It makes snese they want to distance from the Minecraft name for that. Engendered annoying “but muh Minecraft” expectations, and there’s already the Mineclone2 aka Voxelibre “subgame” for grabbing that attention.

Oh no by all means do preach. I was just about doing the same about schroot. :p

And, like I said, it’s not that I don’t like it. It was just too much for the rather small usecase I had back at the time. I’m pretty sure if at some point I move to a distro less featured than Debian Sid I’m gonna have to pay more attention to Flatpak and Nix again.

I basically took the general idea from this Ubuntu doc and made som changes. After installing debootstrap, I followed these general steps:

• set up an user for Steam, with adduser steam.
• created a directory to host the “virtual machine” at /var/lib/chroot/steam64.
• used the page linked above to create a schroot profile directory with the chroot data I want.
• used the page linked above to create a schroot profile entry for the chroot, adding steam as one of its allowed users.
• set up an Ubuntu 18.04 schroot with the following command: debootstrap --variant=buildd bionic /var/lib/chroot/steam64 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/
• on the host, allowed cross-“host” applications to lauch windows with xhost +local:.
• once completed, entered the schroot as root and added the needed i386 arch and packages for Steam and for bubblewrap / Chrome containerization.
• still in the schroot as root, installed enough packages for a basic graphical environment (basically: a text editor, xnest and xterm; between their dependencies, they’ll take care of most of everything).
• exited the schroot.
• entered the schroot as steam and fired up the Steam launcher manually.

It’s not perfect, there are a few issues (in particular with audio) but once I had the installed schroot ready, I never had to worry about its 32-bit packages ever again. And that was back in… like, 2019 or something. Six months ago I copied to old schroot to my new machine and resumed playing, with no more cost than having to set up the schroot packages and the steam user (with the same old UID) on the new machine.

Here’s a sample of the schroot profile file I’m using. The “steam64.local” is the profile directory, which is basically a copy of schroot/buildd (or of schroot/minbase) with some configurations in fstab and copyfiles to account for eg.: isolating /var/run and dbus, and giving the schroot access to the home directory for the steam user.

Tried Nix once, I liked it but overall found it too complicated to setup and manage for the [counts fingers] three programs I was using it for. Might be worth the while if I need a larger library of programs from Outside, but so far Debian and AppImages have not failed me.

Part of the problem is, sure, that installing an entire arch for a package touches up a lot of stuff… What I did was I set up a debootstrap schroot and added i386 arch to that so that neither they nor Steam touch my main system. Not only did I never have problems with Steam again, but I actually resumed pretty much from what I was when I got a new machine, simply by copying the schroot files over. Didn’t even have to install anything (but the schroot serve on my new system itself).

So wait, Apple effectively mandates that users of their store lie to their users? Wonder if that’s something that can be tackled legally.

So now Mozilla can stop receiving their hush money, right?

Since when has any antivirus ever had the intent of actually protecting against viruses? The entire antivirus market is a scam.

, and the laptop doesn’t have an Ethernet port so off you go to buy a usb-eth adaptor.

What, no Android USB tether? It’s been native since Debian 6 IIRC.

Hahahahha! The sucker.

only half an hour

no information on the internet connection quality

Minetest I guess. Can’t trust that I can get Retroarch plus the cores and games I want on time, and it’s not worth the hassle for only 3 hrs drive.

Audacious can even theme itself using Winamp themes!

Eh, I’ve always felt these solutions are complementary, or supplementary, rather than a “versus”. Each one, in particular cases, covers gaps the others can’t cover. The only one that’s unneeded is Snap.

For example, I like Flatpak. I like that I can get software from an authorized hub, much like with a package manager. I like that the releases of the apps in the hub are mostly well documented.

But no matter how nice Flatpak seems to be, its overreliance on “portals” and “buses” and “seals” comes associated with trying to over-engineerize my system too much for its own good. Every app I have ever tried on Flatpak, for example, doesn’t support audio, apparently because I have the godly, eternal, battle-tested ALSA and not the manchild’s crap that is PulseAudio. But since apparently PulseAudio is the GNome / Microsoft approved way to do audio on Linux, I’m supposed expected to have it. What’s next? systemd-flatpakd?

OTOH, I picked up the AppImage for Freetube and not only do I get audio but it loads and runs noticeably faster than the Flatpak version. And since it’s an official release I know where can I trustably get an update from. Literally no downsides!

But I sure as hell am not going to go for an AppImage for an app from which I expect more integration with my desktop activity, such as say a code editor or an advanced image / model viewer. Not if I can help it. Because I am going to be expecting to be able to stuff like drag and drop, have a correct tray icon, etc.

So that means I have to keep an eye on both solutions.

Hey, at least I’m avoiding Snap!

Now if there’s an AppImage for Steam somewhere… maybe…

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I’ve seen nothing in the requirements that say that the designated person has to be reachable. If I had to set a fediverse instance of something, I’d just set the mailer inbox to /dev/null or smth to save storage. Or just subject the corpos to the same treatment they subject normal citizens,

Dear sender. Your request has been added to our queue for review - might not want a malintentioned party get through safety procedures, wouldn’t we? We know you understand us better than anyone. You may get a reply in a period from 48 to 72 days, our staff is very busy but we certainly have you in our hearts. God bless America, Heil Trump, and we’ll make the free software communists build the wall and pay for it! Cheers.

Oh no I do when it comes to that. The problem’s (usually) not there.

The problem mostly lies with distro packagers. They often ignore the “this dependency is optional” part and make the dependency mandatory. Back in the day Fedora was terrible at packaging new stuff (trying to remove PulseAudio would also try to remove Libreoffice, for example), nowadays it seems it’s Debian’s turn at the horribad packaging wheel. So in order to “use an alternative”, which would actually be the exact same software I’m already using except correctly compiled and packaged, I’d have to jump distros.

One notorious example is NetworkManager, which in Debian requires systemd for some weird-ass reason even tho you can run a correct Debian system without systemd. The Antix people compile it correctly, with systemd as optional / shim’d, but that means having to add Antix’s repo to Debian to use NetworkManager in Debian.

But hey, if you don’t like it, just don’t use it. It’s that easy.

Not when you are forced into it because it’s made a dependency of something you use.

That and the Gnome devs carry a lot of anti-consumer opinions and practices in particular since Gnome 3. Must be something to do with the Microsoft influence from around that time.

But their choices do impact other projects. I may not use Gnome, but the choices made on theming (or lack of) , for example, now also effect XFCE.

We’re on the same page then, as someone who says to go around involved in “multiple large Foss services” (no evidence to that) but that demands to be given freeloading on infrastructure by everyone else because otherwise Discord, well, is not really worth responding seriously to either.