Rubenerd

I’m dealing with an on/off migraine today, so I’m publishing this half-baked draft. I think I got out most of what I wanted to say, though I’m sure it’s still a bit rough.

The Year of the Linux Desktop is a meme among detractors and even Linux users. It speaks to the inability of the platform to crack into the general purpose computing market, despite its overwhelming success in the server space and years of development. This is a shame, because for plenty of use cases I’d consider Linux to be easier to use than equivalent Windows and Mac systems. That’s not something I’d have expected to write.

The way I see it, there are two major stumbling blocks: hardware support, and games. General purpose devices have seen huge improvements: gone are the days of spotty Wi-Fi or poor graphics performance under most circumstances. But it’s still far too easy to buy a printer, scanner, or phone, and simply not have it recognised. That’s a topic for another time.

Games are another tough nut to crack. As a Mac and FreeBSD user, I empathise with the struggle people running Linux face in getting vendors to care about their platform, let alone port their software. If you’re not on Windows, you’re a source of support tickets, not money. In some cases, the GPL makes Linux even tougher to support than the BSDs; at least legally.

But there have been some massive improvements over the years. Regardless of your stance on binary blob drivers, Linux is as capable as Windows at running games today. I don’t think this gets enough attention.

I’m lucky that almost all my favourite contemporary games support Linux natively, including Cities Skylines, Minecraft, Portal 2, Superliminal, and X-Plane 11. Have I mentioned recently how delightful KDE’s puzzle games are too? The idea that I can reboot my FreeBSD workstation into Debian to play games instead of Windows would have seemed preposterous less than a decade ago.

Today, I don’t invest in a new game or franchise unless I know Linux support is either offered or available. FreeBSD is a bonus… I love that Minecraft has become my favourite game, and it runs natively on my favourite OS. After years of enduring enterprise software, who would have thought Java would save my recreation time? But I digress.

Most people though aren’t interested in native Linux games, but rather the promise of running Windows games on Linux. Linus and his team at Linus Tech Tips have been running Linux through its paces, and concluded:

Overall I’m really happy I did the challenge. I learned a lot, and it gave me a lot of hope for the future. But is this the year of the Linux desktop? For gamers, the answer is no, I’m sorry. And the more niche your use case gets … the more resounding that ‘no’ gets.

But something has given me a lot of hope. And that’s how much positivity from the Linux community in spite of our concerns. Because even if I’m not ready to convert my gaming rig just yet, it gives me hope that one day the meme will end, and the Year of the Linux Desktop will come.

The volunteers and developers behind Wine, Steam, ProtonDB, and Lutris have pushed the envelope further than I think any of us could have imagined, but Linux is still not a general replacement for Windows for games. You have to be willing to spend the time to get things working, and there’s no guarantee they will. There are also plenty of gaps in support, including from companies who use packages that do support Linux. Regardless of the political or business reasons for it, the result is the same.

I agree with LTT’s assessment from my own anecdotal experience. Train Simulator 2022 for Windows runs great on Linux via the Proton framework, but the recent Atelier Ryza games struggle. I run those on my Mac, where fortunately it runs fine.

Linux is enough of a gaming platform for me, and possibly anyone else who has my weird taste in games. But I wouldn’t give it to someone who doesn’t have that motivation to avoid having to touch Windows (some of us get enough of Windows Server during the day at work to want to, thank you)!

I’ve had these lyrics in my head all morning:

The creator creates;
But rarely he replaces.

Mmm, hyphens! I wrote at the start of this pandemic fun that we’d be living with knock-on effects for years. Some of these didn’t take long at all.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we have rates of obesity and physical ailments rising as more people work from home and avoid contacting others. Singaporean physiotherapist Justin Wee makes the connection between this and our mental health:

What we see in our clinic shows how the pandemic has increased sedentary lifestyles. An example of a direct impact is the lack of movement when people work from home – if they go into the office, they are likely to take public transport or walk to lunch.

There is also ample research proof that exercise also eases anxiety – the release of endorphins plays a critical role in regulating our thoughts and feelings.

When I was a kid, I thought the term was sedimentary lifestyle, because gathered sand turns to stone when stuck in one place. Why is it that I’m only proud of observations and ideas I made by accident!?

