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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Check out distrobox. It’s a way to have a Ubuntu (or any other Linux distro) container and allows you to install Ubuntu packages, even desktop applications.

    It works great for when you need to install a random .deb file or follow a very Ubuntu specific step by step procedure. I use it exactly for this kind of stuff.

    No rebooting needed, integrates fully with the host system, no virtual machine either.



  • That’s true, but some system level changes by default can’t be done because most system folders are read only. It’s trivial to turn this off, however a steam os update would overwrite any changes made.

    For installing new apps this is not an issue because Steam os is designed with flatpak support, so if an app is shipped as flatpak (or appimage which is just a single file you can execute) then it can be used without making the system folders writeable

    However in this case, it’s about the nix package manager which needs access to specific system folders to not just install packages (which can be apps or system stuff) but also to apply changes to the system configuration

    It’s really nice that a valve developer is taking the extra steps to make sure nix can be used out of the box. I don’t really understand why they are doing this, I think it’s just because they think it’s cool and some users are going to appreciate it.








  • Sure. Dwarf Fortress is a fantasy world simulator and fantasy story generator

    It has 3 game modes: fortress, adventure and legends.

    You begin all 3 by creating a world. The game will simulate the geology, tectonic plaques, erosion that eventually lead to a world that is habitable

    Then the game puts elves, dwarves and humans on it and simulates a couple hundred years of history.

    Civilizations rise and fall, go to war. People marry, have children and die.

    Then you start your game. In fortress mode, you lead a group of dwarves to establish a new settlement. It plays like a city builder, colony sim and a little like the Sims

    Every npc is simulated very in depth with thoughts, memories, relatives, moods, needs. This means there is stuff like trauma and npcs deal with it in different ways and eventually process into into a change in their personality and stats. The personality affects their social relationships.

    You guide the dwarves to dig and build rooms, workshops, taverns. You organize the military and trade.

    Eventually you might get attacked by globins or something. Each goblin will come from a specific village, they will have a family, thoughts and moods and memories.

    You can see how the game is unique. No other game will go to this extent in simulating the world and its people.

    Adventure mode is how you play with just one character and explore the world. It’s not good to play yet because most of the development at the moment is for fortress mode.

    Legends is like Wikipedia for a world you generated, you can browse all events, people, places.

    What makes the game amazing is the stories. One time, a beast from the caves arrived. It was a monster in the shape of a slug, made of lava, with wings.

    It flew up my well and was about to kill everyone. But some beekeeper dwarf was lowering a bucket. The bucker hit the Beast so hard it fell into the water reservoir and died (it was made of lava).

    Some water evaporated and the hot steam hit a few dwarves sending them to the hospital.

    Another story is a mayor I had that was so good at consoling people he became legendary at it. He suffered trauma because a drunk angry citizen punched him. Also he lost his cat. He reflected on this and “found peace”, it’s kinda funny but that’s how the game rolls. After that his stats changed or something and he was never bothered by anything. Managing stress in the game is important so this guy being so zen kept me on the edge of my seat when he was in danger due to how valuable he was as an unstoppable beast in consoling everyone all day every day and preventing fist fights or worse as we were dealing with a war with elves.

    Bottom line is, the game is extremely deep to a fault even, but I love it so much. I love how the stories are so unique and how things can go in such weird ways, I love seeing characters develop so organically with no scripted events at all.


  • Thankfully the lemmy developers are aware of those issues and are working on improvements.

    Looks like soon, viewing content will always be done through your instance and links won’t take you to other instances. The clunky way to search for communities on other instances if your current instance doesn’t know about them yet will get fixed too.

    Multireddit style aggregations of communities are also being worked on

    Plus these days there is a massive influx of users, once this stabilizes a bit all major instances will be federated and know about communities on each other, so many problems of discovery will get mitigated.




  • Like markipol@beehaw.org said (sorry I don’t know how to mention users yet) in the other comment, this can be resolved without centralization.

    For example “unions” of communities could be made that are the equivalent of a multi reddit. They would group together posts across all major “technology” communities into one feed.

    Then anyone from any instance can engage via comments. Making a postswould require choosing to which of the communities iin the union to post to because each one would have its own moderators and rules.

    Users would subscribe to the union to see technology contents across all technology communities.

    Any user could create a union on any instance so major instances would have their own unions that include content from other major instances that they are in a good relationship with.

    Would this not resolve the problem while keeping it decentralized?