“It implements client-side decorations, or it gets the hose again!”

GNOME’s design philosophy is “we’ve determined that nobody needs this feature”.

KDE’s is “we’ve determined that nobody needs this feature… but it would be really cool, fuck it, we ball cube”.

Now all I need is a way to remotely start a headless session and I can finally nuke X11 off my computer.

Do you want regulatory overreach? Imagine forcing every small project or self-hoster to adhere to the rules set by the equivalent of the HDMI Forum, but controlled by the likes of Microsoft and Facebook.

To redirect your other question: you should ask the web developers. If they’re honest, you’ll get a dozen legitimate answers that can’t be solved without locally running code. A chat web app, for example, needs to either poll the server at a given rate, or use a WebSocket to fetch incoming messages, both of which require Javascript. Then it needs to modify the DOM to display the new messages, which again requires Javascript. If it needs access to the microphone or webcam, it has to use some kind of local interface. I could go on. The point is, a lot of this arbitrary local code exists because there’s no other way to implement many features without it. Imagine having to reload an instant messaging app if you want to see if you’ve received anything. It would be like writing a GUI application using Qt or GTK, but without using any events.

Most websites would break, or not even display, without javascript. Sure, it’s bonkers for you, but an alternative browser that can’t immediately show a website that works perfectly well in Chrome wouldn’t get much of a user base.

https://buttplug.io/

It’s open-source, written in Rust, and has plugins from Stardew Valley to Ultrakill.

I recently switched to CachyOS. While I don’t have the same hard-on for it that most users seem to have, I like how it’s set up by default to create a btrfs snapshot of the root filesystem before and after each update. Grub can even boot into individual snapshots directly. I’m almost looking forward to the day it saves my ass after an update breaks my system.

Delays expected as radio traffic devolves into immature giggles whenever a flight into Pensacola (PNS) or Charlotte (CLT) is spotted.

Sometimes not even money. Microslop was left holding the bag when they jacked up the price of Gamepass and suddenly it became unaffordable for a lot of customers, and spent billions on a lemon. Sony is actively alienating their supporters, rejecting their largest market, and going all-in on a game that can’t even reach five thousand daily concurrent players on Steam because they’ve also already spent billions on a lemon. Bad calls and sunk costs all around.

I didn’t mean that in a very positive way.

I know there’s a post-hoc artistique justification where Alan is a hack writer and everything in the dark place is only as good as his imagination… but a poorly made game is still a poorly made game, and trying to shove half of a Max Payne action shooter into an Alan Wake game is just asking for disappointment (just ask Amnesia fans about pigs).

But they okayed Alan Wake’s American Nightmare.

Is it unstable, or resource intensive?

Yes and yes. Most of the Steam client is implemented, poorly, as a web app running in a web view derived from (I believe) an old version of Chromium. It’s needlessly resource-intensive, even more so than Electron apps. The suite as a whole uses its own libraries in ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_{32,64} and I’m pretty sure it still depends on some 32-bit-only things. The overlay sometimes causes ridiculous performance issues related to input events (I move the mouse and the game drops to single digit framerates) even if the overlay isn’t active. The Steam Input config utility is poorly designed and horribly implemented.

Lately it’s also been trying to murder my PC.

I love Steam as a service, but the client is in an unacceptable state.

On the other hand, Sky TV somehow managed to successfully sue Microsoft to force them to rename SkyDrive.

Do you get excessive RAM usage?

I’ve had three hard system crashes because something spawned an endless amount of winedbg and conhost.exe processes until the memory is full and I can’t figure out why.

Popularity does not imply quality.

I’ve played the recent Zelda games. They’re okay. But also disgustingly overrated.

most BIOS updaters

I’ve had to RMA plenty of otherwise perfectly usable motherboards because Windows had fucked up their firmware with unprompted updates, bordering on zero-click malware behaviour. The farther that shit stays from Linux, the better.

A blackout is just a loss of power. Nothing complicated about it. There are obvious human and societal consequences, but as far as the infrastructure is concerned, a blackout usually means that protection devices have been tripped and the system has protected itself from greater damage.

A brownout means that the electric grid (or interconnection), for some reason, can’t supply enough power to satisfy the demand, but protection devices haven’t tripped yet. It can result in momentary power losses, drops in voltage, drops in frequency, or some generators getting desynchronized with the rest of the grid. If reactive loads (like HVAC motors) go offline momentarily, they can cause spikes in power consumption, which can overload circuits and trip safety devices.

A UPS needs to immediately switch to battery power when there are signs of an imminent power loss. A brownout might cause a consumer-grade UPS to switch on and off repeatedly, which the inverter circuit probably doesn’t like.

This channel is run by a real civil engineer, he’s released some great videos about the challenges of maintaining an electric grid.