Red hat isn’t a publicly traded company, but they are owned by a publicly traded company (IBM)

Going public just means that the shares will be traded on a public market (stock market) rather than being held privately. So anyone who wants to buy shares can. There are some legal requirements to be publicly traded, largely regarding public disclosure of finances and assets.

The major difference would be that suddenly anyone who wants to have a say in how they are run can buy shares, and if they buy enough shares, they can pressure leadership in to making decisions they would not have otherwise made. also, people buying the shares probably will want to see their shares increase in value, and thus leadership will be pressured to please the stock market hive mind. Potentially it opens them up to a hostile takeover where some outside group buys up enough shares to replaces the leadership with people they want in charge.

Most of the people here who talk about it as a false flag tend to come from the really wacky side of things, like “it was actually a space laser and a hologram!”

So most people just outright discount any discussion of it as skitzo posting.

Largely comes from shit heads who use open VC, especially on FPS games, to say heinous shit, given that it’s pseudonymous and they’re not likely to face real consequences from it.

It’s less of a thing these days simply because the novelty has worn off and pseudonymity is less of a protection than it used to be, since a bad reputation in an online community actually means something if you spend a lot of time there.

But, a loud obnoxious idiot shouting slurs or spamming them in text chat tends to paint a whole community in a bad light, creating the stereotype.

“Well, to get people to consider if our method is potentially applicable to their situation and needs, we need to give it descriptive names that sound dynamic and cool to get their attention. If it’s not right for their needs they’ll disregard it of course.”

The business idiots: “Hmmm, yes, fancy words, trendy, apply it immediately to everything so I can say I “over saw implementation” on my resume next time I hop jobs”

Sleep is important

in an era where many systems are always-on and suspend/resume working more reliably these days

… do people not turn their computers off when they’re done using them?

They make a good point about how massive multiplayer games shouldn’t try to compete with wow, nor to try and implement every feature that wow has, but I think it goes beyond that. I think they need to question the pre existing assumptions of what an MMO is. Like, fundamentally, it’s a mass multiplayer online game, but so much of what gets associated with that concept is not really inherent to it.

Quests, bosses, grinding NPCs for equipment, ect ect. What the shape of content even looks like for these kinds of games.

There is so much potential in the concept of a big world with lots of players all interacting and it is held back by attempting to hew to a certain formula that looks very similar to WoW. Specifically the reliance on NPCs to fill out the world and to act as a source of resources.

Someone brought up foxhole and I think that’s a really good example. It is made by a small team(like… 10 people if I recall?) and it completely lacks a lot of the stuff normally expected in an MMO. No NPCs, no leveling or skill points, no quests or missions. All of the purposes those systems normally fulfill are handled through largely player driven dynamics. It’s a profoundly collaborative game built on team based PVP and an entirely player driven economy. Importantly, you are not playing a hero or unique character, nor collecting particularly valuable equipment overtime. You are cannon fodder, and you will die. In some ways, you are the NPC. Some parts of it definitely share heritage from the genre, but it expands on a lot of stuff that I feel is under developed in most.

It’s a departure from the normal formula and I think it shows that the potential audience for MMOs is actually much larger than the current crop, as a lot of people who play were never into other MMOs. The genre has pigeonholed its self by attempting to chase an existing audience that are used to a certain dynamic, but there is so much more potential that is left on the table.

Yah, I think foxhole is a really good example of why the idea of “reinventing the MMO” is a really good discussion.

Before foxhole I had largely bounced off of MMOs because a lot were overly focused on “quests”, boss fights, loot tables and other spreadsheet nonsense. The sword and sorcery setting of many also just didn’t grab my attention.

Foxholes focus on collaborative logistics, supply chains, and large scale persistent warfare, not to mention being more grounded as a setting, actually engaged me and got me involved in teamwork and collaboration that was very fun.

Also blue team rules green team drools.

In a lot of cases they’re not actually saving much money on these systems. They’re not cheap machines, require expensive outside contractors to be repaired, and also still require an employee overseeing them.

It might seem cheaper in the sense that one cashier can oversee 6 customers using the machines instead of serving one customer at a time, but most of the time, there’s only going to be one person checking out. The only time that 1:6 ratio comes in to play is during narrow periods in the day when the store is very busy, like around 5~7 when a bunch of people are finished with work and on their way home.

Perhaps it would save money if they were keeping every check out lane open all shift long without these machines, thus requiring 6 people who’s sole job is to stand there idly most of a shift, but that’s not what they did. There is a lot of other work that needs to be done in the store, straightening shelves, refilling empty slots from overhead, helping customers find stuff. So most of the time 5 of those “cashiers” would be going around the store doing that when things weren’t busy, and then just staff the registers during those rushes. Those staff are still there, doing other things.

