So the past week or so my time has been pretty much consumed by Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire and it has been a pretty amazing time.
It’s the first time in a long while for me where I’ve actually been able to get my mind inside the world I’m playing in or reading about which does mean that it does bring me some sadness to have to leave that world but the journey was great.
It might be a bit late for a New Year’s promise, but having read a post recently of someone missing blogs and well me writing one, I’m considering trying a somewhat more regular writing cadence on here. I’m not still quite sure what that cadence might be, weekly sounds somewhat realistic, and I’m also not sure what that might do to my motivation to do so but it feels like an interesting proposition. Perhaps getting started with it could even prove to be its own motivator, seeing how good it feels when I get a decent amount of things written on here.
I also believe forming the habit of simply writing might prove useful, essentially improving my skill at committing to something since that is something I can at times have trouble with. It will also prove interesting having to more actively seek out topics to write about since that has generally been my biggest problem, which will require me to practice my creativity somewhat—that also being a skill I have not trained as much as I would perhaps like, at least in this context.
Making writing more deliberate also has another side-effect, namely training me to do it over a longer period of time and actually editing what I’ve written rather than as a “one-shot” as most of the previous posts here; me just sitting down and writing because I remember to and pressing publish at the and. The long pauses between posts lead to a mentality of “just get something out there”, which can of course happen again with a schedule if I haven’t prepared anything and that’s fine, but should be less likely to happen assuming I stick with it and actually prepare the posts in advance as is my intention at least. This more drawn-out method of writing will also allow me to think about and state my viewpoints more thoroughly on a subject since I don’t have such a stress to press the publish-button, which will hopefully lead to some longer-form content (or perhaps simply more edited content).
I am not making longer form content a hard requirement for myself though, since this remains an activity mostly driven by my desires rather than anything done for some external purpose. In that same vein, I am also hoping this more deliberate approach to the whole thing will allow me to satisfy that need on a more ongoing basis rather than merely sporadically when I remember to.
As is starting to become spring-tradition I feel, I gave switching to Linux as my primary operating system on my desktop another shot, and the results were slightly better than last time though still not quite enough to make the switch permanent. Honestly, the overall experience was rather impressive, the biggest problem is me still needing to shoehorn some Windows-things (games) into Linux, and aside from those I think I would’ve already made the switch.
As a change from last time, I tried the Liquorix kernel, which is the Linux kernel tuned to fit the interactive desktop use-case better and the difference was quite noticeable. This probably made the biggest difference in how everything felt this time around and it’s definitely something I could get used to. There was some funkiness however, as I had installed the Nvidia drivers first but once I installed the kernel I needed to install newer drivers and getting rid of those cleanly and the newer ones installed was a bit of a short pain which does also lead me to worry somewhat of the longterm stability of the system since I have had a bad experience with Arch and Nvidia drivers in the past where the kernel got updated to be newer than the drivers supported. The dangers of binary-blob drivers on Linux I suppose, which I was intending to counteract by using a more stable distro (Debian) but of course the Liquorix kernel releases follow the current kernel releases much more closely so that didn’t really end up being an advantage.
As mentioned above, the biggest pain-point for me is still gaming, namely the Blizzard games. World of Warcraft is still my main jam at the moment, and while it isn’t impossible to get running on Linux and actually has a rather decent rating on Lutris, Battle.net was something of a pain for me to get running and then because it’s not just a game launcher but also a chat service, one that I quite heavily use, I want to have it constantly running which doesn’t always work that well and the integration into the desktop is lacking because Wine. Specifically, Battle.net has a tray icon that then gets shown to Linux as some sort of “legacy” format which isn’t supported by the newer versions of the major desktop environments (GNOME and KDE) which would mean I might need to use something more niche which I’m not that into at the moment though it might be interesting at some later point. The customisability of the interface is after all one of the strengths of Linux.
Another new pain-point was actually Epic Games Store, something I hadn’t used the last time I made this experiment but was now using primarily due to the free games they have been offering, which can contain some rather nice deals at times. This feels especially silly, since some of the games they offer—For the King as an example—do actually have a Linux version yet because I own the Epic Games Store version I can’t actually play it easily on Linux. From what I gather, Epic Games doesn’t have the best of reputations when it comes to Linux support in general, which also makes me somewhat wary of trying to run the store through Wine in case they decide to treat it as cheating or the like. The dangers of free stuff I suppose.
Also, I never got started on streaming and getting that to work, multiple audio devices as a problem from last time.
Another more minor niggle is streaming. It really is rather minor, since I kind of know exactly how I want it all set up and what I need to do to get there, just the way there is somewhat annoying.
