MudMan

Wait, is the civil war the better outcome here? I mean, you granted Trump control of all branches of the government and elected him president twice. How do you guys envision that playing out?

Ugh. Every time a US politics post gets through my blocklist I'm baffled at the surreal narratives in there. Americans are so weird.

It's actually much cheaper to buy MKW bundled with the console than standalone. There is really no good reason to buy one without the other unless you're extremely not into Mario Kart, and in that case there wasn't a reason to get the Switch 2 until Bananza came out (after the period being reported here).

Clearly the price was less of an issue than people were guessing on the Internet. Which makes sense. The Switch 2 is still cheaper than a Steam Deck OLED, a PS5 Pro or a mid to low range smartphone. People like to compare straight sticker prices, but it's been quite a ride for hardware prices since Covid.

So just so I'm clear, somebody decided that the way to handle this was... free advertising?

1 hour?

Is this privacy, security or both? Because honestly, in one hour to normies I don't think we'd ever get to proselytism of any kind. We'd barely get through explaining MFA properly.

I mean, all due respect to Firefox and adblockers, at that level you're concerned with people not having "password123" as their single password across all things with no fallbacks. Depending on the demographic you're talking to if you can get them to not do that and can explain to them what phishing looks like in a world of deepfakes and voice clones you're doing work.

Huh. I don't think it's come up in a game for me, but maybe I just don't use that input enough for those. You can remap it, anyway (including to the mouse shake thing, if that's your bag).

And for Windows people, there's a PowerToys thing where double clicking control highlights it.

Worth noting that on some setups the cursor can straight up disappear until it's moved. It's not even just that you're dumb and can't see it, it often gets hidden by certain types of content.

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.