linuxdweeb

Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally, she downloaded a shitty ad-infested calculator from the Google Play store.

And since it’s GPL that any additions are compatible with the GPL, which the ad / tracking stuff they’re likely to add likely isn’t.

That's a good point, although I wonder if there are any ad SDKs that are GPL compatible? There's no reason that couldn't exist AFAIK.

However, there's also the much simpler scenario where they straight up replace the apps with something completely different. This company buys apps all the time, so I'm sure they have at least a few calendar, gallery, file browser, etc apps lying around that they can reuse.

All single board computers have driver problems because they require custom kernel forks that can't or don't get mainlined for whatever reason (usually laziness), but Raspberry PI is actually the best when it comes to that stuff.

So when you buy an SBC, you need to ask yourself: will the company continue to develop/update/patch their custom kernel fork now that they shipped? Or will they just abandon it and move on to the next product? 9 times out of 9.01, it's the latter.

Tell me you haven't used Linux in the past ~20 years without telling me you haven't used Linux in the past ~20 years

What about when they want to read an old letter from a relative, study notes from a senior, archive document, manuscript of work of literature they love or a fancy font ?

Ask ChatGPT to translate and summarize it.

When I learned how to write in "cursive" in a south Florida elementary school (early 00s), I learned that "Zaner Bloser" style he posted above. However, I've never heard the term "joined up writing" before today. I think you're both just mistaking regional terms for standardized ones.

#SayingTheQuietPartOutLoud

Computer programmers are the devil.

I'm not a lawyer either, but the GPL doesn't say anything about commercial use. Zipo can sell the code in the apps without having to ask permission from contributors. The only restriction is that they have to keep their modifications open source (which that Github response says).

But the main point is that the Zipo people bought out the Google Play listing, giving them access to the millions of users who have those apps installed on their phones. They likely don't give a shit about features/keeping the apps closed source. It's just a purchase of the userbase, likely for shady reasons.

This also means that forking the Simple Mobile repos isn't even likely to accomplish much. Sure, it'll put control of the repo in the hands of a more trusted party (which is significant), but since it's open source anyways, it'd be easy to catch any attempts to sneak malware into the apps. And if all development effort moves to the fork, Zipo can still take that fork and redistribute it under the "Simple Mobile Tools" name.

Ultimately, the fucked up thing here is that the original developer, Tibor Kaputa, sold out millions of users. Forking isn't going fix that. Fuck him. The only thing that will fix this situation is if Google takes down their store listing, but that's not going to happen. Hopefully F-droid does.

Oh shit, you're actually a modder! Thanks for helping to keep these old games alive, and keep up the good work!!

I'm a sucker for nostalgia.

I don't remember all the steps I had to do, but I do remember it being a pain in the ass. I downloaded the black edition from myabandonware.com and installed a widescreen mod (which messed up the UI since some elements were slightly offscreen, but it didn't bother me).

Besides that, the only other annoyance was the controls. There are actually a lot of community layouts for this game, but the ones I ended up using were a pain when navigating the menus. You'll definitely want to try a few.

FWIW, here are my current working launch settings for it:

• Proton 8.0-4
• Launch Options: WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8=n,b" %command%

So I guess if you get past the installer, those should get it to launch.

Even Steam themselves say it sucks for preventing piracy:

The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.

Plus, it's optional for devs.