Basically, the big problem is that my audio setup in Windows is actually rather complicated, with four different (virtual) audio devices so that I can cleanly separate game, music, voice and desktop sounds and then only pipe some of those through to the stream. The different audio devices also more easily allow me to adjust the different audio levels for me and the stream, for example my game and music audio is rather quiet because I want to hear what’s going on in voice but as that isn’t piped to the stream most of the time I can actually turn those up a bit for them so that it isn’t all so quiet and they can enjoy the music. The game sounds are also more important to me than to the stream, so being able to adjust those separately is quite nice.
Now, all of this is rather trivially possible with Pulseaudio, which does support creating virtual audio sinks without any extra software installation as is required on Windows (though I guess what’s core and what’s not is somewhat more loosely defined on Linux than Windows, since it’s dependant on the distribution), however I want all of this to automatically be the case from the moment I log in so that I don’t have to keep readjusting my software to use the correct sinks and did unfortunately not find a good way to do this. Some sort of login script would be the obvious example but I didn’t really want to take the time to program something like that.
Then there is the case of the bots. Namely, chatbots. While a lot of the popular ones are cloud-based these days, which one would think would mean that running on Linux wouldn’t be a problem, the song request part often requires a Windows application in order to provide the currently playing song to the streaming software in the form of a simple text file. Since these seem to be mostly Electron-applications, I don’t really see the reasoning behind this other than the developers not considering Linux a big enough market in order to make the effort which does make it all a bit more of a pain for me. There are also more “pure” cloud variants like StreamElements which do have a mechanism of providing the song title through a web browser interface but unfortunately the last time I used it the song request functionality was somewhat flawed, skipping some songs completely and not doing a particularly good job of shuffling the songs.
Now I have been wanting to write my own bot for the song requests because all of them feel a bit janky in one way or the other anyway which would alleviate these concerns and allow me to use the others just for moderation, however as I haven’t done that yet it’s something of a blocker at the moment.
Finally, one major problem from last time that I didn’t end up running into this time but could rear its head again, some versions of OBS oddly enough did not include hardware acceleration (on Nvidia cards at least) for the encoding which for a single PC streaming setup like mine was a complete non-starter. This seemed to primarily depend on the distribution and not OBS itself, with some strangeness like Ubuntu 18.04 at the time having hardware acceleration but 19.04 did not. I believe at the time the flatpak also lacked hardware acceleration which if it was still the case would have been a blocker this time around as well since using an outdated version of OBS since new features tend to be rather significant in something so relatively recent as live game streaming.
Beyond those two main problems, there were a few more minor things that I would need to figure out were I to decide on a more permanent switch but that don’t really impede my day-to-day too much. Namely:
I’ve recently re-discovered OneNote for notetaking, and so far it’s actually been rather nice to use for the small amounts of notetaking that I do. It seems to sync pretty snappily between devices, has performant enough clients for the operating systems I use regularly at the moment, and mostly just gets out of the way of me writing something short that needs remembering. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there isn’t a version available for Linux, outside of potentially a web-based one, which would mean I need a replacement. At the same time, my notetaking needs at the moment are rather light, so this shouldn’t pose too much trouble but still it is something that will need consideration if I make the switch in the future.
This one is rather easy, it’s just mostly a matter of remembering everything that’s necessary. Currently use a fair bit of web development stuff, so Node, webpack and the like, and all of that probably even runs better on Linux than it does on Windows. Similarily, I do some Go develoment, and that is probably also more intuitive to use on Linux than Windows so no problem there, and my current editor of choice, Visual Studio Code, is also available. The biggest hurdle if one can call it that would just be getting everything set up the way I like it so that the threshold to get something done when I want to is as low as possible.
So this is just one of those things that yes, it’s solvable, yes, it’s not too much work, but quite honestly it should just be standard at this point and not something I need to go hunting for how to get working properly. I get that it’s probably a hard problem to get working for the generic case and with all the open and closed source drivers, but the unecessary CPU load just shouldn’t be there when I’m watching videos or doing other browsing on more graphically intensive websites. It’s a minor thing because I know it’s fixable just didn’t get to the point of looking up exactly how, but it annoys me that it’s a thing I need to fix in the first place.
In the end, this time (as well) ended up being a failure, but it did give me new hope once again that some day in the not too distant future this will be an option that I can reasonably choose, since the roadblocks are becoming fewer each time and the only really big remaining one is gaming which seems to be getting better each year on Linux with more support from publishers. Even there I also have pretty big hopes concerning the future since Blizzard has already supported Mac gaming for so long it seems reasonable that they would in turn also support Linux in the not too distant future. And if even if they don’t, at some point I’m probably going to have played their games enough and find others that I want to play, so maybe that’ll be a good opportunity to narrow my search and focus on ones that have Linux as a supported platform.
The general state of the desktop and seeing how good it has gotten also makes me think that there are some other systems in the house that can be converted since they don’t have some of the requirements I do, so at the very least the knowledge gained from the experiment will prove very useful to me and here’s hoping next time around everything’s far enough along that it doesn’t just stay an experiment!
