Using full names like that might be fine for explaining a physical rule, or stating the final result of some calculation - but it certainly would be cumbersome and difficult for actually carrying out the calculations. In many cases we already fill pages with algebra showing how things can be related and rearranged to arrive at new results. That kind of work would be intractable with full word names for the variables, partially because you’d be constantly spilling off the end of the page trying to write the steps; but also because having all that stuff would actually obfuscate what you are trying to do - which is algebra. And during that process, the meanings and values of the pronumerals is not as important has how they interact with each other. So the names are just a distraction.

For setting up an equation, and for stating the final result, the meanings of the variables are very important; but during the process of manipulating the equations to get the result you want the meanings of the letters are often ignored. You only need to know that it is something that can be multiplied, or inverted, or subtracted, or whatever. Eg. suppose I want to rearrange to get the velocity. I don’t care that I’m dividing both sides by the air density times the drag coefficient and the area… I’m just dividing ρCA, which is an algebraic blob whose interpretation can be saved for some other time.

I wouldn’t read too much into it. Using “he” instead of “it” is a mistake that a person might make if English is not their first language. It’s pretty easy to imagine that someone working on a browser would not be interesting in messing around with the pronouns in their build instructions. They made an error, and they didn’t think the error was important (which in itself was another error). But it is fixed now. Surely no harm done. They were not actively trying to impede anyone’s progress or deny anyone’s rights, or even say anything negative about anyone at all. They simply made a mistake in their use of pronouns in their build instructions. The mistake is now fixed. And although its fair to take it as a ‘warning’ that maybe there are objectionable views lurking in there, it certainly is not evidence of such views. I really don’t think it’s fair to hang this mistake over them. I’m sure that pretty much everyone in this thread has made worse mistakes throughout their lives. I know I certainly have.

There are real problems transgender people are having, ladybird browser must be low on that priority.

Are you trying to tell me that Ladybird inadvertently referring to a computer process ‘he’ instead of ‘it’ is not a high priority problem for transgender people? What could possibly be worse? :p

(But seriously though. I find it really weird that people are still upset at Ladybird about this. It makes me wonder if there’s some social manipulation going on. Like, is anyone actually upset about this, or is it just an excuse to attack the devs?)

Is this because they used “he” instead of “they” in the build instructions? … They changed that and acknowledged the mistake. Surely that’s enough. It’s the fucking build instructions. I think we can probably find it in our hearts to forgive them.

[edit] Just in case people think I’m joking. I’m not. As far as I’m aware, the critical incident that that has resulted in people calling Ladybird devs anti-trans is that they wrote ‘he’ instead of ‘they’ in the build instructions. That’s what caused the original outrage. And as far as I’m aware, there have been no other incidents. But please, if there is something of substance that I’m not aware of, post about it here.

Sure. I very much like having offline installers too. I’ve got a heap of them saved on my computer, and on an external drive. But Lutris and Heroic Games Launcher are clients. So I’m not really sure what you mean.

Thanks for the info. That sounds like a decent system. The idea of unpacking into a place of my choosing, and running without an additional launcher kind of appeals to me from a software-simplicity point of view - even if installing the game is slightly more hands on. But I don’t think I’ll do it that way myself, mostly because I don’t really want to further entrench Steam. Valve does a lot of good stuff … but their dominance in this space still makes me uncomfortable. (And the fact that they don’t let you disable the “what’s new” advertising bar on the library page is a big red flag for me.)

When I was first getting started, I briefly tried Lutris - but was put off by two things. The first was that it felt very complicated. I was new to Linux at the time, and I’m being asked helps of config questions about how to install which-and-what components in order to use such-and-such runners or launcher or whatever… basically just a heap of stuff that I didn’t really understand. And when I tried using a recommend ‘gold rated’ auto-setup to install something, it just froze. So that was disappointing. I decided that maybe I’d try something else.

