Yeah, I have a similar situation with Borderlands 2 not running on my machine with Windows 7 but running just fine in Linux with Proton (which is Steam’s branch of Wine).

It seems to me that Linux with Wine is actually better at backwards compatibility for Windows applications than Windows itself.

PS: Also a handful of old games I have from GoG that wouldn’t run on Windows run just fine with Wine on Linux.

Yeah, I was an EU immigrant in Britain at the time and the Delusions Of Grandeur of the locals were really placed in sharp relief and some of those were pretty shocking. These were especially bad for the Brexiters but for example many Remainers claimed that the UK should “Stay in the EU and shape it from the inside” (so a “we Britons know best than the rest” view, and remember that the Leave Referendum happenned after the UK Government demanded from the EU, once again, even more special treatment and was told “No”).

In Britain the mindset that led to Brexit had been heavilly pushed by the Press and Politicians for decades, so this outcome wasn’t totally unexpected. In fact I only know about Britons being expelled from Spain after the end of the transition period since they didn’t register, because some British newspapers which had supported Brexit published outraged pieces about how Spain was expelling Britons), so even after the whole Brexit thing was done, at least part of the Press still pushed (and Britons still believed) the whole idea that Britons should have special treatment even whilst not reciprocating it.

As I see it Britain and Britons are suffering from one hell of a post-Imperial Hangover, which makes it very problematic for them to cooperate with other nations in any format other than “purelly competitive and always trying to gain an advantage over others”, so they were always the odd one out in the EU and, frankly, De Gaule was right when way back he did not want to let the UK into the EU.

I remember back during the Leave Referendum that many Briton pensioners living in Spain voted Leave “To keep the Spaniards from entering ‘our’ country” and later were very suprised that they themselves were also impacted and had to apply to live in Spain (and apparently after the end of the transition period some even got expelled from Spain because they couldn’t be arsed to register and became illegal immigrants).

Germany has supported Israel with weapons whilst knowing they were committing a Genocide, so the answer for Germany is probably “Yes”, at least as an accomplice.

The answer for the Republic Of Ireland is as far as I know “No”.

It’s funny that smelling the spices and the food as I cook it to see if they’ll go well together is my main method of figuring out which spices to use.

Personally I think it’s only much of a problem when it’s two languages from a language branch other than my native language.

So, for example, as my native language is Portuguese (from the Romance branch) I have no trouble telling French from Portuguese, Italian or Spanish (even when words are the same the accent is different) and whilst I might on occasion mix Spanish words into Italian or vice-versa when speaking, it’s unsual, but when I learned German after having learned Dutch it was very confusing and almost felt like the German language knowledge was eating up the Dutch language knowledge in my mind, because one so often polluted the other one (more in the thinking and talking in that language, rather than spotting if the language spoken was Dutch or German, since the accents still give it away, to the point that I can tell Swiss German from that from Germany even though my German language knowledge is still pretty basic).

Meanwhile back when I first I learned French after having learned English I never confused one with the other.

I think that if you’re intimately familiar with a language branch you know enough to spot even small differences and know which is which or at least it’s a lot easier (hence I might confuse Spanish words with Italian ones - both foreign languages to me - but it’s unusual) but in a totally different language branch the “distance” from what is familiar is a lot larger and words from multiple languages from that branch which you’re not sure of just sound like they might be from any of those languages (or even multiple of them, which they sometimes are).

A family of software development processes for teams, which focuses on cycles of quickly building and delivering smaller blocks of program functionally (often just a single program feature - say: “search customers by last name” - or just part of a feature) to end-users so as to get quick feedback from those users of the software, which is then is use to determining what should be done for subsequent cycles.

When done properly it addresses the issues of older software development processes (such as the Waterfall process) in siuations where the users don’t really have a detailed vision of what the software needs to do for them (which are the most usual situations unless the software just helps automates their present way of doing things) or there are frequent changes of what they need the software to do for them (i.e. they already use the software but frequently need new software features or tweaks to existing features).

