I’ve tinkered plenty even when using Windows haha. I even have a Windows 98 and Windows XP virtual machine for some old things, but everything I care about seems to have a modern HD release, a userpatch or can be hooked with dxwnd, so I don’t use them anymore at the moment.

But yeah probably the long term solution is Linux. Personally I wouldn’t run Windows 7 anymore. The unfixed CVE list has become quite long. I just went checking for the above titles out of principle, because I don’t like this conflation of PC gaming with only Steam.

I still haven’t made the jump to gaming on Linux, unfortunately. Although I’ve been running a dual boot for the last 8 years or so, because I used Linux for my studies, use it for my work, and for hosting my game servers on a second computer, so I would be in a prime position… but so far I have just gone the way of least resistance, which is still Windows 10 at the moment.

But I have a deadline now: October 2025. Just need to figure out the best distro, I don’t think I’ll use my existing Fedora KDE install for this. Maybe Arch, or one of these new immutable distros, that might be neat for when different games require different versions of libraries.

Ah sorry I hadn’t heard that they switched to Java 21 with 1.20.5

The title of that article is kind of weird. It’s just wrong to claim they are dead for gaming because of a lack of steam.

Anyone can just get Witcher 3, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Stardew Valley, or Anno 2070 from GoG and for each of them you can game for another 50 hours without needing steam. Or get Minecraft from their page directly and play for 100 hours. This is all without going to any retro titles.

looks like a console from a 90s pop music video

Damn that’s a spectre that I hadn’t even thought of yet.

I’m guessing here, but the only thing that makes sense in context is Fixed Wireless Access, FWA.

Maybe some error with the initialism snuck in because Shimitar is from Italy. I could see myself doing something similar, since in German we read W as “vee”.

Well, maybe now with a republican FCC

lol, no

There is this overview showing the options: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/wifiextenders/overview

I have only used the WDS mode once and none of the others, so my experience isn’t enough to make a recommendation.

For my part I didn’t mind that so much in Cyberpunk 2077, I just played it multiple times with different V characters.

But then I can see that it’s a big time investment and not good for everyone.

I’ll just quote the OpenWRT Wiki here, because I think half the comments here confuse mesh and roaming:

Are you sure you want a mesh?

If you are looking for a solution to enable your user devices to seamlessly roam from one access point to another in your home, you need 802.11r (roaming), not 802.11s.

It is unfortunate that some manufacturers have used the word “Mesh” for marketing purposes to describe their non-standard, closed source, proprietary “roaming” functionality and this causes great confusion to many people when they enter the world of international standards and open source firmware for their network infrastructure.

• The accepted standard for mesh networks is ieee802.11s.
• The accepted standard for fast roaming of user devices is ieee802.11r.

These are two completely unrelated standards.

Source: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/mesh/802-11s#are_you_sure_you_want_a_mesh

On a general note I would say for the individual consumer it doesn’t matter so much if they keep releasing yearly, we just don’t have to buy yearly.

It’s kind of a waste of resources for the manufacturers supporting more models than necessary. If that leads to shorter support schedules that’s when it impacts us. But as you observed they seem to be lengthening at the moment.

I’m currently on a Pixel 6 from 2021, that I bought used from someone who was chasing the latest and greatest. I have no reason for changing yet. After October 2026 when support ends I’ll see if I have to migrate to Graphene OS or something. If no secure path forward exists I may have to get newer hardware then.

From what I can tell, the only OEM that does this currently might be Fairphone.

Does what? I don’t see anything in the sentences before that “this” could refer to.

I wouldn’t say it’s in trouble. It’s about to be retired by ICANN. But there isn’t any trouble, just standard policy processes.

Repeated surgical corrections for your ever growing earlobes

That makes sense. He’s old enough and close enough thematically to have seen a few of these tech hype cycles.

You’d think the secret service were better at opsec than random soldiers getting their helicopters blown up.

Pretty good disclosure text. There are much bigger companies that don’t manage to be this clear.

The only nitpick I have is saying “encypted” with bcrypt, even though they clearly know that bcrypt only hashes things.

Repairing things helps reduce the endless resource expediture and trash creation. Ice cream machines are just a random example. As you can read in the article they were going for much more, and more significant stuff, but got denied.

Ah this bit is sad. The exception only covers bypassing DMCA protections to fix your own stuff not distributing the tooling for it.

It is still a crime for iFixit to sell a tool to fix ice cream machines, and that’s a real shame. The ruling doesn’t change the underlying statute making it illegal to share or sell tools that bypass software locks. This leaves most of the repair work inaccessible to the average person, since the technical barriers remain high. Without these tools, this exemption is largely theoretical for many small businesses that don’t have in-house repair experts.

Except Battle for Wesnoth and Pingus.

Maybe OpenRCT and Osu! a little further down the line.