Haven’t you heard? In 2025 software isn’t ALLOWED to be complete. If you’re not constantly playing a cat and mouse game with someone’s pet ideological crusade in your dependencies, you’re an irrelevant dinosaur and can’t possibly be a critical or functional part of anybody’s workflow.

It means some of your old software will stop working and if you file a bug report they’ll tell you to contact the developers who either haven’t touched it in two decades or have since died.

I think we already have a term for leasing a girlfriend…

We’ve got a term for the middle-man gatekeepers who collect the money too.

I also don’t like how things are legally speaking with DMCA, but the main takeaway is - the creation and distribution of an emulator, without DRM protections, is unequivocally protected and legal. ROM backup is certainly in most cases not, but if you are making your own copies for your own use, even while illegally breaking encryption, it would be difficult to prove and prosecute on an individual basis.

The right we must continually remind people is NOT even REMOTELY in question is the right to create and distribute emulators. This is by far the more important one, because people cannot reasonably develop their own emulators - it requires an open, collaborative community to ensure future preservation, and it’s a constant battle to keep people from actively trying to cede this right because they have nebulous loyalties to soulless companies that return no such feelings.

Not to be a stickler, but this does not say making copies is illegal - it makes circumvention of drm methods illegal. You can make drm’d copies as you like as long as you don’t circumvent the drm method. If your game isn’t encrypted, and the emulator doesn’t implement the drm, you haven’t circumvented drm - you are playing your legal copy on a device that does not implement the drm. It’s distinct from removing the drm from a device that implements it.

I do get that most consoles encrypt their software these days, but let’s be clear - it’s not as simple as “DRM means you have no rights.”

I hope everyone learns the lesson from the Japanese dude who married his hologram just to watch her die when the service was shut down…

If your girlfriend isn’t running on your air-gapped hardware offline, she’s not your girlfriend.

Copying your own game and materials for backup purposes is no grey area, and neither is development or use of emulators, and panicky, uninformed spewing of gut feelings are how public knowledge of your actual rights gets muddled into people with zero knowledge waxing poetic about how they THINK it works because they like games and think that makes their ramblings valuable.

Absolutely. I want to skim the important parts at my own pace. Not dedicate multiple minutes of attention to a video.

Now do Half-life 3.

In this case you happen to be right on both counts.

Separating the message from the messenger is a key skill. A right answer doesn’t become wrong because it comes from a jerk.

And can you not see how that’s a problem? Software that was written without using XDG portals shouldn’t have to be concerned about their existence. If it is required that existing, finished software has to adapt to a new paradigm, it is not a replacement - it’s new. And it’s intrusive. If you replace the water system for a house, that’s one thing. If you replace the water system in the house AND the new system requires the owner to buy and install all new fixtures on all the faucets, that’s an entirely different thing altogether.

Quite simply, you can draw and annotate the screen. I can circle things, draw attention to things, and highlight things on every window in the desktop environment without ANY consideration of what application is running - it’s completely agnostic. Wayland’s design doesn’t allow it.

Until this feature is present, Wayland is unusable for me.

This kind of thing is precisely why the overall decision to replace X by building something NEW was folly from the beginning - because you are ALWAYS going to be missing use cases. X should’ve been treated like an API and “completion” be measured directly and terms of how much of the functionality is implemented - not in terms of “how much, in fuzzy natural language terms, do we have that works equivalently”.

Also, and let’s be entirely clear about this… Open Board got here FIRST. It was FINISHED software. Developed, released, and doing its job. To come along, make a change to its dependencies, and then blame IT for doing something wrong? Is it the job of every single developer to update their software to match what Wayland wants? Thousands of projects over decades? What happens when the Wayland devs make another change and something else breaks? I’m getting flashbacks of Linus Torvalds RIGHTFULLY yelling at a developer blaming an application for not functioning after a kernel update. “WE DO NOT BREAK USER SPACE.”

Android forces developers to make these kinds of retroactive changes, and it’s why the ecosystem sucks and any stable, well-built software is a couple updates away from being useless. I don’t want my desktop OS to be more like that.

Here we are YEARS later and OpenBoard is STILL broken.

No, I don’t want a fully contained, separate whiteboard application - As a teacher, I need to be able to DIRECTLY DRAW ON THE DESKTOP. Until this is a fully supported feature that software can implement, Wayland is completely broken for me.