popcar2

Use something like Heroic Launcher which lets you easily download/install GOG games via Proton.

Awesome. I've been using FUTO keyboard for two years now and it's the best free & private keyboard I found, but swiping has been really bad for all these keyboards which was such a pain because I use swiping a lot.

Nice to see the hour of swiping I did adding to their dataset actually helped. I'm using it now and it feels as good as the Google keyboard.

Edit: It is sending me a little that it keeps swiping "whats" instead of "what's" though, hopefully they fix that later.

And TIC-80! https://tic80.com/

Mofunzone... Now that's a deep cut. I used to spend a lot of time playing the RPGs over there.

Glad this project is still going, but have they ever fixed its stability and being able to change the framerate without breaking the whole project? Last I tried, trying to export the video with a different fps just broke all the keyframe timings...

Some of the recommendations here are good classics, but if you're looking for some REALLY good ones:

* Sonny 2 (really in-depth turn based RPG)

* Fancy Pants Adventures 1-3 (2D platformer)

* Larry and the Gnomes (Beat 'em up)

* Interactive Buddy 2 (Fun simulator toy)

* Final Ninja Zero (2D platformer)

* Bubble Tanks 2 (Twinstick shooter)

These really take me back...

I was considering making a similar list since I was very interested in checking out alternative chat programs, but I have to say this list isn't that good. A lot of the alternatives here aren't ACTUALLY Discord alternatives.

Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people, follow news, talk in forums, etc... It also has a lot of features people hand-waive like a really good roles system, moderation and server management tools, a bot ecosystem, etc.

Signal is a Whatsapp alternative for 1-on-1 chats with friends and small groups.

Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.

I haven't used Zulip but AFAIK it's like Rocket Chat.

Ditto on Mattermost.

Discourse is a forum.

Stoat is basically the only thing here that actually competes on Discord and it's really barebones. There isn't a genuine Discord alternative because it turns out it's really hard (and expensive!) to do what it does, kind of like a Youtube alternatives scenario.

This was the one to finally stop getting me to distro hop. Cachy is very easy to use and very well maintained. The performance is usually the selling point people talk about, but it's also very customizable and beginner-friendly (especially for an arch-based distro).

It uses an online installer that lets you choose the desktop environment, boot manager, file system, among other things. You can follow the defaults if you're new. Once you install it, it also comes with a few helper applications that can quickly set up things you'd want to use, like a one-click button that installs all the gaming packages you want to use and their flavor of Proton which is (allegedly) faster than the default.

They also have a really good wiki which I contributed a bit to and a very active community if you need help. All around, 10/10 would recommend to anyone. I managed to convince my friend who's new to Linux to use this instead of Zorin and he's had a great time.

The first page says none of the book was written by AI

Absolutely. I was just reminiscing about a '97 game called "Claw". The studio that made it shut down earlier this year and I wish I could make a sort-of remake of it, but you legally can't. It's not even clear who owns the rights to it anymore.

Uhhuh. I think anyone in the tech field can immediately tell where this is going, and I'm not at all excited for it.

1. They silently make it online only. Currently you need to make an account and be online on activation, so they're already one step closer to getting there.

2. They silently ditch the concept of buying and owning Affinity software, but that's okay because it's ~totally free~!

3. As soon as they lock in enough users from how nice and friendly they are, pull the rug. At some point they'll suddenly start locking features behind the pro subscription.

It's textbook at this point.

The biggest problem is probably work-related apps not working. Adobe products, MS Office, and certain niches like the music industry just aren't supported on Linux.

Many ultra-popular games don't work due to anticheat, but some do. Dota 2, Counter-strike, Marvel Rivals, Overwatch 2, among others work perfectly fine. We've also reached a point where virtually every offline game will work too.

I absolutely love SRB2K but I think they overcooked Ring Racers. It's bloated with so many mechanics that the tutorial for how to play the game is literally almost an hour long. The controls are also harsher than the previous game, especially when it comes to slopes.

Version 2.4 which is almost out doubles down on it being a high skill racing game with even more mechanics... Gaining "amps" when dealing damage, going into overdrive, "ring bail" which is dropping all your coins for a boost and can cancel spinning out, "neutral drift" where you lose less speed when drifting without steering...

I don't know what's going on at this point. I just want to hold forward and drift.

This is very true, and it's a large part of why I never use microblogging at all, it's impossible to just find posts that fit what you want to see.

That's why I mostly use Lemmy/Piefed because everything is neatly organized into communities that you can subscribe to. I mostly browse tech & gaming communities and my feed is very chill.

I don't have a horse in which decentralized protocol wins, but while ATProtocol sounds great on paper I'm still inching closer to liking ActivityPub more. I'm pretty active on Lemmy[1] which is quite active and fun to browse

1. 99.99% (literally) of AT users are on Bluesky, which is helmed by a for-profit corporation. The argument is that they don't control the protocol but considering it is THE dominating instance of that protocol, what's stopping them from strong-arming the protocol and changing how it works to benefit them? Better yet, what's stopping them from doing a rugpull and closing off their open service? What if bluesky decides 5 years from now that you aren't allowed to move your account? This isn't some hypothetical scenario, this already happened before. A lot of social medias started off with fairly open features and APIs and slowly choked them out for profit.