One thing I learned early on that’s helped me: sit outside if you can. I do most of my work from our balcony, which I’m lucky to have. Even if the weather isn’t great, the sunshine, sounds of nature, and breeze on my face does absolute wonders. I don’t think I’d be half as composed as currently am if I’d spend the last two years working inside in our loungeroom.

But I digress! Riffing on that point, Brigid Delaney discusses our collective psychosis over at the Guardian:

We have shown that we are nothing if not adaptable over the last two years – but I have seen nothing from the politicians acknowledging that this part of the journey is going to be challenging for many. Many Australians got really scared for the better part of two years and the government and the media didn’t let up when it came to hammering in the fear. The fear isn’t going to go away overnight just because many people experience the virus in its mild form.

You can’t freak people out for that long and that hard without expecting some residual traces of that fear to remain in the system.

This is what the self-professed logical Twitterati armchair epidemiologists and experts fail to understand in all of this. There is nothing rational or normal about our current situation, and even if you agree with the government’s handling of it, the farcical communication has been inexcusable. Instead, confused or scared people are told they have “rocks in their head”, something which I’m sure has changed minds.

We’re squishy, imperfect animals living in a world we’ve yet to fully grapple. It’s incredible that we’ve shortened the duration of this disease with vaccines and other preventative measures, and that we’ve come together to fight this as much as we have. Yes we can do far more, and yes there are people spreading misinformation lies, but I think some exercise and back patting are in order, and maybe a bit of compassion.

There was a lot to love about living in Singapore; so much so that I’m probably moving back after the pandemic. Australia is great, and would sure be easier with my citizenship, but home is home (lah).

One culture shock though was how blasé the country is with recycling. No apartment building we lived in had any facility for it, and the two offices I briefly worked in only had recycling for toner cartridges. Things have improved since I left according to friends, but there’s still a mental barrier.

This always struck me as odd, given the country’s stance in other areas. The government continues to advocate for public transport, spending billions continuously building new train lines in ever more complex environments. Greenery is meticulously maintained along streets to reduce the heat-island effect and provide shade.

Like land-scarce Japan, garbage in Singapore is sent to incinerators. But there’s a huge opportunity to redirect more of that away, like Japan does.

Here are some news stories I’ve read recently about it:

• According to The Straits Times, the National Environment Agency will be distributing recycling bins to every home. Almost everyone lives in apartments, so the expectation would be that the bins would be used to collect recycling, then have it taken to the bins downstairs. A bit awkward, but a step in the right direction.

• Channel NewsAsia are also reporting that buyback schemes for drink containers will also be implemented next year. This I think will have more of a positive impact.

Dissenters of such measures will say they’ll be exploited, or claim they’re a waste (wah!) of time. Anything that redirects even a bit of stuff away from being burned isn’t.

Lewis Mumford was an American technology and science historian, who wrote at length about urban environments. I saw this quote of his going around again recently:

Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.

But this is my favourite:

Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.

Vivaldi is an excellent alternative browser that consistently takes the right approach when it comes to all manner of things. Jon von Tetzchner recently wrote about why the browser won’t go into the crypto-“currency” space, commending that even April Fool’s jokes would be dangerous:

… with the incredible hype and attention that cryptocurrencies, and more recently NFTs, are currently getting, we couldn’t even go for such a joke, for fear that it would be taken seriously.

Appreciate for a moment that blockchain’s technology and advocates are so ridiculous, they’re indistinguishable from satire! I’d only be hesitant to call the whole self-defeating mess Poecoin if I weren’t worried a cryptobro would assume Nathan Poe is Satoshi Nakamoto.

Jon’s conclusion is spot on:

The entire crypto fantasy is designed to lure you into a system that is extremely inefficient, consumes vast amounts of energy, uses large amounts of hardware that could better be spent doing something else and will quite often result in the average person losing any money they might put into it.

When you strip away the hype, these virtual currencies have very real repercussions for people, society, and the environment. By creating our own cryptocurrency or supporting cryptocurrency-related features in the browser, we would be helping our users to participate in what is at best a gamble and at worst a scam. It would be unethical, plain and simple.

We refuse to dress these scams up as opportunities. Instead, we encourage you to treat them with the skepticism they deserve. This may be a game for some curious crypto-investors and wealthy speculators, but for those unlucky enough to get caught out by the pyramid scheme, it could be devastating.

