Sickday

There’s only one day of the year when you can dupe me this well. Well done

I don’t develop distributed applications, but Im not understanding how it simplifies dependency management. Isn’t it just shifting the work into the app bundle? Stuff still has to be updated or replaced all the time, right?

That’s correct. This simplifies the dependency management system because not every distribution ships with every version of every package, so when software requires a version of a package that the distro dosesn’t ship with or have in its repositories, the end user has to either build the package from source, or find some other way to run their software. Flatpaks developers will define the versions of dependencies that are required for an application to run and that exact version is pulled in when the flatpak is installed. This makes the issue of every distro not having every version of every package moot.

Don’t maintainers have to release new bundles if they contain dependencies with vulnerabilities?

They don’t have to, no. But they absolutely should.

Is it because developers are often using dependencies that are ahead of release versions?

Sometimes, yes. Or the software is using a dependency that is so old that it’s no longer included in a distro’s package repositories.

Also, how is it so much better than images for your applications on Docker Hub?

I would say they’re suited to different purposes.

Docker shines when availability is a concern and replication is desired. It’s fantastic for running a swarm of applications spread across multiple machines automatically managing their lifecycles based on load. In general though, I wouldn’t use Docker containers to run graphical applications. Most images are not suited for this by default, and would require you install a bunch of additional packages before you could consider running any graphical apps. Solutions to run graphical applications in Docker do exist (see x11docker), but it doesn’t really seem like a common practice.

Flatpaks are designed to integrate into an existing desktops that already have a graphical environment running. Some flatpaks include the packages required for hardware acceleration (Steam, OBS) which can eliminate the need for those packages to be available via your distro’s package manager.

What this means is that a distro like Alpine Linux that doesn’t have an nvidia package in its repos can still run Steam because the Steam flatpak includes the nvidia driver if you have an nvidia GPU installed.

Never say never, I guess, but nothing about flatpak really appeals to my instincts. I really just want to know if it’s something I should adopt, or if I can continue to blissfully ignore.

¯_(ツ)_/¯ It’s a tool. Use it when it’s useful, or don’t.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I’ve been preaching to friends for years that FOSS versions of Starbound and/or Terraria would be a big hit.

awk

These are a few I’ve played over the years and really enjoyed. I think most are still available, but some are unfortunately only distributed via discord servers.

No particular order to these:

• Pokemon Prism - A very in-depth mod of Pokemon Crystal with 2 entirely new regions and a large catalog of Pokemon from multiple generations to capture. To my knowledge, it is a successor to Pokemon Brown
• Pokemon Brown - A very in-depth mod of Pokemon Red. This was made 2 decades ago, and was the first mod I ever played. Includes a new region and many Pokemon from different generations.
• Polished Crystal - A faithful (or not) upgrade to Pokemon Crystal.
• Pokemon Crystal Clear - A mod of Pokemon Crystal that brings in many new features and vastly upgrades the AI.
• Pokemon RedStar/BlueStar - A mod of Pokemon Red/Blue that includes the SpaceWorld 1997 assets.
• Pokemon Crystal Kaizo - A mod of Pokemon Crystal that adds in much better AI and a fair bit more difficulty. All Gen 2 Pokemon can be captured and just about every trainer presents a new level of difficulty.
• Altered Emerald - A massive mod of Pokemon Emerald that adds “(almost) every move and ability from gen 1 to 7” along with a few extras while making all 386 Gen 3 Pokemon capturable.

Edit: Just realized this wasn’t strictly Pokemon mods… Oops lol.

For-gy-o

Now there’s a winner. F-Orgy-O. Like a Federated Orgy.

Cult of the Lamb - Got this for my birthday from my buddy and it’s been very solid. I see why the reviews hype this game up; it’s a weird rpg with base building elements and that’s right up my alley. I’ve been playing it on the steam deck with a conservative power profile and it’s been a lot of fun.

Tactics Ogre Reborn - I’m a FF Tactics fan and I was told this game would scratch the itch. So far I can say it’s at got a captivating story. It’s great that my choices matter in this game and that character development is based on those choices. The gameplay is familiar and fluid. The AI also seems to scale well with the difficulty setting. I’d say fans of FF Tactics should definitely pick this up.

I can’t remember how I rescued it now but managed to get it back without a reinstall

You could’ve booted into a previous generation where you still had all those things on your system. The glory of atomic distros :)

I did for some time. There’s beauty in the simplicity and flexibility of Alpine, plus BusyBox is great once you understand all the weird quirks between it and coreutils. As unpopular as it might be, I actually really like OpenRC. Alpine feels pretty close to BSD if you’re familiar with that family of operating systems. These days I use it for just about all my servers save for a few Nix boxes.

If you decide to explore this route, here are a couple tools I found useful at the start:

• Conty - A single executable that launches applications in a standalone Linux Container
• x11docker - Run GUI apps and desktop environments in docker and podman containers.

Also might behoove you to check out Alpine community’s documentation on chroots in case you need specific software that isn’t available otherwise.

Since no one answered you here, I’ll say distrochooser.de isn’t bad at all. For the new linux user who is comfortable enough trying new things, I think it’s perfect. It does lose its usefulness if you’ve already tried all of the options it offers, but at that point you probably don’t need distrochooser anyway.

The Asahi Linux project provides a Fedora-based experience for people using Apple Silicon. It works well for the most part but there are features that are still being developed.

As for Windows, I don’t know of any methods to get Windows running outside of macOS, but many people utilize Parallels for Windows apps or the desktop experience.

Here’s my top 8 in no particular order

• Golden Sun / The Lost Age
• Drill Dozer
• Kirby Nightmare in Dreamland
• Summon Night Swordcraft Story 1/2
• Mega Man Battle Network 3, 5, and 6 (either flavor of each is good)
• Mother 3
• Astro Boy Omega Factor
• Sonic Battle

You should give Squadron 42 a shot on one of their Free Weekends. It’s pretty close to Elite as far as flight mechanics and maneuvering goes and a lot more forgiving about getting the parts you want in your ship. It’s pretty jank on foot though. Not sure if that’s a dealbreaker.

Sort of surprised Elite Dangerous never made your list. It seems like it would be right up your alley! I’ve invested thousands of hours in Elite Dangerous and several thousands hours across the entire Elite franchise.

I’ve had lots of fun with more recent space games, but to this day Star Citizen’s Squadron 42 is the closest I’ve seen any game come to Elite’s level of flight control and maneuvering. I would say it’s currently held down by how they try to manage additional content and flushing out existing content. Endgame content isn’t as exhilarating as I’d hoped, but there’s still plenty to do in the game to keep you busy for hundreds if not thousands of hours.

Elite certainly isn’t without it’s faults and I’d be pleased to see more contenders in this space (ha!), but I also recognize that space sandbox games are very difficult to get right.