I second the folks who recommended a Raspberry Pi and RetroPi variant. For no frills, just-start-playing, it can’t be beat.

Another option I haven’t seen mentioned yet, is Ubunutu with Steam. Thanks to the rising popularity of the SteamDeck, lots of great games run perfectly, with no fuss, under Steam on Ubuntu.

But again, with your target including a lot of retro games, a RetroPi is the smooth path. Most of your PS2 games will work fine with some fiddling. Your PS3 experience will be more bound by the current state of PS3 emulation, than by the power of the Raspberry Pi (though you should certainly plan to get the biggest supported model, and get a big cooling kit and overclock it.)

I’ve played various PS2 games with relatively little fuss on an overclocked Pi3 with a cooling kit.

For PS3 era games, I would just make the leap to Ubutnu and then just buy any that are Steam Deck Verified, through the Steam store. Some won’t be, but the ones that are should be a good time.

I, personally, don’t have the life spare cycles to mess with emulating unverified PS3 era games. PS2 era was still very hit and miss last time I bothered for an arcade machine build. I’m sure it’s doable, and might affect your hardware choice. Your best odds are probably Ubuntu, again - thanks to all the investment by Valve.

Pi has the power to do up through PS2 just fine, though last I checked the state of emulation for PS2 and PS3 wasn’t good yet, for the average hacker.

If this is your first time emulating, you’ll have a nicer time learning the ropes on RetroPi on an actual Raspberry Pi. Statistically, you’re not really giving anything up, because anything that doesn’t require insane levels of expertise and esoteric knowledge emulates perfectly on Pi.

Contrarily, is this isn’t your first emulation outing, or you’re down to go all-in down the rabbit hole; then build the whole PC around whatever you find emulates PS3 well, and the rest should be trivial to add.

This is terrific. Thank you for starting this discussion.

I don’t think we can or should wait for individual users to make these decisions. Server admins are the ones who understand the risks and so should make this call. Guidance for server admins based on past experience (cough XMPP!) should be quite welcome.

I might refine the bit about altered API versions to really focus on the real problem: proprietary extensions. We probably want to leave the door open to try out additions to the spec that come with detailed RFCs.

But we know from XMPP that proprietary extensions are a huge problem.

As part of the eternal September myself, we didn’t just use AOL disks as coasters, we used them for awesome pranks like filling eachother’s cars to the brim with them. It was truly astonishing how many of those disks were around.

I’m planning the same.

Let’s not defederate from every corporate player. Some of them can probably respect reasonable rules of civility.

But fuck Meta. We already know how this plays out.

We know there’s a huge wave of hatred and misinformation incoming. We’ve seen it on their other platforms.

Yeah. I’ll switch to an instance that is defederated from Threads, if mine doesn’t.

I left Meta’s other properties to avoid state sponsored hate speech. I won’t use a platform that gives hate speech a platform.

I don’t need to wait to know if Meta will do that. I already know.

Oh hey, thanks! I never particularly wanted any of my apps to route around the VPN, but there the option it is under Advanced, when split tunneling is enabled. Could be handy. Thanks!

Yep. And I’m saying that when he gets better at it, he will call them, ask them to grab lunch, and openly say at the start of lunch “I’m buying because there’s this thing I might want to hire you for, and I want to talk about it during lunch”.

I’ve head-hunted people over the course of five years, myself. But they knew it, because I bought them lunch at least once per year to talk about how I’m a fan of their work.

This dude is likely to be disappointed because while he’s been thinking about job fit for 5 years, his ideal candidate hasn’t thought about him at all.

“… And the person doesn’t even know…” This dude is bad at this.

Y’all, if you work in my field and I buy you lunch, it’s because I’m trying to hire you.

But you won’t have to wonder. I’ll start the conversation with something subtle, like “I’m buying today because I’m trying to hire you.”

It…uh…works. Really well. Stay tuned for more insightful tips, I guess.

If you’re interested in that level of control, it’s time to look hard at GrapheneOS. “Internet” is a permission you can grant or deny for each app, under GrapheneOS.

But I’m not aware of a way to selectively direct phone traffic through Proton VPN, at the phone. Even on GrapheneOS.

Enough skill with an expensive router could do it, but only on your home network, or only while routing all of your phone traffic back to your home network via yet another VPN.

Edit: TIL, Proton VPN supports split tunneling. Sweet! Look under Settings - Advanced - Split Tunneling - then pick your apps to include/exclude.

Edit 2: TIL DivestOS also supports “Internet” as a per app Permission. Very cool.

I’m all for companies participating in open source communities… but this is the company that routinely blocks me from viewing my aunt’s reposts of Russian state sponsored racist propeganda just because I don’t install the incredibly invasive mobile app.

I can imagine a few ways that this could go wrong…

I assume you mean to check on his often they’re is the breaking changes? :)

Declarative style isn’t perfect, but it’s a massive improvement from straight bash scripting.

I think you’re looking for Ansible. Have fun!

The difference between an Anible playbook and a script, is Ansible has a ‘check’, ‘change’, ‘verify’ pattern, and is declarative (meaning that once the playbook is made, it tends to keep working on future versions of Ansible.)

Have a look at the Onyx Boox line of devices.

They run Android under the hood, so various file sync apps just work (i.e. to move books wirelessly from your own Network Attached Storage.)

But beware that the tablet versions default to a much lower screnn refresh rate than a typical ebook, since they don’t need the refresh when you’re taking notes. There’s configuration options to make them act more like an ebook reader, at the cost of some of the battery life.

Awesome. Thanks!

It’s the year of the Linux desktop! /s

But seriously, I think I’m going to buy a SteamDeck.

A Synolgoy network attached storage device is very easy to set up to backup to AWS Glacier, and it has good apps for Android phone backup.

I don’t know how the app support is for iPhone is, though.

Sounds fun! Here’s my favorite relatively chill multiplayer games:

• ToeJam and Earl - the ultimate chill vibes game, punctuated with moments of panic, of course.
• Gunstar Heroes - marvel at the peak of 16 bit graphics, blow up badguy robots, find cool gun combinations, repeat
• Cyborg Justice - incredibly steep learning curve, but a chill repetitive gameplay loop with lots of interesting mechanics to discover
• Battletoads vs Double Dragon - Probably the best brawler, with lots of interesting twists in gameplay mechanics. But starting with 3 lives is unfair - use the Konami code for a chance to see the whole game.

Would it be enough to be able to run .deb packages on fedora?

Unpacking a .deb on Fedora, or unpacking an .rpm on Ubuntu isn’t a big deal. The files inside are often actually identical.

But would not be useful because the files inside usually rely on shared libraries, which may or may not already be installed. Those shared libraries are installed in different places on each Linux distro. Figuring out which ones to ask for (and making sure the program can find them) is the real work that the .Deb or .RPM installers do.

A fun way to try this out is with Portable Apps. Anything called a “portable app” either doesn’t use additional libraries, or carries the libraries it needs with it.

If you find a portable app for Ubunutu, there’s a good chance the Fedora version is an identical file, and works fine on Ubuntu. There’s lots of reasons it might not work, but it can be fun to try.

For the most part, the only reason any Linux program is unavailable on a different version of Linux is that no one has bothered to build the necessary installer for that combination of program and OS.

.RPM was supposed to solve this by being universal, since any other OS can implement it to match .Deb was supposed to solve this by being universal, since any other OS can implement it to match (about 60% actually do). I think Flatpacks and Snaps might solve this by being universal, at some point…

Source: I’ve built installer packages for various operating systems.