I have a tendency to want to change things up once in a while, with everything from doing small tweaks to design, regularly changing transmog ingame, and with software for some reason it seems to mostly manifest with me trying out new browsers or giving Linux yet another shot as my main operating system.
One of these recent changeups was trying out the new Edge that has been floating around for a bit since I kept hearing quite a lot of good things about it though to be fair mainly in r/sysadmin so the criteria there are quite different to the ones I have when picking a browser for myself as opposed to a organisation choosing one for their own use.
Edge Chromium is really, and my god if you search my history you’ll laugh, but it’s really damn good. Maybe the best thing Microsoft has done since whatever the last good thing I can’t think of.
/u/Just_Curious_Dude
Still, it made me curious enough to give it a try and I it did end up being a rather positive experience overall. I enjoy the look and feel of the browser, more so than Chrome, and it does have some interesting features standard like the collections. It finally being available on more platforms than only Windows meant that I could actually give it an honest try since my browsing tends to be a mix of desktop, both Windows and Mac as well as mobile and I like keeping things synced between those so that I can pick up wherever I left on regardless of device.
That, however is where I started running into some problems. The browser is still in a somewhat early state, and while core functionality is definitely there—it’s based on Chromium after all—some features like syncing are not there making things somewhat difficult for me and overall the browser a bit hard to recommend. It did however help me identify a problem with a website I was developing because it was lacking an API that was available in Firefox so that was nice.
The lack of syncing cut my testing somewhat shorter than I had planned so I’m seriously reconsidering revisiting the browser sometime in the future when things are a bit more stable, and for the moment I’m also using it as kind of a “distraction free writing browser” for the blog since I have a tendency of having a lot of tabs open and it allows me to focus on just the writing. Opening a new Firefox-window in a new desktop would go just as easily but hey. To be fair, there was also the matter of the privacy concerns as well as the overall health of the web.
“Microsoft Edge has more privacy-invading telemetry than other browsers”
/u/Hero_of_Shadows
Impressive given that the competition is Google.
Regarding the former, while I think it is an important consideration I am at the same time for now stuck using Windows as my primary operating system so a lot of that telemetry is probably already available to Microsoft meaning I’m not overly concerned about increased exposure there but it was still a consideration in ending the experiment and does mean I’m a bit more hesitant to recommend the browser in general. It does also mean that if I were to succeed in changing over to Linux at some point in the future, I would still end up bringing that baggage with me (though I believe there is as of yet no Linux-version of the browser available, so that would be a pain-point as well).
As for the latter, I’ve been poking at web development for a long time and still remember having to do special-case things for Internet Explorer which makes me somewhat worried about the current trend of Chromium-based browsers gaining such dominance since a monoculture is bad for the overall health of the web since it gives too much control over the future of it essentially to a singe entity—Google—and the only real competition, with history repeating itself, is Firefox. This means that I am very reluctant to change browsers permanently even if I do get curious about what’s out there at times.
I have been feeling a bit of a nostalgia hit recently, having seen some gameplay from Shadowlands where a holy priest was played and really wanting to give the spec a shot again. So far I’ve ended up deciding against it, since I’m still somewhat familiar with the state the spec is in and there isn’t really any content that I do where changing specs would make sense along with my last impression of the spec in this expansion being somewhat negative with it just feeling so powerless in comparison to Legion.
It feels a bit strange how something so innocuous has managed to trigger so much desire in me for something I know I won’t actually enjoy all that much in the end, and perhaps consequently the most sensible approach would be to give it a short shot so that I have it over with so to speak and then not have to think about it again. The problem there becomes, the recent thinking about wanting to play my old spec has also rekindled feelings of wanting to play my old race, night elf, which of course isn’t something quite as easily manageable.
I still find the connection I feel there to be somewhat remarkable, especially now that I have over two years of quite active—probably more active than at any point prior to Legion—play on Horde. To be fair, at the same time it still somehow feels that I’m finding my feet a bit here, not when it comes to the community or the guild I am in as I quite like those but my character. Her latest iteration is, as mentioned here before, vulpera and while the race does feel quite nice to play and having the roll back is really cool, I still find myself somehow missing both being a blood elf but even more being a night elf. Now the former is of course still an option though I think toys or consumables for swapping appearance are the more sensible alternative there rather than a race change again, the latter is sadly still quite definitely off the table unless we get to start raiding cross-faction.
In the end these will probably be feelings I end up not acting upon since while they are valid they conflict with other desires I have that take priority, and I do also really quite enjoy both playing vulpera and discipline as well. Though to be fair, as far as specs go, I do have a bit more freedom to experiment so maybe a raid here or there as holy isn’t such a terrible idea, especially one of the boostraids since the spec might even be slightly better suited for that environment; more easily allowing for healing such large groups. In addition, I was also considering trying shadow again for at least an instance or two which does mean I need to look into the gear needed for that as well. I guess I have more things to consider than I thought…