Astaroth

Astaroth, 5 months ago

Are they really picking their OS then?

But yes I agree, most people will just use what they have and Windows is the standard because they made sure it would become the standard.

Astaroth, 5 months ago

I call bullshit on this post. Since Windows 10 you can just double click a zip file and it opens up like any other directory (even if it isn’t) and shows you the files.

Just the other day I had to tell someone to unzip first before they could patch the rom (they were going to play some romhack on an emulator); I don’t know how old they were but clearly there can be scenarios where someone has a zip file and don’t know what to do with it or use it.

I don’t even know what the rom was or which emulator they were using, because I just told them if they google Rom Patcher JS that’s going to work for whatever file type it is, because according to them the problem was that the patcher they had didn’t work…

But as it turns out they were trying to use the .zip archive as the patch file, so I then had to explain to them that they need to extract it first.

And afterwards the patcher they had did work so I don’t think they even used Rom Patcher JS in the end.

Astaroth, 5 months ago

Right, I forget about that every time until I’m reminded of it. It’s the first thing I change along with showing hidden files when helping someone. (Even if what they need help with is unrelated)

Astaroth, 5 months ago

I tried to get some JumpStart games to run with DOSBOX a few years ago on Windows 7. Iirc I managed to install but not run the game.

I recently tried a bit to try and get another 16bit game run on Arch Linux with WINE in win98 or 95 mode but that still didn’t pan out.

Honestly it’s probably doable in some way without one but next time I try I’ll probably use a VM (Virtual Machine).

Astaroth, 5 months ago

TIL

I didn’t have it set to true but I also never noticed any problem

Astaroth, 5 months ago

I have a GUI file manager that I never use but I got it because I know at some point I’m going to want to be able to see thumbnails of images.

Astaroth, 5 months ago

you mean love it and never want to go back to a DE

Astaroth, 5 months ago

Secondly, the purchase UI seems to have been designed to ensure that a new player can never understand it. I’m sure like all things it becomes clear over time but jeez, did a professional team really work on that thing?

Yes it’s professionally designed, like all microtransaction games the shop is the most important feature and they’re always designed to be confusing by forcing the user to jump through hoops and use multiple currencies to make it less obvious how much money you end up spending on the game if you’re a “whale”.

They don’t want you to be able to have a direct association between how much money or time anything costs, that’s why these games are so predatory and you should not be playing them, regardless of what you think of the actual game itself.

Well, I will say, for a “free” to play game League isn’t that bad (especially not when compared to mobile games), or at least not last I played (3~4 years ago) but they still use the same methods.

Also as others have mentioned, the game’s reputation in terms of it’s community isn’t exactly stellar. Being very “toxic”.

But what I think is even worse than the language, which you at least can mute, is that the most popular streamer for the game “Tyler1” constantly rages, shouts, screams, destroys equipment and punches furniture etc.

Let’s just say if your son starts doing those kinds of things then it’s not (only) because they’re going through a teenage phase it’s probably also because of bad influences from the game and its community.

Astaroth, 5 months ago

just google chinese ev car graveyard i.imgur.com/vjtkj6J.png

not only are they selling at a loss, most of the sales aren’t even real

Astaroth, 5 months ago

I don’t know about the bug in particular but for the next time when/if your system hangs and seems completely unresponsive:

I recommend looking into the Magic SysRq Key, it shares the same button as print screen on the keyboard.

Depending on the keybinds enabled you can kill all processes and reboot the PC, among other things. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

Astaroth, 5 months ago

Why are you using Chinese enumeration commas?

i.e. “、” instead of “,”

Astaroth, 5 months ago

All I know is wine-mono and wine-gecko doesn’t come in any default package lists on apt that you get on Linux Mint (which should include Debian and Ubuntu packages), not sure if they exist on some other mirror list somewhere but it didn’t seem like it, while on Arch I got them directly from Extra (not even AUR).

Well you technically don’t need mono or gecko, especially not if you’re just going to use Steam Proton to play, but I use pure WINE a lot and it was a pain having to install them manually. Eventually I gave up on using mono and just downloaded the .net runtimes I needed through winetricks.

There were also some lib32 package I got from AUR on Arch that didn’t exist on apt. One of those gst plugins (ugly/good/bad/nice/whatever)

Astaroth, 5 months ago

I second the Lego games. Although the older ones (Complete Saga) & Lego Indiana Jones were annoying to play COOP because there’s no split screen.

But Lego Star Wars Clonewars has split screen so you don’t get in the way of each other. I haven’t actually played other newer Lego games but I assume they will have split screen as well.

Astaroth, 5 months ago

Lego games like Lego Starwars has already been mentioned and I will second those (especially the newer ones that have split screen).

Divinity Original Sin is also great.

Honestly most games I can think of have already been mentioned and those who have not seem like they might not be that great of an option since it seems your partner isn’t normally into gaming. (RTS in particular might be too hard)

But I will suggest some anyway just in case

Starcraft 2 has free online multiplayer which includes a COOP vs AI mode.

There’s also a 2 player campaign adaption of Warcraft 3’s normally single player campaign. Although it might only be available for pre-Reforged.

