Consider buying used parts. And you don’t need the newest hardware. There is plenty of good last gen hardware, that is also much cheaper.

There were special long lived BlueRay format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC . I was thinking of getting into, but they were expensive when I looked at it years ago. With 100 GB per disc, this might be a good solution for longtime archive (but you need the reader too…).

As for the CDs and DVDs, the longevity also highly depends on the burner, the blank disc and maybe the software and settings you used at that time. A pressed CD that you buy and its not burned can hold data for very long time, and is much more durable than your burned ones. At least compared to a mechanical hard drive you don’t need to reuse (rewrite) to not loose data. But a hard drive can hold so much data.

Some Steam games can be played without Steam. Some require more and others less or none work to achieve that. GOG is the better choice for this task, but if you already have Steam game that could work for this, maybe no need to rebuy it on GOG. I was thinking of doing something similar to archive what can be archived, but never got around doing it. Here some resources:

• https://steam.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
• https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam

The last time I played a PC game on a physical disc? Can I cheat a little bit here? I found a self burned CD from old early 2008 or earlier days. There were a few RPG Maker 2000 games on it, which I downloaded from internet cafes, such as Vampires Dawn (back then, when only a German version was available for the first game in series). And I played a few of them last year with an open source RPG Maker player called EasyRPG, but with RetroArch.

So yes, I played PC games in 2024 from a physical disc. But I leave it to you, if you count that. :D

Unless its coded with JavaScript (me mocking the date function). Not that I am a JavaScript programmer, I just happen to know its totally broken.

Could someone explain what’s going on with this comment and why its upvoted so much? It’s a genuine question. What’s wrong with his phone (and how do you know what he uses)?

You’ll be chippin’ into the dark future 52 years early,

Still 5 years late. But better late than never. :D

Dolphin filemanager from KDE. Nowadays I default to “compact” view without “preview” enabled. This is similar to “Icon” view, but the icons are small. Lot of files scrolls horizontal instead vertical.

• filenames in compact mode can be longer in one line, which is kind of similar to the look as “details” view, but are all displayed in a multiple rows instead one row
• preview disabled, because this is extremely fast, as I have ton of files that do not even have a preview image

That’s my default. Occasionally I enable preview image and switch to bigger “icon” view when I look into images or videos. Or sometimes I enable “details” view when needed. In normal usage I don’t need the details anyway.

Yes, I use shellcheck in the editor. Its pretty useful. But running (a little bit more complex commands) in the terminal directly won’t help with shellcheck. That’s why I also have a functionality to directly load and edit the current command in the terminal in (Neo)vim and edit and when closing Vim the command gets executed. The benefit doing this is getting checked by shellcheck in the editor and also it makes it easier to one-off complex commands.

Thanks to shellcheck I got in the habbit to always enclose variables in ${var}. And recently learned from a community member that using [[ expr ]] style has basically no downsides against using [ expr ] directly.

If you want to do a Bash like management and programming, that is not dramatically different but fixes some irritations, then Fish is an alternative. Obviously it will not fix all issues, but there is no paradigm shift in handling streams. nushell is dramatically different and at that point, I would rather use a programming language to do the stuff. Speaking of programming language, there is also Xonsh (basically Python+Bash like combination as a system shell).

All these alternatives have a singular big flaw to me: they are not the standard tools on the system, which defeats the purpose of a system shell to me. In the end, without changing the core system that these shells are built on, I don’t think its possible to make a really well made language that interoperates on system level like a shell does at the moment.

That’s the reason why I got a bit more into Bash to understand some flaws, to understand how to use regexes inside Bash and variable substitutions and a few other concepts that are very useful to know. But man… there are so many traps… like looping over a wildcard for files (such as for file in *.txt) and if the wildcard does not match, then the loop consists of the wildcard as a literal word as if “*.txt” was a filename. What a stupid idea. There is an option to change that, but that’s the issue. The language is filled with traps and optional options and you have to know all of them.

Edit: Added example code why default behavior sucks:

$ for file in *.ABCD; do echo "${file}"; done
*.ABCD
shopt -s nullglob
$ for file in *.ABCD; do echo "${file}"; done

Free? Thanks, I take it. Not only that, there are two more games from the publisher free to keep: Field of Glory II: Medieval and Battlestar Galactica Deadlock

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/slitherine25thanniversarypublishersale

The quoted image does not say so, they do not say the native packaging from your distribution is borderline unusable. That judgement was added by YOU. The devs just state the package on Archlinux is not officially supported, without making a judgement (at least in the quoted image).

As for the Fedora issue, that is a completely different thing. That is also Flatpak, so its not the package format itself the issue. Fedora did package the application in Flatpak their own way and presented it as the official product. That is a complete different issue! That has nothing to do with Archlinux packaging their own native format. Archlinux never said or presented it as the official package either and it does not look like the official Flatpak version.

So where does the developers say that anything that is not their official Flatpak package is “borderline unusable”?

And then there is software like OBS, which is known for being borderline unusable when not using the only officially supported way to use it on Linux outside of Ubuntu – which is Flatpak.

But why is that? I mean just because it is packaged by someone else does not mean its unusable. So its not the package formats issue, but your distribution packaging it wrong. Right? In installed the Flatpak version, because they developers recommended it to me. I’m not sure why the Archlinux package should be unusable (and I don’t want to mess around with it, because I don’t know what part is unusable).

Those mystical average people would probably stay on Windows, if they don’t care or cannot learn basics of other systems. Its really not hard to explain and understand, even for “average person” that there is an universal source for applications and there are packages designed and managed by your operating system. I think its important for people to learn basics and we should teach them, not dumb them down like on Windows. Soon people won’t be able to eat themselves anymore…

Flatpak have their own set of issues. One thing is, that Flatpak applications do not integrate that easily and perfect like a native package. Either rights are to given, you need to know what rights are needed and how to set it up. Theming can be an issue, because it uses its own libraries in the Flatpak eco system instead your current distributions theme and desktop environment.

But on the other hand, they have actually a permission system and are a little bit sandbox compared to normal applications. Packages often are distributed quickly and are up to date directly from the developers, and usually are not installed with root rights.

I’m pretty much a CLI guy as well and prefer native packages (Arch based, plus the AUR). But I also use Flatpaks for various reasons, alongside with AppImages.

Beyond raw horsepower, 7-Zip quietly tightens its handling of several legacy formats. Support for ZIP, CcPIO, and FAT archives has been refined, smoothing edge-case extractions that previously required third-party tools.

Over the years there was a few .zip archives that 7z could not handle for whatever reason. For these cases I had to use another application, but don’t know the reason. And my bad to not keeping copies of these files for future testing.

Mhm wait a moment, Final Fantasy 14 is not free, its subscription based.

Its again one of those times when I lost 100% on Steam. I already own the game, so cannot make savings by getting it free, therefore I lost the money that I would have saved. If this keeps happening I am broke very soon.

Just a clarification in case someone sees this comment after the time expired: The game is free to keep if you get it before 10th July. It’s just a typo in this postings title.

RIP for those who was still playing this. I tried the game a few years back on Game Pass (or was it a different service?) where I could try it without paying extra. Played 1 or 2 hours or so. It was an okay experience for a disaster game, but got bored quickly. The controls are actually really good and is the reason why this game can be played at all.