• 84 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • Yes, ~/.local/share/flatpak includes all user installed flatpaks, while /var/lib/flatpak includes all system wide installed flatpaks. Both include repository information and required runtimes (i.e. dependencies).

    This does not include user data, which is stored in ~/.var/app.

    Make sure to test your backup just in case on another system/VM.



  • SteamOS as a whole is not open source. Most of it is, but it also includes proprietary software (e.g. Steam itself). This is likely why you were downvoted, as SteamOS can be kept private without violating any license thus your first statement was false.

    Valve could distribute each single piece of open source software they use on request to their customers, without publishing any guide to actually build it. (Thanks for linking to Valve’s repo, which seems to match this statement.)

    This is how Apple does it with Darwin, the BSD-derived open source core of macOS. Without all the proprietary parts it’s not useful as an OS, even though they follow all the necessary licensing.





  • Podman provides stronger isolation than nixos-containers because the latter only supports rootful containers. Losing access to nixos modules is a disadvantage, altough most services I’d use podman containers for don’t have any modules anyway.

    E.g. I’ve used nixos container as a stop gap to use a major beta, because I didn’t manage to adapt the nixos package accordingly.












  • Analogue likely doesn’t emulate the hardware at the transistor level, as it’s far more difficult than doing what most software emulators do.

    From an interesting (altough non-conclusive) HN-thread [1].

    Without seeing the code, it’s impossible to know where Analog’s implementation falls on the spectrum of software emulation vs hardware simulation. There is nothing magical about FPGAs that automatically makes anything developed with them a 1:1 representation of real hardware. In fact, there are plenty of instances where the FPGA version of a particular console is literally just a representation of a popular emulator only in verilog/vhdl. In many instances, even the best FPGA implementations of some systems are still only simulating system level behavior. Off the top of my head, one famously difficult case is audio, where many chips have analog circuitry that cannot be fully simulated.

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37901381


  • Letztendlich ist es schwer dazwischen zu unterscheiden. Ein Cheat läuft immer lokal auf der eigenen Hardware.

    Im Falle der PSP ist es mit Sicherheit offline, aber inzwischen enthalten die meisten Spiele Online-Elemente, selbst wenn sie eigentlich offline spielbar sind (bzw. sein müssten).

    Ich glaube, es ist sehr schwer, cheats für Online-Spiele zu verbieten, ohne auch rechtliche Schritte gegen cheats für Singleplayer-Spiele zu ermöglichen.

    Z.B. gibt es zwar das Recht auf eine Privatkopie, aber nur, solange kein Kopierschutz umgangen wird. Nun haben seit Jahrzehnten CD’s einen unwirksamen Kopierschutz, aber rechtlich sind Privatkopien trotzdem verboten.

    So langsam gehen die CD’s kaputt, und eigentlich darf niemand die Daten darauf für sich selbst und die Nachwelt aufbewahren.

    Wenn Cheats rechtlich verboten werden, könnte ein schlecht formuliertes Gesetz/Gerichtsentscheidung lokale Modifikation von jeglicher Software verbieten. Das wäre problematisch für alles Mögliche, vom Sicherheitslücken finden, zu Preservation für die Nachwelt und auch einfaches Modding

    Edit: IBKA