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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: November 25th, 2024

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  • Yes! My wife was going to leave me and run off with my conventionally attractive neighbour, but then I discovered Groove Life™! I immediately called their toll-free number and ordered a pair of Groove Life™ socks. My life has never been the same since! Once he saw me walking down the street with new-found confidence thanks to my Groove Life™ socks, my neighbour dumped my wife and moved in with me.



  • fraid I generated a tl;dr for this rather verbose article:

    “Home directories are a mess because too many apps ignore XDG spec and dump dotfiles everywhere. The problem isn’t just legacy software—new apps do it too, often out of ignorance or laziness. Windows has similar issues with profile folders. Fixing it requires devs to actually follow standards, but many resist due to inertia or ‘my way is better’ thinking. Users should push back and demand proper XDG compliance to keep $HOME clean.”











  • The other posters seem to have bad experiences, so I’ll chip in with my more positive report @Kraiden@kbin.earth. TBH I was expecting VR not to work all that well, but I was keen to try so I bought a second-hand HTC Vive, the very first model. Picked one up for €280 on ebay, which is a typical price or was two years ago.

    I was pleasantly surprised by how well most VR titles work. TBH I pretty much only play VR now. I always check ProtonDB before buying any game, which is a good idea in general but especially so for VR. The VR games I play most are Elite: Dangerous, Skyrim, Dirt Rally 2, Half Life 2 (a free VR mod is available on Steam), IL2 Sturmovik (a WWII flight sim) and Pistol Whip. VRChat works great as well. I’ve got a little way into HalfLife Alyx, but put it down because reloading guns in the dark is too much to handle whilst simultaneously being attacked by zombies with headcrabs. That’s not a Linux issue, just me struggling to remember the reload process under pressure. I have played a fair bit of No Man’s Sky, but performance is pretty awful. I’ll be trying it again after reading this news about improved support for it, but I’m not expecting much TBH as VR apparently has poor performance under Windows too. I’ve got about 5 or 6 other VR games which all work fine but just don’t grab me.

    I can’t think of any games that have issues - only thing I can think of is the free VR Labs “game” made by Valve, which has an “Item Shop” zone which has never worked. Every other part of it works perfectly though.

    Of course, the OG Vive is definitely showing its age, with a very noticeable screen-door effect - it’s like playing games in really low resolution. So I will probably upgrade soon - there have been rumours about a new headset from Valve - the Deckard - if that does make an appearance it might be my cue to reach for the wallet, because the other well-supported headset is the Valve Index, which is getting kinda old now (it’d still be a lot better than my Vive of course). Well, actually there is also the gen 1 Vive Pro.

    No other headsets have native support in Linux - you have to mess around with Monado or ALVR - this may well be why the other posters have had poor experiences. To reiterate, your best bets for VR on Linux are the OG HTC Vive, the gen 1 Vive Pro or the Valve Index.




  • These do look better to my mind, not least because they’re shorter than the old plain metal style. I hadn’t heard of them before, so I just read up a bit. As far as I can tell, they’ve only been used for one link so far, connecting the Hinkley power station to the grid, and while this design was originally going to be rolled out nationwide as part of the government’s “net zero” plans, apparently that’s no longer the case due to noise complaints from people living near the Hinkley line as well as higher costs due to them using more steel than originally expected. At least that’s what I could gather from a bit of web-searching.