• 0 Posts
  • 62 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 21st, 2023

help-circle
  • I think it’s probably more a situation where they are not a good fit for each other anymore. The D&D license has value and Hasbro rightly wants to capitalize on that. Larian is a hot commodity right now and they don’t need to borrow the credibility that comes with a big license like D&D. There’s also a timing issue. BG4 is unnecessary when BG3 will continue to sell for years to come. Larian will put out at least a couple more games before BG4 makes sense.

    Larian is in a position where they can make whatever game they want and it will sell like hotcakes. Why the hell would they want to pay enormous royalties again when they can bring the writing in house? Sure, Hasbro could reduce their fee, but they can’t reduce it to the point where it’s worthwhile for both them and Larian.

    If I’m running Larian, there’s no way I’m making another D&D game. The lore is great, but the rule set sucks. There are better systems in the tabletop space and there’s no reason to even be limited to that after you’ve already made the decision to not make D&D. Wizards isn’t exactly a paragon of reliability and stability either so there’s risk there. Not to mention, it was Larian who helped pull Hasbro’s asses out of the fire. They were facing massive backlash from their core customers until a kick ass movie and BG3 made everyone forget about it.

    In short, Larian is riding high and Hasbro is not. There’s a lot more money for Larian doing something else and probably good money for Hasbro licensing to another developer.






  • To be honest, Bethesda’s best work is probably behind them. They will sell a few more games based on brand recognition and because we are suckers, but I don’t expect much. I’m old enough to have seen many of my favorite developers go through this. It’s difficult to have overwhelming success and keep knocking it out of the park with every release. Expectations for something better than the last thing are so high, the pressure to do something new, the culture change that comes with huge growth, and they eventually lose that magic that captured us in the first place.


  • I have been very happy with my X1 Extreme. I did have an issue with the keyboard and later the touchpad, but I paid for onsite support so it wasn’t a big deal. They came out a day later and fixed it right there at my dining table.

    I would say buying a ThinkPad is worth it for their paid support options alone. When I had a keyboard problem on my old MacBook, AppleCare took like 10 days to fix it. Lenovo’s premium support is reasonably priced and they don’t mess around. A person picks up the phone when you call and they treat you like you are important. If it’s a hardware problem, they are not fucking around. They don’t care how it happened or ask a bunch of questions. It’s covered and they are fixing it. Fast.

    The X1 is also super easy to work on. It’s easily disassembled with normal tools and upgradable parts like SSD and RAM are right there when you open it up. They don’t do dumb things like solder in the RAM or leave you without an open slot. This thing is designed to be repairable.

    Linux support is flawless.



  • You’re missing out on watching a lot of progress bars while you reinstall all the time. If you like what you have, keep using it. All you get from switching is a different package manager, a few slightly different package names, maybe faster updates and a new default desktop background. You’ll still be using all the same apps, probably similar versions, probably systemd. It’s a bigger difference logging into a new desktop environment than a new distro.











  • Do what you feel you need to do. Beehaw was my first Lemmy instance, although I have since left. What I initially liked about it was that there was active moderation and the admins seemed to do a good job keeping things running. It was a chill place that didn’t really appeal to the more toxic types you run into on the internet. It was like a friendly little bubble and a good home base in the fediverse.

    While I appreciated that toxic instances were blocked, I felt blocking instances simply because they didn’t have great moderation was a little too much. It meant I was missing out on a lot of good content too. I understand the decision but I realized then that the original Beehaw community was more content to be insulated than I was. For a lot of people there, it was more important to have their own tight community than to be part of the fediverse. There’s no hard feelings about it. I enjoyed my time on Beehaw and contributed to server costs. I found another good instance that’s better federated and manages not to have a bunch of nazi and racist garbage so it’s all good.

    These conversations have been brewing for a while at Beehaw. I would imagine a lot of the people who don’t especially like the insulated approach have moved on to other instances or created alt accounts for when they want to interact with the larger fediverse.

    I don’t think anyone will miss anything if Beehaw migrates to a non-federated platform.


  • Not necessarily. You probably want to optimize the kernel and a few packages. Then there are some apps where you want to build them with specific features. Then there’s a bunch of stuff that takes forever to build where a binary would be convenient. Flags and optimizations aren’t that important for KDE frameworks or Firefox.

    Offering binaries is a really nice middle ground. Gentoo makes it so easy to build custom packages from source but it’s always been all or nothing. I don’t want to wait 2-3 hours building updated libraries or Firefox every time there’s a patch.

    Personally, I would be interested in a distro that had binary packages, easy builds like Gentoo and something like Arch’s AUR.