Pathologic (2005). Been wanting to play it for years but been a bit too intimidated because of the reputation it has, but finally gave it a try and am about halfway through the Bachelors’ route.

It’s actually not as bad as I had made it out to be. The core loop of resource management isn’t too difficult and pretty engaging. You famously spend a large portion of the game walking between places but because of the stakes imposed by the resource management and the constant potential for sweet deals in the hobo economy, you’re always engaged. The game isn’t afraid to throw unfair feeling scenarios at you, but if you’re not above reloading and retrying a couple of times they are very possible to deal with, at least so far. I have a decent stock pile at the moment, so I might actually fuck around and not reload next time I catch the plague.

The game does a lot of things with the medium that very few other games have even attempted and is absolutely worth a play. It also has a very unique and compelling setting, Morrowind is probably the closest example I can think of in terms of world building even if the setting in Pathologic is relatively speaking more grounded.

If you haven’t heard of it before, Quinns article in rock paper shotgun is a good introduction and what first made me interested in the game when I first read it maybe a decade ago. Since it was written, Ice Pick Lodge (the studio behind the game), has released a remastered version of the first game with better translation, released a sequel and announced a second sequel, both of which are retelling of the story in the first game from the point of view of one of the three available protagonists in the first game.

Based on the games you listed, Morrowind! One of my absolute favorite old RPGs. Out of the elder scrolls games it’s the one with the strongest world building, which paints a nuanced picture of a very strange and compelling world. Compared to Skyrim in particular it’s more like a pen-and-paper rpg and less like an action game which gives it a higher barrier to entry. In particular, a lot of people find the combat frustrating at the start.

The modding community for the game is very active to this day. To begin with, there’s OpenMW which is a re-implementation of the engine that runs natively on Linux and contains various bug fixes and quality of life features. There’s also a fork of it, tes3mp, which allows you to play Morrowind in multiplayer!

There’s also Tamriel Rebuilt which is a modding project that adds the mainland of Morrowind (the base game just takes place on an island called Vvardenfell) and adds maybe another game worth of content. Theres also Project Tamriel which has one project that recreates Skyrim based on Morrowind-era lore and one that recreates Cyrodiil based on Morrowind-era lore.

I’ve interpreted the “I want smaller games with less graphics and I’m not kidding” meme as saying that we need AA games rather than indies. Games with large-ish teams but less crunch and less complicated asset creation pipelines and more space to fix bugs and iterate on the core game.

Sure, what I’m saying is that they’re both editors that you need to invest time in. A bit less so with helix since it has better defaults so you don’t need to spend as much time configuring it, but I don’t think that makes a huge difference.

Helix has better defaults for sure and I get why people might prefer it but I have a very hard time imagining it being a better choice than vim in every situation even with a lot more development.

Also, if you work with programming for example your editor is going to be one of your main tools and I think that “reading guides” is an acceptable amount of effort to put in to learning such a tool. Vim has a higher barrier of entry than it needs to (this can to some extent be explained with backwards compatability) but with Helix you still have to put some time in to understanding the editing model anyway.

The biggest thing missing from helix right now imo is plugin support, so a lot of plugins that I really like wouldn’t be available. I use fugitive a lot for working with git for example.

Another one is the quickfix list in combination with ex commands. One thing you can do for example is setup :make to run your compiler and then when you get compilation errors they’ll show up in your quickfix list. You can then use :Cfilter to focus on one type of error and then :cdo to for example do a find and replace on the remaining lines.

In general, if I don’t have an lsp available for whatever reason (I work in cmake a fair amount at my $DAYJOB for example) I would much rather use vim, in particular because of the stuff that you can do with ex commands that I mentioned above (also works great with grep) but also because of the ctags support.

Helix can do a lot of nice things out of the box for a lot of cases of software editing, but it’s not nearly as broad or as customizable of a tool as vim

I don’t really see the point in a “facebook competitior” since the only appeal of facebook is that it’s “normal” and “evryone” is on it, something that just isn’t going to be true for e.g. some fediverse product. Everyone should stop using facebook if possible though, I’m trying to persuade different messenger groupchats that I’m part of to switch to something else left and right personally

Vim still has a lot of advantages over helix. Being modern doesn’t automatically make a tool better

I’ve been wanting a phone with a keyboard for a long time, I don’t think I’ll get this one (I specifically got a fairphone in part so I wouldn’t have to think about buying a new phone for a couple of years) but I think that this could be really nice for some specific usecases that are underserved today.

With arch, I’d recommend just jumping in the deep and and installing it, looking things up on the wiki when something goes wrong. Just do it in a virtual machine or on an old laptop or something to start with. I broke my previous distro (mint) by doing some really stupid stuff, and I decided to just go fuck it and install arch. I don’t think I’ve ever learned as much about linux as that weekend.

I suppose that I was already pretty comfortable with the terminal since I was studying computer science at the time so I had a lot of reason to use it. I think the best way to use the terminal is to force yourself to use it, programming is great for this but you can try e.g. sorting your photos or mp3 files or something as practice too.

As long as you have your windows license key you can change your mind later so really you can do whatever. I’d recommend giving 100% linux a try if that seems fun. Obviously you’re gonna want to back up any interesting files that you have on windows either way.

If anything I think that the current rust discourse is a fad. I’m not sure what it is about rust that makes people have so strong opinions about it but I can’t wait for it to become a “normal” language so that people can chill about it a bit.

There are non-propietary versions of android, I use /e/OS for example. Try searching for de googled android if you wanna find out more.

Nice, I’ll check it out. I’ve been meaning to customize the desktop a bit more but it works well enough for the moment.

There are probably better alternatives, but I have a raspbery pi plugged into my tv and use KDE connect to remote control the mouse and keyboard from my phone. If I wanna watch youtube I’ll navigate to youtube.com and click on a video.

Well he speaks english so in that sense he’s english speaking

Yeah the title of the post makes it sound much worse than what it seems to be in practice? Maybe I’m just naive

Well right now most people develop apps supporting x86 and leaves everything else behind. If they’re supporting x86 + arm, maybe adding riscv as a third option would be a smaller step than adding a second architecture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

Don’t know anything about this particular case so while “social engineering to create a backdoor” is certainly a possibility, so is the more straightforward explanation that it is drama about real or perceived problems in the nix community. I think that it’s dangerous to dismiss this altogether because of the recent xz debacle.