2. Users don't really care about protocol, they care about momentum and userbase. Piefed/Lemmy/Mbin are all popular-ish Reddit alternatives using AP. It was already a struggle to reach a point where posts could get over a hundred comments a day, how are you going to convince people to move to another platform again? I'm worried this will just end in splintering an already niche community and cause people to just give up and go back to using popular platforms.

Being able to move accounts is a very neat feature but it's not a reason enough to move. You can already export your settings and make an account on another instance in 20 seconds then import your settings again, which would bring back your subscriptions and blocks and all you set up from account 1. To me it's not a huge deal.

See also: https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

[1]: A fediverse Reddit alternative, e.g https://lemmy.world/ and https://programming.dev/ . See also Piefed which I think is better nowadays https://piefed.social/

Donate is the key term here. If you want there to be alternatives to everything that's getting worse, you need to make those alternatives sustainable - even if they're not there yet. You can donate to alternative Android ROMs, efforts to make Linux on mobile usable, and support companies that actually care about users like Fairphone. They all need money to live.

Sweet talk and online activism is great, but the TLDR is always open-source developers need money to work.

I've always liked the idea of being able to just post anonymously without any votes, but it always quickly devolves into incoherent spam and endless slurs.

The website has been active for an hour and I'm already seeing some of that. It always turns into 4chan.

It'll open the door for more ambitious webgames and web apps that use the GPU.

It's an issue with Godot on the web unfortunately, when you're dropping frames the audio starts clipping and crackling. Judging by the other comment, the lua integration must be doing some heavy work.

I would be way more interested in it playing niche community levels, because I suspect a huge reason it's able to solve these levels is because it was trained on a million Baba is You walkthroughs. Same with people using Pokemon as a way to test LLMs, it really just depends on how well it knows the game.

It's less featured and has limited 3D support, but Defold is great for making smaller games aimed at the web or mobile. It has a much smaller binary size and it's generally more stable, especially in terms of physics. If you take a look at the showcase it's mostly webgames and a few smaller indies.

Nope, which is very bizarre. I don't understand the point of the phone form factor if it doesn't have a SIM card slot. It even has a microphone and everything but you can't make calls from it.

That is wild, I recently updated my own Morse Code teaching tool to v2.0 yesterday, and it's somewhat similar in concept to this: https://popcar2.itch.io/morse-code-simulator

Being able to transmit your signals to other people here is really cool. Makes it a lot more than just typing to yourself.

What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression?

Elden Ring and its DLC, probably. The Japanese games industry is doing far better than their western counterparts, there have been huge headlines that in 2024's Game Awards, 4 of 5 games nominated for Game of the Year came from Asia (3 Japan, 1 China). The last game (Balatro) was an indie game developed by one person.

Not a single nominee was from a major western company like Ubisoft, EA, etc. They may be financially successful now, but the games industry is imploding. This is what happens when you treat developers poorly and chase greedy trends while expecting consumers to put up with it. Like you said, most AAA games releasing these days are either dead on arrival or completely unnotable and miss expectations.

You may enjoy sites like Minifeed[1], Kagi's SmallWeb[2] and Wiby[3]. These are some neat sites that let you discover random blogs and personal sites and are very fun to sift through and read something interesting.

Since we're self-promoting, feel free to check out my blog too :) https://popcar.bearblog.dev/

[1] https://minifeed.net/

[2] https://kagi.com/smallweb

[3] https://wiby.me/

Cool stuff, I like how clean the app looks. Since it's on Electron, is there any chance it can run as a web app? I think there would be a lot of excitement for a web-based video editor that's actually decent to use, even if it doesn't have the greatest performance.

If you'd like to search for how to fix a technical problem and want the first page of results to be articles saying "download/buy our product to fix it now!", then the list probably isn't for you.

There are quite a few company blogs I haven't blocked, mainly ones that are actually informative and aren't trying to trick you into looking at their products.

They aren't, that's why they're blocked. You can see more detail in the issues but the blocked corporate blogs often make clickbait to advertise their product, like https://www.ccleaner.com/knowledge/windows-11-problems-how-t...

Hi! I'm mostly going through them manually. Not all of the domains in the list are literally spam - most of the list also includes misleading sites like corporate blogs that trick people into downloading their software.

You might be interested in the AI spam/low effort section though, one that tops DDG often are these AI generated tech articles: https://github.com/popcar2/BadWebsiteBlocklist/issues/1

They're the same site under different domains, you can tell it's AI by its writing style, how much they churn out per day, how little info there is about who's writing it, how similarly the about pages are written, and how the same article is suspiciously also in similar-sounding sites.

Another one I just caught today that was on top of page 1: https://github.com/popcar2/BadWebsiteBlocklist/issues/84

I'll be sure to report these sites as I'm adding to the list, thanks.

This doesn't block you from visiting MSN, but it does stop their articles from appearing in search. The reason is that MSN just re-hosts articles from other sites rather than provide anything of value. MSN posts often outrank their original source because Microsoft is pushing it hard on Windows/Bing/Edge.

For example: https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/jodie-foster-heckled-a... is just a re-hosted version https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/jod...

My hope in hiding MSN is to allow the original sources to rise back up to the top.