In my own career of over two decades I only ever seen it done properly maybe once or twice. The problem is that “doing Agile” became fashionable at a certain point maybe a decade ago and pretty much a requirement to have in one’s CV as a programmer, so you end up with lots of teams mindlessly “doing Agile” by doing some of the practices from Agile (say, the stand up meeting or paired programming) without including other practices and elements of the process (and adjusting them for their local situation) thus not achieving what that process is meant to achieve - essentially they don’t really understand it as a software development process which is more adequate for some situations and less for others and what it actually is supposed to achieve and how.

(The most frequent things not being done are those around participation of the end-users of the software in evaluating what has been done in the last cycle, determining new features and feature tweaks for the next cycle and prioritizing them. The funny bit is that these are core parts of making Agile deliver its greatest benefits as a software development process, so basically most teams aren’t doing the part of Agile that actually makes it deliver superior results to most other methods).

It doesn’t help that to really and fully get the purpose of Agile and how it achieves it, you generally need to be at the level of experience at which you’re looking at the actual process of making software (the kind of people with at least a decade of experience and titles like Software Architect) which, given how ageist a lot of the Industry is are pretty rare, so Agile is usually being done by “kids” in a monkey-sees-monkey-does way without understanding it as a process, hence why it, unsurprising, has by now gotten a bit of a bad name (as with everything, the right tool should be used for the right job).

They’re supposed to work as an adaptor/buffer/filter between the technical side and the non-technical stakeholders (customers, middle/upper management) and doing some level of organising.

In my 2 and a half decades of experience (a lot of it as a freelancer, so I worked in a lot of companies of all sizes in a couple of countries), most aren’t at all good at it, and very few are very good at it.

Some are so bad that they actually amplify uncertainty and disorganisation by, every time they talk to a customer or higher up, totally changing the team’s direction and priorities.

Mind you, all positions have good professionals and bad professionals, the problem with project management is that a bad professional can screw a lot of work of a lot of people, whilst the damage done by, for example, a single bad programmer, tends to be much more contained and generally mainly impacts the programer him or herself (so that person is very much incentivised to improve).

Half way into saving the World it turns out you need some data that’s not even being collected, something that nobody had figured out because nobody analysed the problem properly beforehand, and now you have to take a totally different approach because that can’t be done in time.

Also the version of a library being include by some dependency of some library you included to do something stupidly simple is different from the version of the same library being included by some dependency of a totally different library somebody else includeed to do something else that’s just as stupidly simple and neither you nor that somebody else want to be the one to rewrite their part of the code.

It’s funny that without actually spotting the mistake I just read it as the op expecting multiple criticisms to and basically telling people bringing them to get in line.

The first sign that the company you just joined is amateur hour, every hour of the day, every day of the year is that they don’t have a Staging environment.

It eliminates the dependency of specific distributions problem and, maybe more importantly, it solves the dependency of specific distribution versions problem (i.e. working fine now but might not work at all later in the very same distribution because some libraries are missing or default configuration is different).

For example, one of the games I have in my GOG library is over 10 years old and has a native Linux binary, which won’t work in a modern Debian-based distro by default because some of the libraries it requires aren’t installed (meanwhile, the Windows binary will work just fine with Wine). It would be kinda deluded to expect the devs would keep on updating the Linux native distro (or even the Windows one) for over a decade, whilst if it had been released as a Docker app, that would not be a problem.

So yeah, stuff like Docker does have a reasonable justification when it comes to isolating from some external dependencies which the application devs have no control over, especially when it comes to future-proofing your app: the Docker API itself needs to remain backwards compatible, but there is no requirement that the Linux distros are backwards compatible (something which would be much harder to guarantee).

Mind you, Docker and similar is a bit of a hack to solve a systemic (cultural even) problem in software development which is that devs don’t really do proper dependency management and just throw in everything and the kitchen sink in terms of external libraries (which then depend on external libraries which in turn depend on more external libraries) into the simplest of apps, but that’s a broader software development culture problem and most of present day developers only ever learned the “find some library that does what you need and add it to the list of dependencies of your build tool” way of programming.