Self-doubt is that voice inside you that says you can’t do something, or you’re not qualified to so something, or that what you’re about to do is fraught with peril.

It’s yet another facet of anxiety that’s so self-defeating, so utterly pointless, and so destructive, yet we convince ourselves to listen to it. Worse, we accept what it says without any critical thought, and let ourselves feel all the worse for it.

Can you imagine sitting next to someone who belittled, berated, and angered you as often as your self-doubt did? What a jerk. What a self-absorbed, nasty, maniacal cynic. What a machiavellian, rude, entitled sackbutt.

I started personifying my self-doubt. His name is Ted. He’s a right old curmudgeon who’d rather see me fall over to make a point than catch me. He’d rather see me pick up a call a nervous wreck. He’d rather have me sit an exam, or enter an interview, thinking about him instead of the task at hand. He’d rather I fumble for the correct syntax in a command line—ideally with disastrous consequences—than perform a task correctly.

I’ve found cloaking self-doubt in a human form to be helpful, precisely because we wouldn’t tolerate this shit from a real person. We’d be rushing to report them faster than you can say sackbutt. It’s an insult my sister and I coined as kids from a medieval trombone, and I’m bringing it back.

Ted is a useful idiot occasionally. Him doubting me had lead me to perform more research, or check both ways before crossing the street, or prepare more for a talk or meeting than I might otherwise. But most of the time he sits there giving me shit, and I don’t tolerate it.

Right now he’s telling me I can’t publish this post, because nobody would care, normal people who have their shit together don’t have these doubts, that I’m a loser for even thinking about it, and that nothing written in less than five minutes could possibly be any good.

Watch this, Ted!

git add ./content/post/2022/self-doubt.html
git commit -m 'New post on self-doubt'
git push origin trunk

You sackbutt.

The PiDP-11 is another project I’ve wanted to get stuck into for years. It’s a kit built around a Raspberry Pi that gives you a functional front panel for a DEC PDP-11/70. It’s absolutely gorgeous, though I don’t think my soldering skills are at the level yet to take on such a project.

I watched a Beige-o-Vision video introducing the kit, and it ended up being a great intro into the PDP-11, including some fun video showing just how big hard drives and minicomputers were at the time. He’s made it onto the list!

This year I’ve remembered how amazing lists are. Write down a list of things I need to do, and I’ll be more likely to do them. Dong this silly little thing has helped so much with my anxiety since I slavisly started writing them again.

There’s no way to write this without it all seeming so obvious as to be patronising, but indulge me for a moment!

Lists are great for remembering things. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve made a “mental note” for what groceries I need, only to arrive at the supermarket and not have a clue. The same goes for work tasks and personal commitments.

As I’ve quoted my old boss saying so many times, if it’s not documented, it doesn’t exist. Mental notes aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, you could say.

But I think it even goes beyond this. Writing things down into lists gives my brain permission to think about other things. I realise I was stressed last year not because I had so much to do, but because I was juggling all of it in my head at the same time. But I’m smart, I can remember to do this stuff! Yeah, nah. Having made a habit of living in Ruben’s brain, I know this squishy mess of greymatter is the last place I should be stashing tasks to remember. As Cory Doctorow would say, use an outboard brain for this!

There’s also that supreme sense of satisfaction from crossing off items. I’m motivated not just to get stuff done, but because I know I can remove another item from the list that’s been glaring at me this whole time.

The other predictable reaction to this is over-thinking. If lists are so great, a sophisticated system to store, track, and update them is better, right? NO! Having spent a small fortune on a complicated mess of Getting Things Done applications over the years, I’m back to using basic text files, and to-to items with due dates in calendars.

My silly post about playing female characters in games must have been picked up by a forum or a social media post somewhere, because I’ve been inundated with comments over the last week or so. Most of them have been positive, and many share heartbreaking stories that go far beyond the childhood awkwardness I talked about.

I want to do these respect, but I don’t think have the mental space or time right now to do so. I never expected my blog to be taken any more than half-seriously, so the fact it’s become a magnet for people to come out of their shells and express their innermost feelings is both touching and overwhelming. I’m but a weird computer guy!

If you’ve emailed me over the last week or so with a comment, thank you. I apologise it’s taking me longer to reply than normal. Know that I appreciate all of you, even the dickheads who only motivate me further to keep writing about such stuff.