• 2 Posts
  • 58 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • It actually happened to me today on Arch.

    I updated the system, including the kernel, everything went smoothly with no errors or warnings, I rebooted, and it said the ZSTD image created by mkinitcpio was corrupt and it failed to boot.

    I booted the arch install iso, chrooted into my installation and reinstalled the linux package, rebooted, and it worked again.

    I have no explanation, this is on a perfectly working laptop with a high end SSD, no errors in memtest, not overclocked, and I’ve been using this Arch install for over a year.

    The chances of the package being corrupt when I downloaded it and the hash still being correct are astronomically low, the chances of a cosmic ray hitting the RAM at just the right time are probably just as low, the fact that mkinitcpio doesn’t verify the images that it creates is shocking, the whole thing would have been avoided on an immutable distro with A/B partitions.






  • Generally speaking, Linux needs better binary compatibility.

    Currently, if you compile something, it’s usually dynamically linked against dozens of libraries that are present on your system, but if you give the executable to someone else with a different distro, they may not have those libraries or their version may be too old or incompatible.

    Statically linking programs is often impossible and generally discouraged, making software distribution a nightmare. Flatpak and similar systems made things easier, but it’s such a crap solution and basically involves having an entire separate OS installed in parallel, with its own problems like having a version of Mesa that’s too old for a new GPU and stuff like that. Applications must be able to be packaged with everything they need with them, there is no reason for dynamic linking to be so important in Linux these days.

    I’m not in favor of proprietary software, but better binary compatibility is a necessity for Linux to succeed, and I’m saying this as someone who’s been using Linux for over a decade and who refuses to install any proprietary software. Sometimes I find myself using apps and games in Wine even when a native version is available just to avoid the hassle of having to find and probably compile libobsoletecrap-5.so






  • Windows becoming completely hostile towards power users.

    I used to LOVE Windows, I even made fun of friends who were using Linux, which I only used on servers because I thought the desktop experience was sub par (and at the time it was, we’re talking 10-15 years ago). Then Windows 8 came and I stayed on 7 because the experience was bad. Then 10 came and data collection started getting out of control, so I had to jump through a bunch of hoops just to make it usable and “private enough”. Eventually things got so bad around 2019 that I realized that I was spending more time fixing that pile of crap than the average Arch user and I decided to give Linux a serious try.

    I was somewhat annoyed by some UI/UX flaws but eventually I got used to it, and with the coming of Linux gaming I started using Windows less and less (it’s an AMD system so the Linux experience is excellent), eventually last year I realized that I hadn’t booted it in months so I just wiped that drive and started using it for games. I’ve also gotten a lot more paranoid about privacy and sandboxing proprietary software.

    Now with Windows 11 things have gotten so bad that even my students are making fun of it so I don’t think I’ll be coming back.






  • Talos 2 is very promising in terms of gameplay, the first one is one of my favorite games and I played through it many times, and I’ve already played this demo 3 times.

    This one is more ambitious, the environments are bigger, there’s more content, the art style is fantastic, BUT… I can’t help but feel a deep sense of technical jank that is shared by many players. The game is a constant state of desperately loading stuff and stuttering due to shader compilation, and you can feel all of it every time you turn around or walk in a new area. Even on ultra with native upscaling, the game only looks good if you stay still, as soon as you move you get smears from every object, the grass stops moving, you can clearly see problems with lighting like shimmering and bleeding, the water and vegetation have no physics whatsoever (the first one at least had water ripples), and despite using raytraced AO they’re still using those horrible screenspace reflections (the first one had actual reflections). To top it all off, settings don’t always apply correctly until you restart the game, and sometimes the game reverts them to whatever it feels more appropriate for your hardware with no indication whatsoever that it’s happened. I’ve yet to see an UE5 game that doesn’t have these issues, that engine just… doesn’t look good in motion. To quote AVGN, it feels like driving an old beat up car, you’re always afraid it’s going to break down.

    Also, one of the developers said they don’t want to support Linux, not even through Proton, then another one said they’ll try to get it to work. Get your shit together, the first one had a native port!

    This is based on my experience with a 5800x, and a 6900xt, in 1440p, so your mileage may vary and I know they’re hard at work to improve the situation.

    So yeah, respect for croteam for making what it’s undoubtedly going to be a great puzzle game, but shame on them if they release it in this state.