Hey, like I said, great info for me to learn because I don’t know. I was only saying that I don’t mind because my situation is fine with it. Thanks for the info, it’s interesting. I’m sure for any situation there’s a better and worse solution and I’m sure that for any solution, there’s a situation that either likes or dislikes the approach.

Yeah but that’s a huge benefit already. I am not savvy enough in the development side to know whether that’s a reward that justifies any of the frustrations people have. Personally I don’t really mind varying methods to do any one job, as long as it’s well-documented, easily managed, and does not create a higher load on the system in any respect.

I don’t really care about all these different things, as long as none of them become a crazy confusing mess, like Windows DLLs.

eBay has recently done something with their app. I had been using it on my Motorola installed from Aurora store but recently it would no longer work it insisted on installing from Play. I had to reenable Play services and try and found out now Play just says my phone isn’t a compatible device. Which is absurd.

Someone made a bad decision and their app has gotten really fucked. I just use the webapp instead now. On that device, anyhow.

I think I’m gonna grab an old external USB drive and live boot from there and test things out

Just keep in mind, in such a case, that your performance will be quite reduced due to limits on I/O. When you have Linux on a real drive - especially a striped RAID, the system is blazing fast. It’s a substantial difference you should keep in mind when evaluating.

The “fun” aspect was what drew me to BeOS when it was near its heyday. What that thing would do in comparison to Winbloze at the time and the user experience in general was astonishingly more pleasant.

I remember their simple web server called Diner I had a website hosted on an older machine running Diner in my lab and it was just always on and when my office got DSL I felt like a king having that site up and accessible from anywhere, knowing it was on a box in my office and running Diner on BeOS.

I’m not Linux-savvy enough to understand everything you said lol. But I’m glad at least that I don’t have to rely on CUPS I just have two printers with static IPs so it’s easy-breezy George and 'Weezy.

Wow. Ok so regarding Feist I was only ever able to get through Magician Apprentice and Master. Reading issues, not important. But I didn’t know he was really not involved. Did be base Serpent War or Rift War saga on the game? Don’t remember what was what this many years later.

I have been thinking of getting my ass in gear and setting up a retro system. I have several units just waiting to be configured it’s just other stuff always taking priority.

So would a Pentium machine let’s say either with DOS/3.11 be good or maybe Win 95. I think maybe I’ll setup one of each since I have a few units available. This way I can play some things that need one and other stuff that is better with the other. I recall Crusader: No Remorse, and Crusader: No Regret won’t run on '95 but it will reboot into DOS mode for it lol. There are quite a few other games I’m eager to play again.

Oddly I’ve found that some stuff is ok under emulation but for whatever reasons - speculatively I’d say access to hardware via real-mode drivers that the abstraction layer in NT and forward prohibits - even the best systems like VMWare and VirtualBox seem to not handle more sophisticated game engines, only the simpler stuff. I imagine maybe it can be made to work better with tweaking and supplementary tools but after all the work that requires to get it to cooperate I think just having a real system with older hardware is probably just easier and more reliable.

I want to play the graphical Zork games again, Return to Zork, Zork: Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor. Those were so much fun. Nemesis was a huge departure from the Zorkverse it was probably a shelved project in need of an easily marketable title? I dunno but Activision et al did an awesome job with it. I tried it not long ago on my Linux laptop and even with tools like PlayOnLinux/WINE, the animation was far too fast and rendered it not controllable.

There’s so much more stuff I would love to dive into again. Lands of Lore, some more of the Sierra titles like King’s Quest, Space Quest, Gabriel Knight, just all their stuff. Between Sierra, Apogee, Activision, Interplay and a few others, the landscape of 1990s gaming is an absolute treasure!

Wow I have really rambled! If you made it all the way here thanks for patiently reading my verbosity.

I have been fine with both Canon and Lexmark and also a Brother unit that someone in my family owns that their new Win11 machine refused to talk to; I opened up my ASUS t-pad with Ubuntu and printed in five seconds.

But yeah CUPS has actually caused many a headache to the point that I’ve disabled it on some units.

This has been a real issue yeah.

Yeeeeah! I haven’t played these in forever but Hero’s Quest was my first Sierra adventure and holy shit was it magic. And Krondor - Raymond freakin Feist writing games!!

Both absolutely epic! Although in my case we’d be playing fast and loose with the term “youth” this was stuff I played after college but still.

More like being molested.

Well I was not really addressing the specific item that spawned this discussion thread, only the notion that was stated that one should only ever use the official stores.

Well I know there’s this app called Plexus or Plexor something and that supposedly helps you get an app past that requirement. I used it once to success long time ago by choosing a setting for the app and then it suddenly did not demand to get from the Play Store, so I know it works - in theory. But since that one success a few months ago, I haven’t gotten it to work again. I suspect maybe that phone at the time was completely de-googled or was a ROM such as CyanogenMod, and maybe the app can bypass if it doesn’t see the Google services at all.

Anyway, I will further investigate. I have some ROMed phones I can try on. If you want, I’ll post update in case you’re interested.

Thanks again for reply. Even if you didn’t have info for it I appreciate the courtesy.

Yes because it’s that simple. Every file online that’s not from some huge corporation is spyware. /s

Some people are strange - we know what we’re doing, we know a site and whether they have a solid reputation, we have experience and can determine when we’re getting a safe file. Oh, and do you truly believe that the “official” sources don’t dole out spyware left & right? Don’t be this naive; It’s not as simple as you stated. That’s just the general carte blanche rule that experts tell ordinary users because if we didn’t, they would download crap from everywhere under the sun and load up on malware every day.

Ok so I have a question: I have a few apps that I have the apk but when I run them, or even if I install from Aurora Shop, when I run them they say I need to install it from Play. Then they exit.

How do I work around this? I have been told it can be circumvented but I haven’t got a handle on how.

Thanks if you can advise.

Is the coming of age ceremony when he loads Doom?

Isn’t that the employee who was found dead like a week later? You know, the one Boeing killed?

And make sure you know where your towel is.

As someone who started with nothing but command line - Timex Sinclair, Apple IIe, DOS, I can’t even relate to the concept of being scared of command line.