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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • I thought I had it running without starting steam before… That was pre-1.4 and the windows version though, so things may have changed. I know there used to be a wrapper that would start the game outside of steam, but that was ages ago.

    I don’t think this is because of multiplayer though, as you can just not use steam services for multiplayer and connect directly to IPs. In my case trying to run without steam started causing crashes with windows forms, so steam linux runtime is probably being used for at least a few things.

    Copying terraria to a windows VM (which was far more work that it needed to be) results in something similar, with a TypeInitializationException, so Steam is needed for what looks to be some social API, maybe for grabbing social links? It’s quite possible that there are more things, but I don’t think Terraria requires steam multiplayer services, especially as the GOG version runs without steam.

    I don’t think that counts as DRM, but the end effect is similar: steam needs to be running. If steam ever dies, I’m certain a simple wrapper will be made to run Terraria and probably many similarly integrated games, but it is not ideal.




  • I don’t know about that. The whole company is set up in a very unique way, such swift enshittification would probably cause a mutiny.

    How well the culture of just making good things is enshrined once Gaben is gone is a different question. I can easily see a slow dissolution of the company as the people who care and the people who can grab power fight.

    I also don’t know the internal details of the structure besides that it’s very flat and self-driven. Perhaps Gaben has an apprentice? I can’t imagine him being completely blind to his unique importance, surely they won’t just sell the company or hire a random CEO.




  • As a newcomer to CLIs, GUI are great because you don’t need to know what you’re looking for. I can just open the devices window, and they’re all there, with most of the extra hardware stuff that’s not actually a real device already cleaned out.

    To do the same with a CLI would take me 10 minutes of looking up what the hardware commands are, 5 minutes figuring out flags, and 30 minutes researching entries to see if they’re important. Even just a collapsible list would make that last step so much easier. And no, I can’t grep for what I need, because I don’t know what I need, I just know something in there is important with a vague idea of what it might look like.

    Once I figure that all out for one thing, the best I can do is write that to a notes file so I don’t need to search so far next time, but there’s a good chance that I’ll need a different combination of commands next time anyway.

    Not hating on CLIs, just wishing I could figure out how to use them faster.



  • I’d say a Control Panel, I miss the plethora of authoritive knowledge and settings for every program, device, driver, network, user, and a dozen more things besides, all findable by browsing and not remembering dozens of commands. Of course I’d miss that either way, because Control Panel has been gutted every new version of windows since XP, but it was once nice.

    The Start menu context menu, or SUPER+X, is still nice, although mostly for avoiding poor UI choices and slow menus. The fact that many useful options are guaranteed to be there on every windows machine is nice though.

    And I would also say Event Viewer, despite how incredibly clunky it is to use. Having one place to check all system logs and track crashes of all kinds was quite useful.

    Basically, windows at one point went out of it’s way to centralize settings and info, and that’s just not possible in Linux without a lot of setup.


  • I believe they’re talking about the W11 context menu, where most common options (like copy, paste, and delete) are replaced by icons that look almost identical to each other. They’re all soft rounded lines and have no defining features, which means you need to stop and parse the icon twice for every cut & paste. They also change position based on which options are available, so you can’t memorize the locations, and since delete is one of the options, I wouldn’t trust my memory.

    Most of the interesting options like edit, run as administrator, open file location, readable copy paste options, or installed options like Edit with Notepad++ or 7zip > are hidden behind a Show more Options option, which just opens the window 10 context menu. Same styling and everything.

    Basically, everything about the W11 context menu slows me down and nothing about it is more usable or helpful.