
Wow, I clearly didn't think this through. That's brutal.
That leads to another idea - if something more substantial was placed in its path - the resulting debris and gas cloud from the impact could reveal something about the contents of the object.
Or, if it's an alien probe, it would force their hand. :-D We could see some exotic manuevering.
A "solid object". But it's not clear how solid a comet is (or more to the point, this or any interstellar comet). If it were a fuzzball of snow, maybe 20 km across, you could in theory decelerate through it more slowly, maybe using a very large parachute initially, then discarding that for successively smaller parachutes as you approach denser and denser parts of the comet. The EPOXI mission to the Hartley 2 comet was reportedly hit nine times by "snowflakes" coming off the comet, but not damaged (https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/spacecraft-sees-...).
0: https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe
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