Great work. They haven’t commented on this matter for some time now and its good to see an updated comment on this issue.

I use Grapheme OS, but do use Mull. I also use Vanadium and base Chromium. Each for different uses. Mull for general browsing (I have many extensions, but I feel a bit more secure by running NoScript).

Vanadium is for when I need more functionality, and raw Chromium for inspecting responsive design of my own sites.

The GrapheneOS community is a great asset to the Android ecosystem, and their mentality has always seemed to be security above all else (even above privacy), which is a voice that is needed in any organization.

Again, thanks for doing this investigation.

I recently got fitgirl’s Cyberpunk 2077 repack working on Artix Linux with Lutris by following this guide:

It doesn’t take into account you also need to use GEProton as well (for Cyberpunk at least), but its easy enough to install GEProton via ProtonUp, and then just configuring the game to use GEProton in the settings via lutris.

I got mangohud working as well, that was relatively simple.

I also noticed that I needed to install and setup dxvk as an overlay for Vulkan.

Yeah, it was a lot of setup and you need plenty of hard drive space as both the repack and the installed game are huge (have double the space available listed on the repack site).

I have the game on Steam, but wanted to know how to do this, and it was not as bad as I thought it would be.

Agreed. I mean, to each their own, but I’ve been open and tried the gamut of butt stuff more than a few times with a few partners, and I’ve gotta say…just not a fan of either giving or receiving anal. Oral, on the other hand…

Yes, the brackets were just there to emphasize it was a search query. Apologies if that was confusing.

Yep. I use Noscript and DDG Lite by default. Just putting into duckduckgo: !g <your search goes here> will search google without having to turn JS on…looks like Duckduckgo wins again, even when it comes to using google, lol.

Just use firejail to sandbox it and find out.

I don’t know why this meme had me rflmao, but it really got me. 🤣

Damn…this looks really good actually. I’m sad to day I never heard of cohost until now. But I’ll admit I just identify with the founder’s sentiments around the tech industry, and their strict adherence to moral values around how a platform like that should interact with their users. I wish their developers all the best in looking for new work.

Man this game and it’s sequel were so good. We’re they the best writing or gameplay I ever saw? No. But the creators had a distinct and beautiful vision and they saw it through to the end. Really sad to hear this, but yeah, this is why Streaming Gaming Platforms need to offer the Download And Play Offline feature. You bought it, it’s yours. If you copy it and illegally distribute that, that’s your prerogative. But ultimately, that’s for you to decide, not the Gaming Platforms.

Nice writeup. One note: I don’t think the Fossify projects are abandoned. The creator has commits on the project as recent as 21 hours ago at the time of this writing. They just haven’t pushed updates to FDroid for a couple months.

Lol. 🤣 This genuinely had me lmao. Thank you.

Xenogears for the PS1 had one of the best combat systems I’ve ever played. Tied with Star Ocean 2 for the PS1. There’s a remake which I think they overhauled the combat system, so I’m not sure if it still is as good as the first edition, but the customizability was amazing.

After that Grandia was fun, but I played it far less than the aforementioned, so have less to say. Chrono Trigger was very good for what it was, and IMHO was only matched by FF6 in that category (heavy turn based combat systems). Chrono Cross is an honorable mention in that category as well.

Lastly, very recently the Sea of Stars game had a very good combat system.

Ultimately these games have great stories, and that’s all I really cared about, but the combat systems could either make or break the monotonous grind to get to the plot points, so they had to be at least decent to make the games playable.

I highly recommend any of these games. Chrono Trigger in particular is highly regarded as possibly the greatest JRPG of all time, and personally I’d put Xenogears at 2nd place, with Star Ocean 2 at 3rd. But I might just be nostalgic.

Tell that to Linus Torvalds.

Lol. Emphasis on the H in IMHO. I meant no offense, it’s a valid point.

I have about 25 or so shell scripts I use somewhat regularly and well over 300 aliases. I actually specifically don’t wrap package manager related scripts for no reason in particular, but many often do.

My rule for an alias is if the amount of custom flags gets lengthy, and I use it often, yeah it gets an alias. Here’s an example of using yt-dlp:

alias ytdl='yt-dlp --sponsorblock-remove all --write-auto-sub -f "bestvideo\*+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best" -f mp4'

For shell scripts, my rule goes that it should probably have multiple features related around a single idea, that way you can use getopts to create custom flags. For example, I have a script that wraps very basic, but commonly used, git commands, chaining the classic add, commit -m, and push behind a series of read prompts, it has -h flags for help -l for a minimal log output, -i to initialize a new repository (even using github api token to remotely create the repo if you want to use github), and -r to revert back changes to a specified commit.

Generally speaking aliases will get you what you need most of the time in a pinch, but shell scripting is more powerful, versatile, but potentially more time consuming.

Others have rightly pointed out that these abstractions can sometimes negatively impact muscle memory, but IMHO this only really applies if you work as devops or sysadmin, where you are often responsible for running many different Linux servers, but usually this isn’t an issue if you have access to the internet and can see your saved aliases and/or scripts (but yeah, instant recall of native commands trumps notes every time).

Additionally, another mentioned using git to keep track of your aliases, which I totally agree with. Whatever you do, back up your aliases and shell scripts, ideally with a git repo of some kind. This not only allows you to take your new scripts/aliases with you wherever you go, but also reference them later in case it’s not possible to use them on not your machine.

Hope this helps. Bash can be crazy powerful if you take the time to learn it, and aliases are a great entry point to recognizing that potential. Here’s one of my favorites that combines mkdir with cd:

alias mkcd='{ IFS= read -r d && mkdir "$d" && cd "$d"; } <<<' 

Good luck, and have fun.

On Android, from FDroid you can install an app called Seal, which is a minimal frontend for yt-dlp. I discovered it while trying to circumvent issues Newpipe was having with some update to the YouTube API.

Unlike Newpipe forks, which can use the sponsor block API but not when downloading the video directly to your device, Seal allows you to input the custom flags available from the yt-dlp cli, so you can automatically skip annoying sponsor mentions even on your downloaded videos.

This is even more true if you subscribe to channels using rss feeds from invidious, then simply use yt-dlp to grab the video directly from the URL. You also can use the noscript extension to selectively block the google video script and instead use yt-dlp to download the video. Using this over a no logging VPN like Mullvad prevents google from tracking your IP. Finally yt-dlp not only allows for use with invidious, but has a sponsorblock flag, which will cut out the mentions of sponsors in the video and then paste it back together, essentially autoskipping the sponsor mentions.

On Android, you can download an app from FDroid called Seal that basically uses yt-dlp, and can be customized to use the same flags.

Most instances had an outage yesterday I noticed. I’ll grant it’s not perfect, and thanks for clarifying, I had been using, but forgot to mention, redlib as a redirect.

Self hosting is obviously the best option if you can, I just use the instances personally and 99% of the time those links have just worked for me, but I can’t speak on other people’s experience with them.

I’m just glad there’s an alternative front end at all and there are those putting their instances out there.

Everyone remember to pollute your answers wherever you post them at least once a day.

You can use alternative front ends like Stealth on Android, or just use a redirect extension to a libreddit instance when finding answers for things. I personally still find good answers on reddit when researching something I know little about, so use these as it cuts out a lot of the noise from the official page/app.

I expect the quality of the content to eventually decline there, but in the meanwhile this helps at least for browsing.