Yozul

Square pixels are a filter just as much as CRT filters are. In fact, they distort the image even more. Even leaving aside all the things that just don’t work right in square pixel land, turning every pixel into a square messes up the aspect ratio of a lot of old consoles. Everything ends up squished and stretched because it wasn’t designed for square pixels. You can call that distorted funhouse mirror version of old video game art “crisp” if you want, but in reality it’s just the cheapest and worst filter.

There is no world in which anyone ever designed a game for anything more powerful than a Gameboy where they expected people to see it as a seemless grid of squares so big you can see them from across the room. That’s just not a real thing outside of badly designed modern “retro” graphics. There’s a reason for that. Seemless square grid is ugly. Like, disgustingly hideous. I do not understand why anyone would ever want to subject their eyeballs to the atrocity that is giant square pixels. If you want to do that to yourself then I can’t stop you. There’s no accounting for taste and all that, but just know that I think less of you for it.

Super Metroid VARIA Randomizer.

Sure, if it’s making your life easier or making you happy or whatever, then have it. Don’t let me yuck your yum. I just think it doesn’t provide any real benefit for most people. Am I not allowed to talk about my opinion?

I think you’re confusing privacy and security. Some of us aren’t really worried about the NSA hacking our phones. We would just like for it to not constantly be selling out every minute detail of our personal information to a mega-corporation. Sure, you still have to pay attention to what apps you install and all of that, but a de-googled android phone is still a massive upgrade in terms of privacy even if it isn’t super secure, as long as you aren’t being individually targeted for some reason.

Copy on write is pretty overrated for most use cases. It’d be nice to have, but I don’t find it’s worth the bother. Disk compression and snapshots have had solutions for longer than btrfs has existed, so I don’t understand why I’d want to cram them into an otherwise worse file system and call it an improvement. I will admit that copy on write and snapshots do at least have a little synergy together, but storage has gotten to be one of the cheapest parts of a computer. I’d rather just have a real backup.

Meh. Those people all have Facebook accounts too. It can’t just be that.

You know file systems are not the only way to do that, right? Heck, Timeshift is explicitly designed to do that easily and automatically without ever even having to look at a command line. Backup before upgrade is a weird thing to cram into a file system.

Twitter has always had an entire order of magnitude less users than other social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok. Heck, it’s barely bigger than Reddit. I’ve honestly never understood why anyone has ever paid any attention to that cesspool.

I mean, unless you really like one of the weird bells and whistles btrfs supports ext4 is just faster and more reliable. If you don’t have weird power user needs then anything else is a downgrade. Even ZFS really only makes a significant difference if you’re moving around gigabytes of data on a daily basis. If you’re on a BSD anyway feel free to go for it, but for most people there is no real benefit. Every other fancy new file system is just worse for typical desktop use cases. People desperately want to replace ext4 because it’s old, but there’s just really nothing to gain from it. Sometimes simple and reliable is good.

Hey, if you don’t think distributions are doing anything, you can always use Linux From Scratch.

Seriously though, most of the work done by good distros is specifically so you don’t notice things. They make a bajillion independent open source projects work together nicely. That’s something I’m glad I don’t have to do myself.

There are much less expensive ways of suing someone than just flying there and staying until the lawsuit is done. They’re still not cheap, but that’s a pretty absurd way of doing it.

Forced arbitration is also complete bullshit. The fact that corporations are starting to realize it’s almost as bad for them as it is for us doesn’t make it any less bullshit.

The big five is pretty much the only version of this that’s actually sort of kind of almost a real thing. Nobody likes being told they have high neuroticism though, so it’s not ever a fun fad meme thing.

Sony released a more realistic looking big budget Overwatch clone. It was fine, but nobody cared, because nobody wants a $40 live service Overwatch clone where all the characters have similar silhouettes. They spent 8 years making an okay game for nobody. If they’d done something different with the same basic characters and gunplay it could have maybe been good. They didn’t though, so estimates suggested they sold about 25,000 copies worldwide before pulling it from their store and refunding everyone.

Amazon is super evil, but it mostly comes from the way they treat their employees and sellers. The customer service is… okayish, mostly. They certainly have problems there as well, but it’s not the real issue.

Mint is actually really good about not having weird dependency chains, and even if it did uninstalling apps would warn you about it. That is a very strange thing for people to have said. It is perfectly normal and good to have some things you don’t want or prefer an alternative to and uninstall them. Default Mint is a great sane starting point for a complete OS, and I think their updater is the best in the entire Linux world, but it’s still Linux. You can still customize it to your heart’s content. Anyone who says otherwise is just being a creep.

If you think China is any better than the US, then you’ve just switched flavors.

Honestly, unless there’s some specific thing you’re looking for just use your distro’s default. If your distro doesn’t have a default I’d probably default to ext4. The way most people use their computers there’s really no noticeable advantage to any of the others, so there’s no reason not to stick with old reliable. If you like to fiddle with things just to see what they can do or have unusual requirements then btrfs or zfs could be worth looking into, but if you have to ask it probably doesn’t matter.

People are creating new operating systems, but the reason they don’t catch on is hardware and software compatibility. It was hard enough to make an actual performant operating system that could work on a wide variety of hardware back in the 90s. Trying to do it for every possible hardware combination available now is just crazy. It can also be an incredibly difficult task to get even open source software working properly on a new OS. Anything else is just completely out of the question.

If I’m on Amazon it’s for something that I need and can’t get locally. There are no saving to donate. I’ll probably have to spend a lot more, drive multiple hours, or both if I don’t shop on Amazon. That’s the only reason I ever use it.