Also I didn’t know about it before now, I googled it just in case, but apparently SC2 also has COOP mods for its campaigns.

You mentioned having a Switch so I will recommend Advance Wars Reboot and Wargroove 1 & 2, although there are no COOP campaigns but you can play multiplayer maps.

Besides Advance Wars Reboot Camp on Switch (or the originals for Gameboy, which you could play with emulator), there’s also an online fan site called Advance Wars By Web where you can play advance wars in the web browser, although there’s no single player.

Wargroove is also on Steam and besides the campaign and regular game itself there are puzzles.

And speaking of Puzzles, card games tend to have Puzzles. I haven’t actually played Magic, Yu Gi Oh, etc. so I can’t say for sure whether they have any, but there’s puzzles in Faeria. (I would’ve recommended Might and Magic Duel of Champions, it had some great puzzles, but Ubisoft shut that game down many years ago)

Astaroth, 5 months ago

For me I just found it annoying that whenever we wanted to go in different directions one player would end up getting dragged back by the camera border. So many failed jumps…

But that’s fair, if someone thinks that being able to get in the way of each other and being forced to cooperate better due to it adds to their enjoyment of the game then playing the games without split screen could be preferable.

I just never considered that possibility.

Astaroth, 5 months ago

yeah to exit without saving you do ZQ instead of ZZ

Astaroth, 5 months ago

ZQ

Astaroth, 5 months ago

I thought about upgrading to AE a few times since it seems to have pretty much everything or at least replacements for everything now, but I guess I’ll never upgrade from 1.57.97 at this rate

Astaroth, 5 months ago

Been a while since I had a VM but iirc it was pretty easy to have a shared directory to the VM, which is very useful to (obviously) share files but it also means that since the files aren’t actually on the VM itself they’ll still be there even if you remove the VM since they’re not part of the image.

How I learned my lesson to have a shared directory was this: I had been having audio issues on the VM and at one point just decided to start over with a new VM, completely forgetting that the files I had been working on for a project were part of the VM and would be gone.

Astaroth, 5 months ago

same reason why people buy games even though they can pirate them to get them for free

Astaroth, 5 months ago

IKEA used to sell great mattresses, but when I had to replace my old one a few years ago they only had hard and semi-hard ones.

And over time the mattress I ended up buying because they didn’t sell the one I wanted anymore sunk in and has formed an uncomfortable indent.

Astaroth, 5 months ago

Just the other day I was looking into how to use a single shared WINE prefix for multiple users since it’s not like any 2 users would ever use the same PC at the same time… TIL I was wrong

Unfortunately I don’t really have anything helpful to add except it seems like Linux is more or less inherently built to support what you’re looking for.

Astaroth, 5 months ago

Arch is made out to be a lot harder and unstable than it really is. And AUR is a great resource but realistically you won’t even use it that much. At least I haven’t. I used it for Brave Browser package before switching to Firefox, some WINE gst plugin, and some other small stuff I don’t remember.

Also keep in mind even if it’s a AUR package, you can just install the package like normal if it’s a binary (it will be named with a -bin at the end, like brave-bin), so just because you’re using some packages from AUR it doesn’t mean you have to build lots of packages from source every time you update.

People hear scary stuff about some random update breaking the system but it’s exaggerated.

You definitely can break stuff with user error and sometimes if you’re not paying attention while updating you can get problems (combination of bad defaults + user error).

Main problem is that you can do whatever you want, but you might not actually know what you really want to do or you might not be doing what you meant to do, and Arch Linux will let you do it even if something breaks due to it.

And well that’s going to be same regardless of OS but it’s more accessible on Arch.

However you shouldn’t be too worried about it, in the basically worst case scenario you might need a Live USB and another device with an internet connection to look up and what you need to do to fix what’s wrong, but you can always count on that there’s a fix.

Most other OSes if you have a problem, depending on what it is you might just be stuck with it.

Biggest noob mistake I recall doing was that I had my old windows hard drive as extra storage and slowly moving stuff over once in a while, so I hadn’t reformatted it and I also wasn’t aware of that the default Linux NTFS driver wasn’t very good and that I should’ve gotten NTFS-3G if I weren’t going to reformat.

Well one day while not paying attention while updating my system through pacman (yay actually) I was also copying files from my old windows hard drive and I didn’t even look before just pressing accept on some AUR package rebuild.

Well it turns out that package was formerly part of Extra repository and thus it used to be a binary package, but now since it was moved to the AUR and it didn’t have -bin it was changed to a package to be built from source, and if I were to continue using it I should’ve changed which package.

But I just hit accept and it started chugging away, and it needed more RAM that I have and apparently there’s no safe guard for this (at least not by default) and by the time I noticed that my RAM usage was getting to high the system already got too sluggish and I was too late to end the process.

I also didn’t know about SysRq at the time so the only option I knew was to force shut down by holding down the power button for 5 seconds.

My actual system was still fine and all but my old windows hard drive that was transferring files got borked. It wasn’t completely bricked so I eventually salvaged it and it’s since been reformatted too, but I thought I had bricked it at the time.

Well that might still seem a bit scary but that was me making several user errors in a row, and at the end of the day it still wasn’t even a big problem.