If Valve’s Employee Handbook is to be believed, they don’t use a formal project structure with static teams. Instead each developer works on whatever project interests them, and one of Valve’s current goals is to improve game performance on Linux/AMD by contributing to upstream open source projects.

Valve is as close as we’ve gotten to someone paying a bunch of industry veterans to contribute to open source. It’s amazing what happens when all innovation isn’t black-boxed in an internal repository and forgotten about.

The crash I referenced was caused by having the scrollbar enabled IIRC, and it was fixed earlier this year. It made it impossible to launch the main activity without crashing if you’d enabled that setting, so users were sharing workarounds to launch directly to the settings screen without loading any communities so they could disable it.

Sync has had serious issues in the past such as an easily triggered, reproducible, guaranteed crash on open, with the dev not putting out a fix for months. This neglect goes back several years, to back when Sync was a Reddit client. Most infamously he disappeared for over a year when his UI refresh wasn’t well received.

The app is great (I’m only on Boost due to user tags requiring a paid subscription in Sync), but his response time to issues is glacial. And it doesn’t help that it’s by far the most expensive client if you want it ad-free, and features that used to be free now require an even more expensive subscription to use on top of that.

At least orcas don’t do to whales what they do to sharks - eat their liver and leave them to die in agony.

Control shares the same universe and is more actiony, from what I’ve heard. It might be worth checking out if you haven’t already.

Or when someone read two sections and the teacher didn’t stop them.

There are two facts old space game fans could tell you about Chris Roberts: that he will never meet a deadline (one of the Wing Commander games, his claim to fame, only came out because the publisher got sick of his delays and forced a release), and that he desperately wants to be a Hollywood writer/director. Both explain Squadron 42.

Right, I should have specified isolated VM. WSL and Windows are interconnected (even if some things, like accessing Windows files within WSL2, are horribly slow). Google’s solution probably won’t have anything like that, given their reluctance to allow users access to Android’s underlying systems.

And to complete the trifecta, there’s also Aseprite for pixel art (it’s free if you compile it yourself).

18/f/California.

Jokes aside, this appears to be a full virtual machine rather than something like WSL that can interact with and manipulate the host OS. You probably won’t be able to do anything interesting with your Android files using it, just mess around in a sandboxed distro. So it’s still good for developers who want a portable Linux environment to run things in, but not nearly as useful as a properly integrated terminal would be.

Yes. Some (not all species) female mosquitoes drink blood for the protein, which they need for egg production. Their actual diet is nectar from flowers.

Yeah, it’s twelve bucks to unlock scheduled backups and cloud syncing in Swift Backup, but then again this post is about paid apps. :)

For anyone who likes the idea of CDDA but bounced off its vertical difficulty and complexity curves, there’s also Cataclysm: Bright Nights. While Dark Days Ahead chases realism, BN is a fork that prioritizes fun.

It adds a ton of quality of life tweaks to make basic tasks less annoying, and removes most of the artificial restrictions DDA added to make the game more difficult. It also lacks the pockets system that DDA implemented that splits your inventory into a dozen smaller ones, so managing your inventory is a hundred times easier in Bright Nights.

It’s kind of unbalanced, is missing a bunch of content that DDA has, and is much easier than the base game, but IMO it’s way more fun. And once you’re comfortable with things, you can move on to the base game for a real challenge.

God I love Mindustry, but I feel it was a better game before it added unit factories and became a full-fledged RTS. I enjoyed it more back when it was pure tower defense with supply line logistics.

Titanium Backup hasn’t been updated in five years, and I think that update was just to meet requirements to stay on the store. Their last changelog entry is adding the menu icon after Android ditched the physical menu button. There are a bunch of settings that are broken or do nothing due to changes to Android over the decades (TB has been around for so long that it supports Android 1.5).

I’ve been using Swift Backup as a replacement these past few years. It’s closed source but was recommended to me, and I haven’t run into any problems yet. Is Neo better in some way, aside from being FOSS?

Now I kind of want a Flintstones RPG.

Right, and they should have fixed them - especially since people literally put together wiki pages documenting every known bug in the game. But all Bethesda did was upgrade the engine a bit (make it 64-bit, add some new graphical effects, implement support for microtransactions) and release the same broken game again and again. The engine upgrades fixed a few crashes, but for some reason Bethesda refuses to patch logic errors in their Papyrus scripts (the code that controls the actual game content) even though those are way easier to fix than engine bugs.

If asked, I’m sure they’d say it was to avoid breaking mod compatibility or something, which is kind of bullshit considering nearly every mod works with the unofficial patches that do what Bethesda refuses to. And they’ve been like this since the very beginning. Their studio is synonymous with bugs.

It’s mind-boggling how they get away with putting such little care into their multi-billion dollar franchises.

Because Bethesda didn’t focus on fixing script bugs in those re-releases, only engine ones. The game logic remains a tangled mess of bugs and the unofficial patches that actually fix things barely needed to change at all to support each new edition.

8 changed a lot of UI for no reason other than to chase the mobile market. 8.1 reverted a lot of that and people liked it, but the damage to 8’s reputation had already been done.

If they kept the edition alive for a few years 8.1 might be remembered as a redemption story like Windows 98 Second Edition, but they rushed 10 out the door - as a free upgrade, no less - to get back the goodwill they’d lost.

Windows ME was a crapshoot. One of our computers blue screened a few times during the couple months we had it installed; the other couldn’t even run an hour without hard crashing.

Nowadays I can’t even remember the last time Windows crashed. Newer versions are definitely a lot more stable, though suck in different ways.