F-Droid is a second-class citizen on billions of existing Android phones, tablets and streaming devices. Google also shows numerous scary warnings meant to trick users into believing that F-Droid is going to hack them or give them malware should they try to use it.
Dubious indeed. I gave Alacritty a really good shot, as I was super excited to have a faster terminal. But my entire experience was plagued with slowdowns -- huge latencies, cat'ing huge files was very slow. I spent tons of time trying to tune things to make it good but it just never got there.
Basically every other "simple" terminal I've found behaves better -- xterm, urxvt, konsole, even iTerm2.
I did quite a bit of testing of alacritty, kitty, iTerm2, and default macos terminal.
Kitty shown best results even using test that alacritty is using (tree /)
vim is faster in kitty (by perception), both when ran without multiplexor and inside tmux session
> Benchmarks so far have just involved running find /usr on my Linux system with Alacritty, st, and urxvt, and on macOS against Terminal.app and iTerm2.
I must say I am very impressed by Kitty's number of open and closed issues on Github. And it has so many features. The developer also seems like a nice guy and open to suggestions. I have used urxvt for a long time but wanted to try something more modern out, and set Kitty up today with a nice small config. I like it a lot so far.
They've said they're going to disable FLoC. Still, this is one of the benefits of Firefox, it's not based on Chromium at all so it's out of the question.
I think Valve's ineptitude in regards to CS:GO becomes easier to explain when considering their history with Counter Strike.
The game that became 1.6 wasn't even their game. It was a mod for the original Half Life and they hired the modders after it got popular.
Then CS:Source came around the same time HL2 did. That is to say it exists only because HL2 did, and Source is just HL2 with guns (lol). It was very divisive in the pro scene and the majority of professional players rejected it.
GO's history is even worse. It wasn't even meant to exist at first; Hidden Path were porting CS:Source to consoles and Valve decided that it could live as its own game. They release it in 2012 and, by all accounts, it sucks. Nobody plays it. Things begin to change when they create a virtual economy (skins) and admittedly do actually improve the game a fair bit. It's only when the game sees those improvements (2013-14?) that the pro scene finally moves from 1.6 to GO.
So the situation in 2021: The most popular game on Steam is a game which, according to Valve themselves, shares 75-85% of its code with a game released almost 20 years ago (Half Life 2), and which everybody knows is a complete and utter mess under the hood (thanks in part due to the source code getting leaked, also thanks to ex-devs sharing their stories of their time working on CS:GO). This along with Valve being notorious for just not having the internal incentive structures to get bugs fixed (hence GO's spaghetti code)... it's easier to understand (but not excuse!) Valve's attitude for serious security flaws like these.
I am similar to you in that I have about 1000 hours in CS:GO, and I've spent many 1000s of hours watching the pro scene. I love Counter Strike, but with Valve the way it is, I don't see how these fundamental flaws will ever get fixed. Look at how they're allowing Valorant to decimate the North American CS scene, just like they allowed Overwatch to take from TF2's player base back in 2016.
> just like they allowed Overwatch to take from TF2's player base back in 2016
Overwatch isn't really taking TF2's crowd though. On the surface they're similar, but mechanically they are worlds apart. Overwatch is highly polished; TF2 is downright clunky by comparison. But it allows custom servers and player scripting/mods. Blizzard is far too tight-fisted for that to realistically happen for Overwatch. TF2 also has all kinds of interesting movement mechanics due to the source engine, that overwatch just really doesn't have. Overwatch's format of merely 6-person teams means you can't really goof around like you can with TF2's 12 and 16-person teams.
I'm sure a lot of players checked out overwatch but didn't stop playing TF2 as they're simply very different games. TF2 also did release major updates albeit infrequently until the jungle inferno update back in ~2017. Now it's just radio silence apart from small seasonal updates.
I'm not as familiar with CS (only played a few dozen cs:go matches), but just from playing both that and valorant I feel like it's going to be a similar situation. Valorant is more polished but it just plays wildly different due to the player abilities.
Valve is neglectful regarding these games (look at how DotA 2 is treated by comparison), but I doubt trying to compete would've helped very much.
There were people from TF2's competitive scene which is also 6v6 who left to go play Overwatch since there was actual money to be made since Blizzard was funding prize pools.
Almost whole competitive scene (already dying thanks to Valve) of TF2 migrated to Overwatch the moment it was available. When the pro players migrated, so did the casuals.
Overwatch can be a different game now, but when it started it had a huge community that resembled TF2 at the start. It wasn’t at all about the mechanics.
Anecdotally speaking, I stopped playing TF2 a few months before Overwatch came out, and playing Overwatch has killed any interest I might have in getting back to TF2. I don't think I'm an outlier.
Is there an alternative of CS 1.6 that runs on Linux and newer MacOSs and doesn't need a quantum computer run (I mean relatively moderate specs :))? I think CS:GO was made unnecessarily heavy without any substantial improvements over 1.6.
I also liked Project IGI - simple mission game. I am not into gaming really. Sniper Elite is like this by any chance?
These were the only games I liked and I'd like to try something like that again. I like normal/realistic game plays - no extra/exotic powers or sci-fi cartoonish elements to a game.
pure speculation on my part, but I also suspect the people at valve have simply never liked counterstrike. they didn't come up with the core gameplay (nor did they design the most popular maps), and compared against the rest of the valve portfolio, it really isn't their style to begin with.
