Oh no! It only plays the CoD games that were good.

IMO: let windows have that, as these games do some SCP-level containment for everyone sane in this hobby.

Man, prices are going to be so nice once the bubble bursts.

The GPL doesn’t force to contribute. But if you make changes to it, you need to have these changes reflect the liberties you yourself received. Megacorporations use the so-called “Explore, Expand, Exterminate” model, the GPL stops this from happening.

Also, I have a rudimentary idea how to fix this. So if anyone who’s more competent than me would like to have a go at it, please do so.

Basically found a non-profit ad agency for free software. Basically the agency would create turnkey ad and branding concepts for certain free software projects that would like to have it and in return they get 5% of their donations, for example. All of the money gets reinvested back into the advertising for the member software projects. Also, it could be very easy, the ad agency would, in broad strokes, just have a competition parity strategy where they essentially do whatever the competition does, in broad strokes, for their advertising and “just” adapt it to what the free software project needs.

Yes, it’s some random “idea guy” on the internet coming up with something that’s coherent and smart sounding. So take it for what you will.

Oh my, YES. Before I entered the world of free software, I was turned off by it. Reason is, I thought to myself, hold on: “If it’s gratis, then it’s going to be at the level of quality of all of these malware-ridden, barely functional, shareware programs.” Luckily I’m smarter now, but free software has a branding problem. It results from these programs often being developed by incredibly competent turbo nerds, the result of this is the advertisement reads like a technical manual or a spec sheet.

Proper advertising is helpful. It informs users about what they can do with the programme. They don’t care about it being programmed in hyper-efficient C, optimised with hardware acceleration or the underlying mathematical principles of how something is being processed. They care about getting the results they want. Instead of darktable, for example, talking about “4x32-bit floating point pixel buffers”, instead, they should talk about what users can use Darktable for. Sell the fantasy of belonging to the best, only thanks to Darktable and getting superior results from the programme. Show people the stunning results that real pros got by using Darktable. Show that there is a real community around the programme, and not just a GitHub repo. These things matter.

Darktable, in my opinion, is the best raw editor out there, and yes, the “4x32-bit floating point pixel buffers” and other incredibly well thought out features are the reason why that is. But 99% of users wouldn’t know why these things listed as their features are so massively useful and make Darktable so ridiculously superior compared to the competition.

I genuinely think that if more free software projects would invest in proper advertising and branding, that GNU/Linux and free software on it wouldn’t have 3% market share, but would be the monopoly in the computing market.

Edit: GIMP is another perfect example. It has another problem, and not just the name. The website is completely barren. “High Quality Photo Manipulation: GIMP provides the tools needed for high quality image manipulation.”

Gimp has not only more features than Adobe Photoshop, but most of them are significantly better. IMO, they need to communicate this and just bundle the extensions. Gimmic is basically tripling the amount of things you can do with it and resynthesiser is a massively useful function to have. “Normies” don’t want to fiddle around with plugins. IMHO: The extensions are very good, highly stable and should just be integrated.

Now, while not exclusively text-to-speech, but my favourite programme for that would be Speech Note.

For these requirements, I’d recommend PopOS. Thanks to its app centre being very well designed, you never need to touch the terminal for anything. Package managers are apt and Flatpak, so you get full access to basically anything that GNU/Linux has to offer. The install itself is super easy as well. I think it may be one of the best beginner distros.

Congrats on saving your parents’ master of business administration!

I just want to say, I find it so goddamn funny that we got Half-Life 3 before Star Citizen. Anyone remembers that?

My recommendation would be Tor and use bridges. Bridges connect to Tor for you, and the IPs of bridges are secret. So no one really knows that you’re connecting to Tor. They can only see you connect to a random IP. For extra security you can use the “tails” OS.

While not foolproof, should be good enough for any sort of “normal” people under mass surveillance. If you’re special enough to have human attention on you, I don’t know sadly.

What? New software doesn’t have the same level of battle testing that 30 year old software, with billions of deployments had? What does that matter? It’s memory safe, guys! That means it can’t have any bugs!

Finally, pictures of firewalls I can get scammed by!

Started with PopOS and stayed ever since.

If I understood correctly, it’s free software anyway, so why the discussion?

I love the Panasonic toughbooks. Most of them have a handle so they’re great to carry around like a briefcase. Had mine in the boot during driver safety training, it got knocked around voilently, not a single scratch. Also put a SSD in, running it with pop OS since many years.

IMO: additional CD/CI pipeline and according QA, paired with the technological regression we’ve seen in real time graphics over the past few years and videogames being developed in sweatshops with a carbon-nanofibre budget, while ads get all the budget is a poor foundation in general.

Why commit to anything more than the bare minimum, when you need to desperately try to reach that while the circumstances are against you?

Notepad++

Betterbird

Recommendation

I think the Raspberry Pi has a suit of prepackaged games and things like that, which you could use. Give your Raspberry Pi a good casing, and it will be indestructible.

Tangent

I would still warn them from the dangers of the modern digital world, in the sense of surveillance and censorship of social media, what is posted on the internet stays there forever, how proprietary software tricks the user and is oftentimes malware (Gmail, Windows, etc.) and things like that.

I mean, computers are cool, but the mainstream computer world is filled with so much nonsense or outright malice. And if I had a child, I wouldn’t want them to be harmed by that. Like, I don’t want my child to be indoctrinated into the sexist manosphere, just because the Instagram Algo said so and will do literally anything to keep them on the platform as long as possible. Software and computers are cool, but there’s so much vile and genuinely dangerous stuff even for adults. For a child it must be hard to navigate. If you say, for example, that Apple devices literally scan every single picture on your device and send the result to Apple, you’ll sound like a crazed tin foil hat lunatic. But this is quite literally what happens with MediaAnalysisD. In the USA, a young family got harassed by police because they sent a picture of their sick child to their doctor via Gmail.

Edit: typo.

Well, you can play the game without it, as others have stated, you should really leave it on. First of all, all of that work needs to happen then later when you’re playing the game, which is just going to lead to a subpar experience with random framerate drops that cannot be explained. From Software’s Elden Ring had a problem at launch with that. Every time a new effect or literally anything in the game was done, you’d wait for half a second and that would sometimes make your game into a slideshow for seemingly no reason. Or the Nier replicant remake wouldn’t play the pre-rendered cutscenes if you didn’t enable it. Most games don’t care, however. But for the sake of stability, my recommendation is to leave it on. It only takes a long time when you boot something up the first time, and with modern games being unoptimised as well, do yourself a favour and leave it on.