Christian

I began writing this comment with the intention of answering your question, but it actually ended up mainly being me venting myself.

Obviously no, it’s never been a flawless experience, but a few months back I decided I wanted to try gaming so I put an nvidia card in my pc and reinstalled linux to start fresh. All of the examples you’ve given sound like the sort of problems I’ve had since then, but never in the ten years before when I was using intel integrated graphics. I was aware going in that nvidia is massively more problematic than AMD, but this card was a spare from someone I know.

Obviously there are games I can run well now that were unrealistic before, but there are also a couple 2D games with SNES-quality graphics that I’ve tried which spike my CPU to 100% and lag like crap in spite of working perfectly before I installed the card. I’ve had two experiences where a game suddenly has issues immediately after an update to the nvidia-utils package. I’m not new to linux, but I am new to gaming on it and I’ve kind of given up on troubleshooting this stuff in favor of “maybe there will be an update tomorrow that fixes this”.

There’s reason for optimism, everyone is saying the situation is steadily improving because nvidia has been much more cooperative in the past couple years. It’s not realistic to say you won’t find annoyances regardless, but it wouldn’t surprise me if over half of your struggles are a direct result of decades of one company’s deliberate decision to ignore pleas to stop making life as hard as they possibly can on software developers trying to support their hardware.

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This is a GPL project. Other than restrictions on relicesnsing, the one thing the GPL doesn’t allow is redistributions with the same name and logo, because anyone could rebuild the source code with malware added and the developer would be perceived as responsible.

You, today, can literally rebuild strawberry with a changed logo and name, and write “my program exactly strawberry except with a changed logo and name” and make that repository publicly available for free and it cannot be taken down as long as it is licensed the same way. No developers are losing sleep over lost sales from piracy of their GPL program. Otherwise they would not use the GPL in the first place.

If a developer sees that their program is being rehosted on codeberg with the same name and logo, what steps do you think they should take to verify that the binaries being shared were not rebuilt from the publicly available source code with a cryptominer added? I can’t think of a way to prevent that other than requiring a name and logo change and taking it down otherwise. It’s not enough to verify just once, because the new code author could change a legit binary to an infected one at any time.

And, again, there is no target audience for this “scam”. What do you believe might motivate the kind of customer who would regret purchasing this to pay for it in the first place? There is no need to litigate possible reasons why something might be a malicious moneymaking scheme when there is no imaginable target that would be victimized.

Which is the reason I thought it was obvious that no one will pay that without a sincere affinity for the project in some way beyond just using the app itself. Who do you imagine would pay here just to get access to the player? You’re talking about this like it’s a scam, but a scam has an intended target audience that we can at least imagine.

I can’t picture someone choosing to buy a $60 subscription to this with no reason other than being a windows user who is dead-set on using strawberry over any other music player. There’s no way the devs are raking in cash from windows users. They’ll maybe get a couple people who like strawberry because they are already foss advocates and are forced to use windows on one of their pcs, ie people who already understand what strawberry’s development priorities will be and also understand that what they are buying could be built from source code without paying.

It’s essentially a policy to ignore those operating systems except when someone cares enough to make a donation, under the reasonable assumption that bug reports from donors will still be worth their time. Windows users who have no knowledge about the project beyond “it plays music” will not shell out $60 by mistake. Literally no one is aware of strawberry’s existence but unaware of alternatives.

What is wrong with this policy? Strawberry is GPL, this sounds like the dev is committed enough to FOSS to not care too much about issues that come up on proprietary operating systems. This is very obviously not going to bring in a lot of money, how many people do you picture using windows or mac who think strawberry is so much better than other options that it’s worth paying for? They’re not advertising this in any way, there’s no plot to trick poor souls into paying.

It strikes me as an easy and effective way to dismiss without argument bugfix requests on operating systems the developer doesn’t care to touch. It’s saying we don’t want to neglect any users on other platforms that sincerely care about our project, but otherwise we just want to prioritze FOSS, so let’s write off essentially all proprietary OS users while providing an avenue in case someone actually does care about our project that much.

Telling my five-year-old that if they can beat Ecco the Dolphin in front of me I will take them out for ice cream, but I’m not sitting down to watch more often than once a week.

I clicked your link not expecting to watch more than thirty seconds but watched the full thing, that was a great lecture.

Being clichés was exactly it, I would find all of the other things perfectly tolerable if the characters had depth. I think three of the four introductions I saw just felt like “this character has actual values that you, the player, will totally align with” but completely hamfisted. If the protagonists are going to be the good guys then a story making that clear should be enough, rather than having “being the good guy” be an entire personality at the very start. (The exception to that came across as a generic oonga boonga beast woman, so having her dialogue be the least taxing for me to read was not exactly reason for optimism.)

I expected they’re all going to be given more depth as the story advances but I didn’t feel excited to wait around to see if that makes them less annoying, especially with four more intro stories remaining.

If you’ve played the second game I would like an opinion on if that one has a better cast.

I tried the first one a few years back and it seemed right up my alley as far as art style and gameplay but I gave up after finding my fourth character because all four of them had personalities and dialogue that were grating on me. I like jrpgs and I can’t remember another one I bailed on explicitly because I found the dialogue annoying.

When I looked through reviews they seemed mostly positive, and even for the critical reviews that did share my complaint it was mostly an afterthought to other concerns that were not a big deal to me personally. If anyone felt similarly and also tried out the sequel I’d really like to know if it’s any better in that regard because I really wanted to like the first one.

Yaoling is spectacular. Monster taming RPG (think pokemon) with autobattle mechanics.

Completely missed their opportunity to start the headline with “Proud New Dad” and having the reveal at the end be that he was no less proud of this before fatherhood.

h-node?

Yeah I don’t have an answer for the thing you’re actually asking (sorry) but this is 100% a reasonable take and honestly I fully approve of their approach here. Strawberry is licensed under the GPL, it is libre software and can be packaged in any FOSS operating system without issue. This adds to the free software community. They are explicitly only selling to people who don’t value free software enough to use a free operating system.

And to be clear, I can guarantee that no one loses sleep over piracy of their GPL software, otherwise it wouldn’t be GPL. I see it more as a way for the devs to wash their hands of troubleshooting for operating systems they don’t want to care about - anyone on windows/mac who cares enough about strawberry to pay gets listened to, but otherwise you’ve created an easy excuse for ignoring the extra work.

As an aside it’s my preferred player on linux, good software.

Which is why they said the issue was torrenting and not using too much data. It’s an unlimited plan and they would never think to put a limit on data usage. They just object to torrenting and it’s pure coincidence that they only object to that when someone is using a lot of data.

I remember reading that the most significant impact DRM has is on security research. Individuals don’t care about bypassing DRM, but an organization is not going to fund anything involving it because of the legal concern. So if a researcher wants to look into a file format behind DRM, or the DRM mechanism itself, being used as an attack vector, that’s not going to get funding.

The defense that companies will make is that they’re happy to grant exceptions in these cases, but in practice the company will make the exceptions as narrow as possible to err on the side of maintaining as much control as possible, while a research organization will want to err on the side of avoiding potential grey areas, meaning the exceptions are inevitability too restrictive to allow much of anything to come of them.

Over ten years ago I was looking for a foss email client and I was really hesitant on claws because the interface looked ridiculously dated, but settled on it anyway because it seemed the most appropriate for me out of what was available.

The interface has received zero facelifts since then, but it’s grown to become endearing because the software has been fantastic and reliable for years. I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles in an email client, so maybe it’s missing features others might want, but it does everything I care about and needs minimal setup.