I'm sure it's a major main to maintain and occasionally add features to such an old codebase, but imo the apathy runs deeper than that.
I agree, this is essentially what I was getting at in my original comment. Counter Strike is not Valve's game. They picked it up when it got popular and since then have done less than the minimum. And despite this they generate hundreds of millions each year off of it? Perfect.
Direct TV created a gaming league called CGS that played CS:Source because it had better graphics than 1.6. It was the first time pro CS players in the US could get contracts (25-35k a year? It wasnt much). This league forced all of the top talent in North America to move to Source. The game was buggy, trash with horrible hitboxes, netcode, audio issues, cluttered maps (with actual trash in them) and unpredictable, overly-complicated physics.
At the time, many 1.6 players still had single/dual core CPUs and source would run at 20-80 fps, when gamers were just starting to get 100+ hz monitors. There was no mass migration of players, due to gameplay and performance issues. The game really wasn't ready for eSports level competition (and never improved to that point)
CGS failed after 2 years, and most of the pros retired afterwards.
During that time, the European 1.6 scene was flourishing. The death of the NA scene was a huge blow to international play. The compLexity roster that was drafted into CGS could have been one of the best NA teams of all time.
I sucked at CS at the time so couldn't tell a difference. After getting decent at CSGO though I can see how a game with certain changes in gunplay would be a turn off. I enjoyed source casually though and switched over completely.
Yeah it’s mostly 2nd tier players who can see a salary bump from switching or have been banned from CS for previous rule violations.
I hope Valorant kicks Valve into gear a bit. I have played many hours of both and CS:GO is a much better game (simplicity, balance, opportunity for individual skill) but we will see...
An interesting thing from an esport perspective: Riot tightly controls Valorant matches, whilst Valve will let anyone run and monetise a CS tournament. I think this will make CS a more healthy scene in the long run.
Yes, top players really are leaving CS for Valorant, though this is mainly limited to the NA scene afaik (two examples who were on top teams: Ethan[0] and nitr0[1]).
Other than that, it is mainly those washed players leaving, yes. Which still isn't healthy for the scene, and means the NA CS scene effectively doesn't exist any more (this isn't hyperbole, there are only two good NA teams right now and both were flown out to Europe by their orgs to compete there instead).
As with most things in life, those that are at the top have little reason to switch to something new. When everyone else moves on and new talent comes up, that is when you see things change. I wouldn't be surprised though if both games and pro scenes co-exist successfully.
I'm excited for Dendrite, their new homeserver written in Go which will hopefully solve at least some of these performance issues. I've hosted a Dendrite server for a couple months now, but haven't had the chance to use it much.
With that said, it's been disappointing to see how slow development has been on it. Hopefully it picks up and they can get it out of beta this year.
Im looking forward to Dendrite, I think that changes the game for them in terms of performance. If im not mistaken at least one server was running on dendrite
They have https://dendrite.matrix.org, and they use Dendrite to test new features (like Spaces). But its issue is it's not feature complete so I don't think it sees that much usage.
Because Linux and windows bootloaders routinely screw with each other. I am NEVER losing another weekend to that crap again. Dedicated windows gaming PC is the correct way to deal with this.
With a UEFI-GPT setup two ESPs (one for each OS) and you're good. Now that I have no software bootloaders, which need to know about multiple OSs, I only need to use BIOS' own boot device selector on startup.
That's not the case for a long time. I have rEFInd that started life in windows 7 esp with freebsd dual booting, now the same hard-drive booting windows 10 (upgraded from 7, not fresh installation) and nixos, all with the same rEFInd from the same.
The correct way to do so, is to have separate hard-drives for different OS. Then there is zero chance of them stepping on each other.
It's a very real and terrifying threat. A standard PC has numerous components with their own firmware that can potentially be flashed. Some of those components may have integrity checking schemes that are supposed to ensure only vendor-signed code can be flashed or executed, but don't rely on those measures actually working as intended (and not being exploitable themselves). Hardware vendors are notoriously bad at this.
This is one of the reasons I'm so enthusiastic about the T2 and M1: a hardware root of trust designed by a competent vendor. (Yes, there is a flaw in the T2, but it requires physical access to exploit.) In my opinion, those are the only trustworthy desktops or laptops on the market right now. You'll notice AWS (Nitro) and Google (Titan) also have their own proprietary hardware security chips for the same reason.
Depends on what the avenue of exploit you're worried about is. You can disable BIOS flashing from the OS in the BIOS, but that might still be theoretically vulnerable to, say, compromising the Intel ME environment and flashing from there; a rootkit loaded in SMM could hang around until the machine is cold power cycled (and theoretically compromise the bootloader(s) to load itself and then chainload the "real" bootloader every boot); if you want to get really invasive, you could theoretically start flashing various microcontrollers attached to the system (say, a USB flash drive, or your HDD/SSD controller) to do malicious things.
These get increasingly unlikely (and unreliable, without knowing and targeting the specific hardware you're using) as your attacker model includes less resources, but not impossible. Intel ME code execution, BIOS and SMM rootkits, malicious USB flash drive firmware and HDD firmware have all been demonstrated (I haven't seen malicious SSD firmware, but there's nothing theoretically stopping it other than the controller doing a lot more on them), and a couple have even been found in the wild.
The outrageous profit Valve make from skins and the like is only half the story imo, their internal structure is the rest. Some of the stories ex-devs share from that place are just... idk, they explain the company’s apparent ineptitude
