leopold

joined 11 months ago
[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (8 children)

It's funny, people said the exact same thing about Windows 10. It had ads and spyware. It also had Cortana, the AI garbage of its time. Consumers will never learn. Can't wait for Windows 12 to also be seen as the one where Microsoft has ruined Windows for real this time.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 3 points 3 weeks ago

Eh, even with track creation, I prefer Modnation Racers and its spiritual successor LittleBigPlanet Karting. Shame both games are stuck on the PS3, but then SuperTuxKart still looks like it came out of the PS2. They run well in RPCS3 and online still works for track sharing through fan servers.

Also, I wasn't that impressed by Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled. It does have tons of content, certainly worth the price. Never played the originals and the remake sure does look pretty, but the track design feels pretty simple, probably because they're from a PS1 game. Simple track layouts, few gimmicks. Some people might prefer that, but not me. I'm sure CTR beat the socks off Mario Kart 64 back in the day, but the tracks in modern Mario Kart are to me far more interesting. I expected more out of it given all the hype. Plus, for some unfathomable reason despite being multiplatform the game was only released on consoles, not PC, so that's another game you have to emulate to play on PC. And if you do have a console to play it on, it's locked at 30fps regardless of platform, which is disappointing for a racing game. There's a 60fps mod if you emulate tho, thankfully.

All-Stars Racing Transformed does have my glowing recommendation, though.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 45 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I dunno, I expect the Deck to last far longer than the average console if anything. It's a PC, so the games are pretty much guaranteed to keep coming for decades to come, as they have for decades past.

The hardware will fall behind, so I think the point where the newest Triple A games won't be playable will come within a few years, but I bet whatever visual novels or pixelated indie games release in 2035 will still run just fine on it.

Plus, it's designed to be repairable, unlike most consoles. And even if Valve stops maintaining SteamOS for the Steam Deck, you'll still be able to install other distros, so software support isn't something I'm very concerned about either.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 3 points 1 month ago

No romhacker or homebrew developer worth their salt will touch any of this. Using leaked material is legally significantly more dangerous than REing. I look forward to seeing the TCRF pages, though.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The official Homestuck site will still let the original SWF files load as long as you have something that can play them. Ruffle works fine. You can also use one of the few browsers that still supports PPAPI plugins (like Falkon) with the official Flash plugin.

But personally I'd say to just use The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, which is more pleasant to read through than the original ever was.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

you don't actually have to do that. for the most part you can just run everything in the same prefix. it's what I usually do.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Hm? Wayland has VRR.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 22 points 1 month ago

FIFO and commit timing are big for gaming. IIRC the lack of those protocols was a big reason why devs didn't want to enable Wayland support for SDL3 at first.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

that sounds unlikely considering he hasn't released a game since like 2017

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 7 points 1 month ago

Nintendo hates their fans, not their developers. They're actually one of the better game companies to work for.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I've seen Linux users scream over basic transparently implemented opt-in telemetry. Something like this would absolutely not go over well were it implemented in a popular distro.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Nah, Lemmy is not really representative of the wider Windows userbase. The willingness to switch away from Windows is definitely going to be far higher in those who were willing to switch away from Reddit.

103
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by leopold@lemmy.kde.social to c/kde@lemmy.kde.social
 

Amarok was KDE's flagship music player during the KDE3 and Plasma 4 days. For Plasma 5, a new music player called Elisa was created with Kirigami which is the current KDE flagship music player. The last full release of Amarok was 2.9.0 in 2018, still targeting Qt4. A Plasma 5 port was started with the intention of being released as Amarok 3.0, but despite a usable alpha 2.9.71 release in 2021, the full 3.0 release was never completed. Outside of the occasional odd pull request, the project was essentially dead and was listed as unmaintained by apps.kde.org.

Two weeks ago, occasional contributor Tuomas Nurmi, author of over a third of these pull requests, made a push to become an Amarok maintainer, starting this thread in the mailing list: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/amarok-devel/2024-March/014748.html

In the thread, Tuomas expresses his desire to revive Amarok. He believes a second alpha for 3.0 can be released in mid-April and a full Plasma 6 port could be completed within 2024 after the release of 3.0. Tuomas has since created a fair amount of merges and fixes in preparation for 3.0 and has shown no sign of stopping.

This is very exciting news. For many, Elisa isn't a satisfying replacement for Amarok. It simply doesn't come close to matching Amarok's power and features. It also has the drawback of being a convergent application, meaning compromises have to be made to make the interface work well on smartphones.

It's also victim to the many drawbacks of Kirigami. Theming is worse since Plasma has to convert QtWidget themes to QtQuick themes, which works great for Breeze, but meh for everything else. There is no good equivalent for KStandardAction/QAction, KHamburgerMenu or KStandardShortcut. Any Kirigami app that wants customizable toolbars and shortcuts need to go out of their way to implement them, while QtWidgets apps just get them for free. You also don't have a good QDockWidget equivalent that I know of. Apps that do bother to reimplement some of these features (Haruna is the only one I know of) still don't have toolbar customization to nearly the same extent QtWidgets apps do. Most Kirigami apps don't bother with this at all and lose a lot of customizability in the process. Elisa is not Haruna, tho. There is no shortcut customization, there is no toolbar to customize and that hamburger menu can't be turned into a menubar.

For years, the solution was Strawberry, a fork of Amarok still under active development. Thing is, Strawberry is a fork of Clementine, itself a fork of Amarok 1.4. That's old. That's 2008 Amarok, not 2018 Amarok. Clementine had its first release in 2010, when Amarok was still going strong. It was for good reason, Amarok 2.0 introduced a very divisive redesign of the interface, which prompted a fork. But this means 2.0+ Amarok and Strawberry are actually very different beasts. For those who were using Amarok 2.9, switching to Strawberry meant switching to a new music player, making it far from an ideal successor. So I'm very much excited for the return of Amarok, the best music player KDE has had.

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