AnyOldName3

As a counterpoint, I’ve had Ubuntu’s installer and grub’s updater overwrite and break Windows’ boot files several times, but never had the opposite happen (I’ve had both destroy themselves, though). Thankfully, I know how to rebuild the necessary parts of a Windows install, so it’s never been a catastrophe, but it’s irritating to see what’s always been the source of the problems I’ve had be held up as infallible. Possibly this is a problem unique to Ubuntu - I’m happy to blame Canonical - so maybe it could be entirely sidestepped with other distros.

It’s easy to get pressured into thinking it’s your responsibility. There’s also the risk that an unhappy company will make a non-copyleft clone of your project, pump resources into it until it’s what everyone uses by default, and then add proprietary extensions so no one uses the open-source version anymore, which, if you believe in the ideals of Free Software, is a bad thing.

There was an EU-wide one that gota lot of its funding redirected to AI stuff recently that you might be thinking of.

No, that is an entirely unrelated bad decision. It being okay to not have a popup to opt out of secure boot when it does its one job and notices you’re about to run insecure code in kernel mode doesn’t make every other user-hostile thing Microsoft ever does magically okay.

It’s upstream GRUB that’s decided the older GRUB versions are insecure and not to be trusted. Microsoft just propagated that to machines running distros that weren’t shipping patched GRUB builds yet. Up-to-date Debian wouldn’t be affected provided that they downstreamed fixes quickly.

https://fedia.io/m/linux@lemmy.ml/t/1111595/-/comment/6916699 says that Debian’s GRUB wasn’t affected, but another part of the boot sequence was.

You can’t trust users to make informed decisions about cybersecurity as most users don’t have the necessary background knowledge, so won’t think beyond this popup is annoying me and has a button to make it go away and I am smart and therefore immune to malware. Microsoft don’t want Windows to have the reputation for being infested with malware like it used to have, and users don’t want their bank details stolen. If something’s potentially going to be a bad idea, it’s better to only give the decision to people capable of making it an informed decision. That’s why we don’t let children opt into surgery or decide whether to have ice cream for dinner, and have their parents decide instead.

The comment you’re quoting was replying to someone suggesting a warning popup, and saying it would be a bad idea, rather than suggesting the secure boot UEFI option should be taken away. You need at least a little bit more awareness of the problem to know to toggle that setting.

UX isn’t universal. What intuitively clicks for one person might be unusable for someone else. Good UX is adequate for as many people as possible, but it can’t be perfect for everyone at once when some people work best with large labelled buttons with big, clear icons that have to go into submenus to fit on the screen, and other people prefer lots of small buttons whose purpose and location they’ve memorised which all fit on screen at once to save them needing to click into submenus.

!openmw@lemmy.ml has less than 150 subscribers, so it’s definitely not large. We’re already swamped with infrastructure work for the stuff we already self-host, so I don’t think we’ll be running our own Lemmy instance any time soon.

OpenMW’s official Lemmy community has been on lemmy.ml since 2021, way before lemmy.world existed (and most other instances, too), and way before there was any inter-instance drama. It’s becoming increasingly likely that it’s not going to be a suitable long-term home, but we’d be much happier if we could migrate the existing community rather than start from scratch with a new one. Is there any way to do that yet?

It doesn’t necessarily work that way, though. If tests tell you you broke something immediately, you don’t have time to forget how anything works, so identifying the problem and fixing it is much faster. For the kind of minor bug that’s potentially acceptable to launch a game with, if it’s something tests detect, it’s probably easier to fix than it is to determine whether it’s viable to just ignore it. If it’s something tests don’t detect, it’s just as easy to ignore whether it’s because there are no tests or because despite there being tests, none of them cover this situation.

The games industry is rife with managers doing things that mean developers have a worse time and have the opposite effect to their stated goals. A good example is crunch. It obviously helps to do extra hours right before a launch when there’s the promise of a holiday after the launch to recuperate, but it’s now common for games studios to be in crunch for months and years at a time, despite the evidence being that after a couple of weeks, everyone’s so tired from crunch that they’re less productive than if they worked normal hours.