The machines are actually more expensive but the margins are the same since they just raise prices to compensate. The real point of the machines is that they give management more direct control over the employees, since they can task them strictly to certain things and not have to worry about them getting pulled off ad hoc to staff registers. The additional cost is passed on to consumers, in a functioning market customers would avoid stores that raised prices to pay for the added cost of the machines, but since most stores do this, customers don’t have much of a choice.

It is very private, by nature of it recording so little and leaving so little trace. Which is what was being asked about, not strictly speaking security.

Most distros don’t collect any data by default.

Basically any distro not built and maintained by a company will be a thousand times more private than Mac or windows. Arch and Debian are both good in that regard, most distros are derived from those. There is also Fedora which is a community project, but it’s very heavily involved with Red Hat inc who is owned by IBM. I’ve never heard about any privacy issues there, but, it’s worth keeping in mind.

If you want something super secure and locked down in regards to privacy, there is Tails which has a lot of neat tricks and tor built in. Not sure I’d recommend it as a daily driver but it’s got it’s use cases.

Or the jaw

Can’t wait for Schleswig-Holstein and France to fight distro proxy wars.

It was, in many ways, all the worst parts of their previous games compiled in to one, with none of the redeeming elements. Like, it seems the internal decision makers have an extremely distorted view of why they have been successful in the past, and the actual production line seemed completely disorganized and dysfunctional. The design and goals were bad, and the execution was bad.

They should have learned from the criticism of oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, 4 and 76, but it seems like they discarded all criticism(genuine or otherwise) on the grounds that the games were successful. And only listened to praise (whether it was wide spread, or from a narrow audience).

Maybe because it wasn’t a success they’ll actually listen to criticism and take the time to sort through it, or maybe they’ll just assume the issue was the space theme and will continue down the procedural shooter looter slop path.

Yah there is a lot of nonsensical compression artifacts, and they’re of wildly varying scales.

Really we’ve been gradually approaching a convergence for a while, really we passed it a while ago, where smart phones are indistinguishable in terms of meaningful capability.

Intialy the barrier was memory and processing power, but really, we crossed that bridge a decade ago, if you count the really low end net books. For a while the main gap was in the fact that one set ran on ARM and the other X86, so there was just a gap in what software that could be run on ether. But these days that’s hardly significant issue with the myriad translation layers.

Hell, you’ve been able to plug a keyboard and mouse in to android and IOS for a while now, and external monitors are also workable. So input and form factor aren’t a huge issue. Really the limitation is that most people who want a laptop or desktop form factor… will just buy one of those and people who want a mobile will get one of those. Most people will just get both.

Honestly I think most people buying laptops for work would be better served by adding a mouse keyboard and external monitor to their phone (ideally in some sort of laptop shaped phone dock with an extra battery), but mobile OSs are cludgy with that kind of set up. Maybe android merging chrome OS in to it will bridge that issue.

But really I don’t think Google, Microsoft or Apple really want to do something like that because it might cause mobile sales to cannibalize thin and light laptop sales. I mean, maybe Google would because they don’t really have much skin in the laptop game.

“I’m helping development of a foss project!”

doesn’t write a single line of code, just submits claude code without reviewing it or even testing

Comparing brave and fire fox is like comparing librewolf and chrome. When people suggest using a privacy browser other than brave, they’re not saying “just use fire fox”.

KDE is avalible for most distros. It being just a desktop environment. It’s well supported on Fedora, openSUSE, Debian and Arch. As well as many of the various distros based on those. Ubuntu, a Debian derivative, and fedora both have a version that installs with KDE out of the box, and the arch install script has it as one of the main options. You could also install it on mint, but, like, half the point of mint is the cinnamon desktop.

If you’re interested in customizability, are willing to read some wiki pages, and never want to wait for support for some new feature, arch is great.

If you want a system that’s incredibly stable, will run on basically any computer made after 1995, and is generally just very reliable. Debian can’t be beat.

Fedora and Ubuntu are both fairly easy to use, new versions are released fairly often. If you don’t want to think much about it, they’re good options.

As for game compatibility, most will work without any effort, some stuff will need a bit of puttzing with settings. The only situations where you may need a VM or duel boot would be certain competitive multiplayer games that specifically use kernel level anti cheat. If you play one of those, check it on ProtonDB . Notionally Proton DB is for the steam deck and steam games run through proton, but generally what’s on there also applies to any other game run through wine.

You shouldn’t need to replace any hardware. If you have an Nvidia graphics card you will need to install the drivers as they don’t come with the kernel, but it will run just fine. I’ve heard of some issues regarding specific brands of headphones, and I had to fuss a bit to get my microphone and it’s audio interfacing working.

Adobe products, a lot of popular music production software and a few popular CAD programs will have issues. Most of them can be run on Linux, but they don’t like it, and finding an alternative would be better.