The VHS was a bastard on an entirely different level. My cousin lost his The Empire Strikes Back tape because a roller got stuck and the tape got twisted around the reader head.

Should’ve used a Betamax. /s

I grew up with analog audio, and still have most of my dad’s late 70s “high tech” equipment, about a hundred vinyl records (mostly 33s with a few 45s), and several boxes of audio cassettes. Given the chance… I wouldn’t go back. That era had some severe issues that we just had to deal with because it was the best that contemporary technology could offer.

• Magnetic tapes have a finite shelf life. If not stored in a dry and cool place, the polyurethane tape absorbs moisture, which ruins the binder and the ferromagnetic coating falls off. Eventually the tape itself disintegrates.
• Magnetic tapes are susceptible to mechanical damage, they naturally stretch, and they can scratch if the rollers are dirty.
• They are also obviously vulnerable to electromagnetic fields.
• Playback quality is strongly dependent on the recording equipment, the magnetic medium’s quality, and the playback device.
• Even though the compact cassette is the icon of media sharing, copying is never 1:1 and always incurs a loss in quality.
• The best achievable audio quality can’t physically reach the quality of most digital recordings because of the granularity/resolution of the medium and the noise introduced by the pickup and amplifier circuits. The same is true for vinyl records: the superior audio quality is just a myth.

I loved analog audio recordings when they were relevant, but there are good reasons why magnetic tapes are obsolete, and why we largely skipped the CED and LaserDisc and moved on to CDs and digital audio with their own unique issues.

I miss cassettes and vinyl records only for nostalgia’s sake. Realistically, they were a BITCH to handle and store with questionable lifetimes and middling audio quality.

Rabbits, beavers, and hippos are fish, you see.

Math - not even once.

That first data point is simply invalid. Ignore it. Monitoring software usually report some kind of statistic (mean, median, min/max, etc) taken from measurements over a period of time instead of the instantaneous value when the report is updated. But they can’t do that for the first data point when the application is launched because there’s no time period over which to measure it.

TL;DR: Don’t use NTFS on Linux, especially for games. Not because the Linux driver is bad, but because Windows itself introduces compatibility issues, and the workaround breaks Wine.

It’s not just Valve. Wine itself doesn’t work right if the wineprefix is located on an NTFS filesystem because not even Windows is fully compliant with the NTFS specs.

The reason: colons. The device file names in WINEPREFIX/dosdevices are named in the Windows style, like c:, d:, etc. This is not an issue with ext* filesystems, but presents a conflict when NTFS and Windows become involved. The : character is not specified by NTFS as a reserved character, but it is reserved by Windows to separate the drive letter in paths. You can create a file containing a colon in its name on an NTFS filesystem without problem, but doing so will make the drive unmountable in Windows. I know because I’ve done it.

To overcome this, NTFS filesystems in Linux can be mounted using the windows_names option (specified in /etc/fstab or the mount command). This will raise an error if you try to create a filename that contains a Windows-reserved character. As a result, Wine can’t create the dosdevices files because their names contain colons.

The reason Valve specifically recommends against this is because the Steam library contains both the game content files (SteamLibrary/steamapps/common) and the wineprefixes (SteamLibrary/steamapps/compatdata), meaning that creating the library on an NTFS filesystem will necessarily create the wineprefixes on the same filesystem. Again, you could just mount it without the windows_names option, but that would immediately make it unmountable in Windows, and you’d be better off reformatting it as ext4 or btrfs.

(edit) I should probably explain what a wineprefix is.

Wine (and Valve’s fork Proton) is a compatibility suite that presents a Windows-like runtime environment to Windows programs and translates their calls to their Linux equivalents. One part of that is the wineprefix. It’s a directory that contains device files needed by Windows (drives and COM interfaces), the registry files, and a miniature C: drive containing reimplemented essential Windows software (cmd, explorer, Internet Explorer, etc) and an isolated userdir. When you launch a Windows app, it will see this directory as the C: drive, it will install dependencies (e.g. the Visual C++ Runtime) here, and the game’s save files will also be located there.

Steam creates individual wineprefixes for every game inside the SteamLibrary/steamapps/compatdata directory, identified by the game’s Steam ID. For example, the wineprefix of Baldur’s Gate 3 on my computer is located at /games/SteamLibrary/steamapps/compatdata/1086940.

He didn’t get called “man of steel”, good old Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili called himself that just to massage his ego. Kind of like certified Most Fuckable Twink Nick Adams proclaiming himself to be an “alpha male”.

Flatpak is not just an alternative packaging format. One of the key advantages is that it provides a predictable runtime environment that is independent from the rest of the system. Sometimes an application needs a particular version of a dependency (called dependency pinning, very common practice in development) and can’t rely on the system having the correct files. It also isolates the application from issues stemming from environment variables and the “global” filesystem.

It also gives developers greater control over packaging. Because of this isolation, they don’t have to rely on downstream packagers to manually adapt the software to the distro’s available packages (potentially introducing bugs).

One infamous example is Bottles. The project is officially distributed as flatpak, but OpenSUSE wanted to distribute it as native binaries. They had to use an outdated, broken version and caused a flood of user reports for issues that were not Bottles’ fault. More in this thread and open letter: https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles/pull/3583

You can (and probably should) disable that for USB devices: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/root-tip-how-to-disable-write-cache-for-usb-storage-devices/135566

You’d be a perfect fit as a military analyst. Those people make noncredibledefense look positively proficient.

Currently playing through BG3 for the first time… I guess this is how I learn that Minsc somehow made it into the game.

Boo’s conspicuous absence is worrying though.

No, they don’t interact at all. You can have any number of similar applications, and run multiple games from them.

It’s for gen-alpha computers. Makes sure all them files are yeeted, no cap.

Smog is just the developers’ workaround for overpopulation because the universe machine can’t handle that many animated entities without distance culling.

wax or pine sap

How the hell do you huff those though?

alias consent='chmod u+x' makes creating an executable very kinky.

Aaaand you’re gone. Truthfully I should’ve done this yesterday, your original comment was enough to warrant a temporary suspension. If you can’t play nice, if you can’t at least feign tolerance, you can find a different forum where your conduct is accepted.

Feel free to complain on YPTB.

this network needs opposing opinions from its “acceptable” narrative

So it’s okay for you to do it, but not for others to push back against you because they believe the expressed views to be morally wrong? I think you might be looking for an echo chamber of your own.

I’ll remind you that you’re in a public forum and should expect the public to voice their displeasure.

I also want to point out that I can see the votes on every comment. It is incredibly childish of you to downvote every dissenting reply and most of the other comments.

You’re doing the exact same thing with this public crashout about how much their happiness offends you. You’re spreading your vitriol because you want people to take your side. I’d rather surround myself with furries and femboys than the likes of you.

Queer and nonconforming people exist, they have the same right to express themselves as everyone else, and you’d better get used to it real quick.