Aside of political motives regarding Microsoft, the technological problem that Valve is solving with using the flatpak technology is creating a single Linux build target for all Linux game releases.
A recurring complaint from gamedevs is that it's difficult to support many different Linux distributions/versions/runtimes. Steam already does a decent job providing its own runtime to link against, but this goes several steps further in abstracting away from the distribution that a user may be running.
Which platinum game? Which known problem? I wish complaints were less vague, then it wouldn't sound like exaggeration and would be actionable for people who are working on these technologies.
For what it's worth, I've played dozens of platinum (and gold, and silver) games since Proton came out with nearly flawless experiences. In many cases, it ran more reliably than Windows.
Valfaris is rated platinum on protondb, and it crashes on launch for me, same with Titan Quest, which is rated gold. Proton has been a godsend for gaming on Linux, but I don't put much stock in protondb beyond checking to see if a game is known to not run at all.
I hope you reported your experience as well then? This is a user-maintained database, so unless people keep putting in their information, it will not be accurate/complete.
It’s good to hear that Android supports this as well now, but I think you understate the difference in when these features arrived. From a quick search, the location example was fixed in iOS 8 in 2014 [1], and in Android 10 in 2019 [2], putting Apple 5 years ahead of Google on privacy features. Based on the list of privacy features being introduced in iOS 14, my impression is that this is still the case?
Thanks for looking up the timeline, I was not sure. Also full disk encryption on phones is another thing Apple did way earlier.
I agree it's not exactly apples to Apples. Does Apple still have special permissions for their own apps which allows them to run unobstructed, but other apps need to jump hoops with callbacks and other workarounds?
Are we expecting for Apple to always be 5 years ahead of Google on privacy features? Or did Google shift priorities with Android 10?
Honestly if we're talking about buying an iOS device or an Android device in 2014, I'd lean towards iOS for sure. I don't feel the same way about it today.
> Are we expecting for Apple to always be 5 years ahead of Google on privacy features? Or did Google shift priorities with Android 10?
Good question! My personal impression is that Google, being primarily a tracking company, reluctantly added just enough privacy features for people not to flock to Apple. (I think people have grown more privacy-conscious over the past few years, and Apple has marketed their privacy features heavily.) Links like this [1], listing the iOS 14 privacy features that will arrive in late 2020, appear to still be ahead of what Google has done yet – and e.g. Facebook’s reaction to the cross-app tracking block appear to indicate that this isn’t something they’ve encountered from Google.
But being an iPhone user now, I of course notice more easily what’s happening in the Apple world than Google world. If you have an overview of new privacy features in Android, which aren’t in iOS, I’d be very happy to be proven wrong. I’d love to see a full arms race between Google and Apple on privacy, with both parties introducing novel features.
> Does Apple still have special permissions for their own apps which allows them to run unobstructed, but other apps need to jump hoops with callbacks and other workarounds?
Unfortunately, yes. There is e.g. no way to get as reliable background sync with things like Nextcloud and Resilio as you do with iCloud, since there’s no “run in the background” permission. Not sure about this, but I don’t think any other app can take over the lock screen in the same way as Apple Maps. You can’t set a default browser than Safari, but I believe this is changing in iOS 14.
While I respect Apple for their stance on privacy and therefore use an iPhone, I do disagree with some of these missing permissions, and hope that a new round of anti-trust investigations may force them to open up on this.
I also had some bad experiences with Fastmail, they're very aggressive at shutting down your account if billing fails (expired cc) with zero warnings. Ended up missing emails on two occasions because of this (I was using fastmail for forwarding). For recovery, they offered to read my emails to confirm my identity which was the final straw. Related thread here: https://twitter.com/shazow/status/1021570521987731458
Agreed! That's one thing that I know Gmail is _very_ good at, at least. I didn't get the impression that Fastmail cares particularly about that problem yet.
I used a realistic sounding name, I tried several email addresses that were rejected as blocked, eventually I landed on an email that worked and my account got immediately disabled.
I'm sure I could eventually succeed, but I don't believe that it's fair to brush this off as something that anybody could do easily.
Your tweet indicates that you were stopped by the "government ID required" hoop. I've been there. I'm no graphics design wizard, but I foiled this by (1) taking a photograph of my actual government ID, (2) copying letters around to spell the name I'm known by, (3) applying some noise and blur filters (4) downsampling, and (5) redacting all PII except name & face. Compared to making an actual fake ID, I call this quite simple.
I imagine that you could use a plausible but fake name and a plausible but fake "random person" image, but I'm not interested in actually interacting with that website enough to try.
You might try a clean OS & browser install, to avoid trackers, and maybe if you've been banned a bunch already, use a VPN (or stop using a VPN) or use Starbucks wifi or something.
I don't recommend or use that shit website anymore, so the simple solution is stop doing the thing that's hurting you... but if you really need it for some reason then putting ~30min into making a fake id might be worthwhile.
> But did Facebook add any value (i.e. engineering money/hours) to improve the device? What you've listed are all negatives, but there have to be at least a few positives to come out of it.
Same. I'm hoping that Valve's commitment to do a Linux-native release of Half-Life: Alyx is at least a commitment to get an end-to-end working VR experience on Linux sooner than later.
Did you mean "from Jekyll to Hugo" instead?