The games that are going to be the hardest to preserve may end up being many of the mobile games that are popular now.

These games are usually installed through an app store, so if the app store pulls it, that could be it for new installations of the game unless the game can be extracted off an existing device. And even if you manage to extract the game off of a device, in order to get it onto another mobile device will likely require some way to side load it.

Many of these games also depend on a server so once the server is turned off that’s another way the game to die.

The mobile devices these games run on aren’t built for the long term either. They are essentially disposable devices meant to last a few years and then be tossed. They aren’t built to be serviced or repaired. Eventually the batteries will die, and while you can replace the battery, there’s no standardization of battery packs and eventually replacement batteries won’t be available either.

Even if you can get an old mobile device going, there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually be able to do anything with it, because the device itself may depend on some remote server just to function that could someday be shut off. There’s already old phones today that if you factory reset them, it effectively bricks them since they need to contact some activation server as part of the initial setup process and that server is long gone.

Of course, many people may ask - who cares? Perhaps so, but I’d bet a lot of people said the same thing about the old Atari and Nintendo and Sega and MS-DOS games that were popular years ago and are still popular today.

It’s kind of interesting that pretty much all the games I played as a kid are still accessible to me today - in many cases the original game is still playable on the original, still functional, hardware. But a lot of kids today growing up today playing mobile games on a phone or a tablet, when they are my age, could very well have no way to ever experience those games again that they grew up with as kids.

No checkbox for Wesley Crusher? 🤔

I’m using Manjaro for my desktop and laptop. If I had to pick a new distro today, I’d likely give EndeavourOS a try. But Manjaro has been working well for me for a several years now, does everything I want with little drama, and issues have been few. So I’m a happy camper and I’ll keep on using it.

I have a home server that has been running Debian Stable since the mid-2000’s or so. It just chugs right along, so complaints are few. Though occasionally having to deal with the old versions of some of the packages on it can be annoying.

Well, that’s a misleading title. All the countries in their list have some debt, just less than most.

All countries carry some debt, because they need to show a history of reliably making payments on that debt in case they need to borrow money in the future for whatever reason. Not all countries, however, run massive deficits every year.

If you’re comfortable with swapping out components in your PC, just buy a second SSD. Remove the Windows drive, put Linux on the new drive. If Linux doesn’t work out for you, just swap them back.

You could also run a live Linux distribution from a USB stick, or potentially install Linux onto a USB stick or SD.

When the US retired the F4, a number of the planes were converted into target drones. Probably the bigger hurdle would be to get these planes airworthy again.

It’s been a while since I’ve used Gnome, but back when I did I also felt it lacked a lot of configurability much like the Mac.

In comparison, KDE felt a lot more like Windows (or how Windows used to be in the past) where you could configure and tweak all sorts of things.

Finder? Polished? Even compared to Windows Explorer, Finder is terrible.

Not too long ago, on a Slackware box I needed to manually change glibc to another version. No problem, I thought, just remove the version that’s there and install the package for the version I needed. So removepkg glibc and then immediately dawned on me… oh wait I really didn’t want to do that… Of course, after that installpkg and pretty much everything else was broken since pretty much everything either depends on glibc, or has a dependency that depends on glibc, so I couldn’t install the new package or do pretty much anything other than smack my forehead.

Wasn’t actually too big of a deal to fix. Used another computer to create a bootable USB stick with the Slackware installer, booted the computer with the USB stick, and did some chroot trickery to reinstall the old glibc package again. Then booted it back up normally and used upgradepkg to change glibc like I should have in the first place.

The thing is, it forced the people making games to release them as a finished, working product, with the bugs (mostly) stamped out.

Today it’s just push something out the door now, and we’ll patch it soak them for even more money with DLC later.

Donald trumP?

I did switch over to yt-dlp some time later as development seems to have slowed on Pytube and yt-dlp seems to be where all the activity is.

That reminds me back when some time ago, I was tired of dealing with sketchy, and often broken, websites and programs for downloading videos from Youtube. I figured these sorts of programs must be doing something along the lines of downloading the Youtube page, parsing through the massive pile of HTML and Javascript to find the stream, and then saving that to a video file. That seemed like something I could do myself with Python, so I set out to see if I could figure out how to do it.

A few minutes and a couple of web searches later, I discovered that someone else had figured that all out already and I just needed to do “pip install pytube”.

I enjoyed it the first time I watched it, but the second time I just saw how bad it was. Definitely a movie that you only need to see once.

I did the opposite. After one of the big updates, Windows 10 decided it was no longer going to work with the Vista-era drivers for an old Core 2 Duo laptop. To be fair to Microsoft, was I pretty impressed when I initially installed Windows 10 and it accepted those ancient drivers without any complaints on a laptop that was 10 years old at that time.

So I instead installed Manjaro and everything worked just fine.

Safari is holding back the web with their old, quirky, outdated engine. However, as Safari’s engine is the only option for iOS, most web developers can’t afford to ignore Safari because they can’t ignore the iPhone. So it’s IE all over again - an old, outdated browser that everyone nevertheless has to support as a significant portion of the users are using it. In some ways it’s even worse, as iPhone users don’t have any choice due to Apple’s restrictions, but even in the darkest days of IE’s stranglehold on the web Microsoft never restricted what browsers you could install on Windows.

There’s always the centrally managed corporate Windows desktops. My workplace is better about this now, but previously they’d just push down updates and with some of them you’d have little other choice but to let it proceed no matter how inconvenient the timing.