MudMan

Yeah, PS2 is standalone business still. And in its defense, PCSX2 is super user friendly as a standalone package and supports most of the shared stuff you’d want from Retroarch anyway.

I guess it kinda is. Some choices are a bit… peculiar.

I’ve just been using it for so long I have no concept of how it reads getting into it for the first time.

It can also be used as a bit of a behind-the-scenes engine in some emulation wrappers, which I guess sort of works around that issue, but hey, that’s definitely a valid concern. Retroarch makes sense if you emulate a ton of systems and want a consistent experience across the board, and it has some nice shared features across all cores, but all of that definitely comes with some complexity.

It’s one of them, and it’s fine, but it’s not what I’ve been using. I’ve been bouncing between PCSX and Beetle and they’re both just fine. I mean, at this point PSX games run on anything.

I don’t know, the PSX is old and well understood enough now that in my head it’s in the bundle of “just do Retroarch” systems along with all the 8 and 16 bit stuff.

I don’t even remember what core I usually run for it. They’re all at least serviceable to great.

It’s not the first weird rant I hear coming out of this project, which I don’t follow otherwise, so it definitely seems like it’s a thing.

I’m not sure I buy your motivations, but hey, I can oblige regardless. What, top three small things from Windows I’d like on Linux and the other way around? Windows to Linux first?

• Hibernation and states across boots. I know people hate Windows power management on laptops, but at least on my last couple of desktops it’s been surprisingly robust. I can come back overnight to the same setup I left open, even if an update ran in the middle. Same windows, tabs, open documents… It even survives booting into Linux and then coming back just fine. KDE is taking some steps in this direction, but they’re a ways away. I hope they progress quickly on it.

• Scaling and multimonitor. It’s way better than it used to be, but there are still a ton of minor annoyances on Linux. KDE in particular has some issues with icon scaling on vertical taskbars, which you’d think would be easy to fix but have been there for a while now. Other pieces of software still struggle with consistent text and headers, too, especially on multimonitor setups with different fractional scaling. Say what you will about Windows’ look and feel (and I will in a sec), the compositing is super robust and flexible.

• Mounts! Network mounts in particular and Samba mounts specifically. You just click on them, authenticate and you can mount them as either a folder or a drive right from the context menu. On Linux, Dolphin will give you access to them the same way within itself, but they won’t be mounted to the fs in a predictable way, so it’s fine for copy/pasting stuff but it’s not good if you want to use them as local folders. And Windows will remember those mounts across sessions, authentication included. On Linux you need to edit fstab manually and keep a plaintext copy of your SMB password. It’s just so smooth on Windows.

So… Linux to Windows next?

• Just the snappy window movement, man. Linux feels so much lighter than Windows for no good reason. I also really like both Gnome’s more Mac-like desktop and KDE’s default “hold shift to tile” window snapping. Windows used to be the gold standard for window management without going full tiling but I’d say I prefer KDE now.

• Vertical taskbars/no taskbars. I don’t understand why Windows decided to force the taskbar to the bottom. It’s just absurd for ultrawide screens and inconvenient for tablets and touchscreens, or for screens with burn-in issues. I’d argue KDE overcorrects. You don’t need to have a dozen different docks per desktop, but it’s definitely better than zero options. And the top bar is great for touch and more reliable than sliding from the bottom edge to pop up a hidden taskbar on Windows.

• Remote desktop everywhere. Gnome in particular has fantastic out-of-the-box support. Windows’ version of this is actually very good, too, but the server is paywalled to the Pro license, which is hard to justify. And hey, I get it, they’re trying to monetize their OS but that’s actually worse, so…

Now, that was a tangent, but if more people want to share their top 3’s I’ll read them. What the hell.

Not how it’s worked with the rest of these features, for the record. I did get click-to-do, which is activated by default (but does nothing unless you trigger it manually). That’s just an entry in their increasingly large wall of “stuff you don’t want switches” in the Settings.

It’s immensely wasteful in terms of dev time, but at the same time, hey, kudos for having all this stuff centralized in the one list, unwieldy as it’s getting (at least there’s a search in there).

I wish we could talk like adults about these things over here, because there’s a ton of interesting nuance to how Windows 11 actually works, rather than the parody version that everybody loves to dunk on. There are some actually good features and choices I’d like to see make the jump to Linux and vice versa, even discounting things like hardware or software support. But nobody ever wants to have that conversation, it’s all just the dopamine hit chase from rooting for the home team (and/or being contrarian about it).

I seem to remember the feature was opt-in, right?

I’d check, but this hasn’t made it to my Copilot+ PC, despite all the fuss.

Youtube very consistently ranks lowest in terms of reacting to reports of hate speech and is a massive vector for it worldwide.

I mean, I have serious doubts about the effectiveness of the measure, but Youtube is a massive contributor to the decline of democracy around the world.

Tiktok, incidentally, has way better stats on addressing hate speech complaints than Youtube. As in, by far. As in, industry leading, so in the exact opposite end of Youtube’s.

Just to fast-forward this dumb cat-and-mouse thing, the next step is people go back to torrenting their porn and deeper down the rabbit hole of garbage “free” websites skirting the rules.

As always, the UK is useful on the international stage because sometimes you need to be able to point at some idiot trying dumb stuff to explain to people why dumb stuff is dumb.

Nothing. I read what the article below the title says, then I check it somewhere else for good measure.

You really don’t need to take a hard stance every time you see two words somewhere. It is allowed to withhold judgement until you figure out what the hell you’re looking at.

He… does not at all. This is barely a ceremonial denomination meaning that they are a designated mirror of official US documentation. This has even less of an impact than their basic clasification as a library, it’s unilaterally decided by just the one senator and is mostly PR. They could have stored the same documents without the designation, even.

This is all a search or wikipedia visit away. People really operate on the basis of seeing a headline, not even bothering to click through and just… making up what it means in their heads. We really need to get better at this, it’s been decades of Internet and centuries of newspapers.

So nothing good can come from this.

Why?

Donald Trump.

How does that follow? Again I ask, you are aware that the US government has more than one person in it, right?

Sure, but “bunch” is the operative word here. People in government don’t agree with each other, kinda by design.

In this particular case this is a thing any one member of Congress can do unilaterally and a democrat senator from California just decided to do it. That particular fucking loser probably doesn’t agree with a bunch of the other fucking losers on a bunch of stuff, including this one.

How so? As far as I can tell all this means is they’re added to a list of official places storing public documents. Beyond the slight bragging rights, slightly increased sense of legitimacy in upcoming lawsuits and… I guess the server costs? this seems pretty neutral. I don’t even think you need the official designation to actually store the documents in question.

You… know the US government isn’t a person, right?

I own a couple that were only distributed in this region that way in an acceptable format for weird reasons related to localization. And then I moved internationally a couple of times and the Microsoft store REALLY isn’t willing to understand that’s a thing that can happen. It’s been a bit of a mess and one of the multiple reasons to not use MS’s store as a package/software manager in the first place.