Games are complicated, and building something complicated in a mad rush because of an imposed deadline is less effective than taking the time to think things through, and typically ends up failing or taking longer anyway.

I’m thinking more for the scale of something like OpenMW, as we’ve got more frequently asked questions than we could hope to put on an FAQ page. In the olden days, stuff showed up from our forums when people googled it, and now it doesn’t, so we get loads of questions through Discord, and very rarely one from Matrix.

If past support questions showed up in searches, then more users would be able to help themselves and would never need to ask for support, so it wouldn’t matter as much what platform it happened on.

Personally, I think it would be good if support discords were all bridged to matrix spaces (currently doable, but matrix needs locking down more than discord to stop spam as the tools to prevent and remove it are worse) and the matrix history was archived somewhere search engines could index it like mailing list archives are (currently not doable). That approach would let users use what they want without forcing anyone else to, and keeps self help as easy as it was in the days of forums.

If the AI had any actual I, it might point out that the most recent Halloween Document was from twenty years ago, and Microsoft’s attitudes have changed in that time. After all, they make a lot of money from renting out Linux VMs through Azure, so it’d be silly for them to hate their revenue stream.

I’d be unsurprised if it’s just set up to abandon the conversation if accused of lying, rather than defending its position.

There are kinds of analytics that are incompatible with the GPL, as you can’t restrict what users do with GPL software, and that includes asking children not to submit analytics containing information you’re not allowed to know about children under COPPA. The only options are to hope your software is only used by adults, or not implement any kinds of analytics that collect the relevant kinds of personal information.

Shared components work brilliantly in a fantasy world where nothing uses new features of a library or depends on bug fixes in new versions of a library, and no library ever has releases with regressions or updates that change the API. That’s not the case, though, so often there’ll exist no single version of a dependency that makes all the software on your machine actually compile and be minimally buggy. If you’re lucky, downstream packagers will make different packages for different versions of things they know cause this kind of problem so they can be installed side by side, or maintain a collection of patches to create a version that makes everything work even though no actual release would, but sometimes they do things like remove version range checks from CMake so things build, but don’t even end up running.

Have you set up linear advance/pressure advance? I found it worked wonders with making sure the extruder gets back up to pressure after a retraction.

Not that I agree that removing/banning archive links is sensible, but reddit has a much bigger budget for lawyers than any instance admin, so is in a much safer position with grey-area and black-area-but-no-one-complained-yet content. It’s not like reddit was ever particularly anti-piracy, either - the corporate interests they bowed to were advertisers and their shareholders.

The way I like to think of it is that non-copyleft licences are like giving everyone freedom by saying there are no laws - suddenly, you can do anything, and the government can’t stop you! However, other people can also do anything and the government can’t stop them, either, and that includes using a big net to catch other people and make them their slaves. The people caught in the nets aren’t going to feel very free anymore, and it’s not unreasonable to think that a lot of people will end up caught in nets.

Copyleft licences are like saying there are no laws except you’re not allowed to do anything that would restrict someone else’s freedom. In theory, that’s only going to inconvenience you if you were going to do something bad, and leaves most people much freer.

The idea is basically that you shouldn’t be able to restrict anyone else’s freedom to modify the software they use, and if you’re going to, you don’t get to base your software on things made by people who didn’t.

Usually FOSS is specifically copyleft licences like the GPL, which Microsoft don’t use. Their open-source stuff tends to be MIT.

We only reimplemented the engine, not the game. You still need to own a copy of Morrowind so there’s something for the new engine to actually run. That said, it is possible for it to run other potentially-open-source games, such as OpenMW’s example suite (which isn’t finished enough to even call a game yet) or the Robowind demo (which I can’t remember the licencing details of) .