I would love it if we solved what’s essentially the core Technical Architecture problem of in present day software development practices, but I have no idea how we can do so, hence the “hack” of things like Docker of pretty much including the whole runtime environment (funnilly enough, a variant of the old way of having your apps build statically with every dependency) to work around it.

Well, mucking about with configuration on a computer is a form of entertainment hence its “use” in a broader sense…

Look for a processor for the same socket that supports more RAM and make sure the Motherboard can handle it - maybe you’re lucky and it’s not a limit of that architecture.

If that won’t work, breakup your self-hosting needs into multiple machines and add another second hand or cheap machine to the pile.

I’ve worked in designing computer systems to handle tons of data and requests and often the only reasonable solution is to break up the load and throw more machines at it (for example, when serving millions of requests on a website, just put a load balancer in front of it that assigns user sessions and associated requests to multiple machines, so the load balancer pretty much just routes request by user session whilst the heavy processing stuff is done by multiple machines in such a way the you can just expand the whole thing by adding more machines).

In a self-hosting scenario I suspect you’ll have a lot of margin for expansion by splitting services into multiple hosts and using stuff like network shared drives in the background for shared data, before you have to fully upgrade a host machine because you hit that architecture’s maximum memory.

Granted, if a single service whose load can’t be broken down so that you can run it as a cluster, needs more memory than you can put in any of your machines, then you’re stuck having to get a new machine, but even then by splitting services you can get a machine with a newer architecture that can handle more memory but is still cheap (such as a cheap mini-PC) and just move that memory-heavy service to it whilst leaving CPU intensive services in the old but more powerful machine.

Worry not: in 20 years’ time people born in 2028 will all pretty much look like kids to you.

I have a cheap N100 mini-PC with Lubuntu on it with Kodi alongside a wireless remote as my TV box, and use my TV as a dumb screen.

Mind you, you can do it even more easily with LibreELEC instead of Lubuntu and more cheaply with one of its supported cheap SBCs plus a box instead of a mini PC.

That said, even the simplest solution is beyond the ability of most people to set up, and once you go up to the next level of easiness to setup - a dedicated Android TV Box - you’re hit with enshittification (at the very least preconfigured apps like Netflix with matching buttons in your remote) even if you avoid big brands.

Things are really bad nowadays unless you’re a well informed tech expert with the patience to dive into those things when you’re home.

The Haaretz is a well established Israeli Newspaper.

I use a pretty basic one (with an N100 microprocessor and intel integrated graphics) as a TV box + home server combo and its excellent for that.

It’s totally unsuitable for gaming unless we’re talking about stuff running in DOSEmu or similar and even then I’m using it with a wireless remote rather than a keyboard + mouse, which isn’t exactly suitable for PC gaming.

Mind you, there are configurations with dedicated graphics but they’re about 4x the price of the one I got (which cost me about €120) and at that point you’re starting to enter into the same domain as small form factor desktop PCs using things like standard motherboards, which are probably better for PC gaming simply because you can upgrade just about anything in those whilst hardware upgradeability of mini PCs is limited to only some things (like SDD and RAM).

Time to stop the Israeli white colonialist land theft - FTFY.

Trauma my ass.

Literally only a handful of people alive today in Israel experienced the Holocaust and most aren’t even descendents Western European Jews: their parents and grandparents came from Russia (especially people from the Settler Movement).

Nah, this is the same kind of thieving and murdering white colonialism as in the US back when their were genociding the Native Tribes, Appartheid South Africa and the worst of the White occupiers in Africa (such as Belgium in Congo) - as can be seen by the way the Zionists treat Ethiopian Jews - which just happens to be associated with an unusual overwhelmingly white religion other than the usual overwhelmingly White religion.

These people have the same kind of “Western Values” as early XX century Germany.