I’ve seen Lutris recommended in a lot of places; so apparently it’s pretty good. But at the time I used it, it wasn’t really what I was looking for. I think a lot of people praise Lutris for the way it lets you have case-by-case special configurations for all sorts of things, which might allow you get some stubborn stuff working. But for me, it felt like more things I could break. I’ve got enough games that I’m happy enough to just say that if it doesn’t work then I won’t play it. So I guess Lutris wasn’t for me. [edit - Bottles also had a lot of config choices to get started; but I was lucky enough that what I picked worked first time; and I haven’t looked at the config since.]

That sounds like a similar setup to what I’m doing; just using proton-ge rather than bottles. Perhaps your way is a bit more light-weight, which is probably nice.

Heroic does seem to have jumped in popularity recently. I’d never heard of it when I first started installing games on Linux.)

Does the comet support mean that it can also do Galaxy cloud-saves and achievements? I wouldn’t say those things are super important to me, but it would make switching between launches easier - since I wouldn’t have to stuff around trying to move save files to the right place after switching.

I’m more than happy to just download the installers, and only manually update. That’s how I use to do it when I was using Windows. But the installers don’t run natively on linux, I’m just not sure how best to use them. My first attempt was to use bottles to run an installer, then again to run the game after it installed. That worked - but after doing it once I decided that it would be easier to just install Galaxy instead so that I don’t have to setting things up over and over.

I’m curious about how Steam responds to you adding a non-steam game like that. Are you using innoextract to unpack the files from the installer into some personal directory, and then telling Steam to run the game from there? Or do you tell steam directly to run the installer? … And when you add a non-steam game to steam is that an entirely local thing? (I don’t really want to be reporting to Valve about what GOG games I’m playing.)

I see one advantage of using Steam is that if I already have Steam, then it saves me installing another tool. But some disadvantages is that it presumably won’t do save syncing, or Galaxy achievement tracking - and the installation process for each game might be a bit fiddly by the sounds of it.

Widelands is a great strategy / building game. The gameplay and UI style is a niche - but that’s one of the things I like about it. It’s doing something different to most games.

(The gameplay is similar to Settlers 2; before that franchise changed direction.)

[edit] But the open-source game I’ve spent the most time playing would be OpenXcom-extended, with xpiratez. That game is truly huge.

CrossCode is fantastic. But it is not an open source game.

♫ Imagine all the people sharin’ all the world ♪ ♪ Yoo, hoo, oo-oo ♫

I guess its just a reminder that getting a PhD is often more about dedication than it is about practical knowledge.

I saw someone post this a few days ago, and someone else quickly pointed out that it is incorrect. This time I’ll point out it is incorrect.

In base-pi, pi would be represented as 10. The place value of the right-most digit would be pi^0, and the next digit is pi^1.

(and when things go bad…)

Ad! Ad!! Oh, it’s an ad. :(

Blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker …

Nevertheless, Valve’s work with proton has pretty much crushed the argument that Windows is needed for games. That use to be a major sticking point, preventing people from leaving Windows - but now not so much.

Well, if your GPU is NVIDIA, you will also need a bleeding edge rolling release distro for now. Other than that, anything that ships recent version of KDE Plasma or GNOME (the first one handles Xwayland with DPI scaling a bit better imo and is generally more functional)

I keep hearing people say this. But I’ve got an nvidia card, and I just went with the default Mint Cinnamon install and I’ve had no problems whatsoever. I guess maybe my card isn’t new enough to run into whatever problems other people are talking about.

… Actually, there is one minor annoyance. I get lots of nvidia flatpak updates; and they are large downloads. I’d prefer not to be downloading gigabytes of graphics card updates every week. But other flatpaks demand that I have the latest nvidia stuff, so … I guess that is an nvidia annoyance that I experience. I don’t expect that to be fixed by a bleeding edge distro though!

But we’re talking about proportions of Desktop operating systems. People using the desktop less might decrease (or slow the increase) of total desktop usage; but there would need to be more reason that just that for it to impact Windows disproportionately.

Hey, no one is trying to stop you from doing that. I’m sure it is very convenient for you.

My point of view though is that automatically uploading my personal files to some corporation computer on the other side of the world should not be the default when I try to save something. Maybe sometimes I’ll want to use that feature, but there are a variety of reasons why I don’t want it most of the time. And I definitely don’t like having to jump through hoops just to avoid it.