• 34 posts
  • 243 comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: February 10th, 2024
  • Qt is still the only excellent cross-platform desktop GUI framework.

    It’s a pity that its current custodian’s commercial licenses:

    • are subscriptions
    • are painfully expensive for a solo developer or small group
    • have a reputation for triggering legal threats and badgering from The Qt Company if one ever wants to end their subscription or (separately) use the open-source license for a FOSS project

    This situation makes me afraid to use their commercial offerings, which in turn means they won’t get any money from me at all; I feel that I can safely use their libs only in open-source code. Their business model is their decision, of course, but I can’t help wondering if their whale-hunting approach actually nets them more money than a more accessible, lower-cost, one-time (or one-major-version) license option would. In many other industries, high sales volume reaps more profits than high price.

    Thank goodness for the KDE Free Qt Foundation.

  • Breath of the Wild: Beautiful. Mysterious. Inspired.

    Tears of the Kingdom. Big. Shallow. Boring.

    I found the first dozen or two hours of TotK exciting, as I encountered new mechanics and a darker side of Hyrule. But it wasn’t long before the new and exciting became endless expanses of copy/paste encounters and terrain, forgettable characters, and annoying enemies. Nothing felt clever or interesting. I lost interest in exploring, and wandered away from the game.

    Then I went back to the first game for another run.

  • +1 for bringing it up as serious discussion.

    The last time I had to ask permission for something like this, the issue turned out to be simply that the IT staff wasn’t trained in Linux and therefore couldn’t support it. I was more than capable of administering my own Linux box and ensuring that it wouldn’t become a risk to our company network, so we agreed that I would do that.

    It was a win-win result: I had the tool I needed to be most productive, and IT had fewer machines to support.

  • Blizzard games have always run very well in Wine.

    They run, but I wouldn’t say very well. A few counterexamples off the top of my head:

    • Wine raw input patches are required to avoid subtle mouse glitches in Overwatch.
    • Saving Overwatch highlight videos doesn’t work.
    • Battle.net launcher changes have made it unusable in Wine more than once, leaving people suddenly unable to play for days or weeks even when the games themselves would run fine if they could be updated and launched.

    You might not notice the problems (or not as often) if using Proton. That’s because Proton includes a load of Wine patches for stuff like this.

    It would be nice if Blizzard tested on Wine and worked with the maintainers to ensure things stayed smooth.