There’s only one day of the year when you can dupe me this well. Well done

Strongly agreed. Frankly Blizzard got away with decades of discrimination and harassment to the point where an employee took her own life because of the shitty frat culture that festered in the company. And for all that they essentially got a slap on the wrist, a governor in-pocket, and a merger with Activision.

I don't develop distributed applications, but Im not understanding how it simplifies dependency management. Isn't it just shifting the work into the app bundle? Stuff still has to be updated or replaced all the time, right?

That's correct. This simplifies the dependency management system because not every distribution ships with every version of every package, so when software requires a version of a package that the distro dosesn't ship with or have in its repositories, the end user has to either build the package from source, or find some other way to run their software. Flatpaks developers will define the versions of dependencies that are required for an application to run and that exact version is pulled in when the flatpak is installed. This makes the issue of every distro not having every version of every package moot.

Don't maintainers have to release new bundles if they contain dependencies with vulnerabilities?

They don't have to, no. But they absolutely should.

Is it because developers are often using dependencies that are ahead of release versions?

Sometimes, yes. Or the software is using a dependency that is so old that it's no longer included in a distro's package repositories.

Also, how is it so much better than images for your applications on Docker Hub?

I would say they're suited to different purposes.

Docker shines when availability is a concern and replication is desired. It's fantastic for running a swarm of applications spread across multiple machines automatically managing their lifecycles based on load. In general though, I wouldn't use Docker containers to run graphical applications. Most images are not suited for this by default, and would require you install a bunch of additional packages before you could consider running any graphical apps. Solutions to run graphical applications in Docker do exist (see x11docker), but it doesn't really seem like a common practice.

Flatpaks are designed to integrate into an existing desktops that already have a graphical environment running. Some flatpaks include the packages required for hardware acceleration (Steam, OBS) which can eliminate the need for those packages to be available via your distro's package manager.

What this means is that a distro like Alpine Linux that doesn't have an nvidia package in its repos can still run Steam because the Steam flatpak includes the nvidia driver if you have an nvidia GPU installed.

Never say never, I guess, but nothing about flatpak really appeals to my instincts. I really just want to know if it's something I should adopt, or if I can continue to blissfully ignore.

¯_(ツ)_/¯ It's a tool. Use it when it's useful, or don't.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I've been preaching to friends for years that FOSS versions of Starbound and/or Terraria would be a big hit.

awk

You asked for one, but I've got two hills to die on, sorry.

1. Solo: A Star Wars Story was a lot of fun and I thought it was a solid entry. I didn't really like the Sequels or Prequels, but Rogue One and Solo both stuck out as good titles to me.

2. Lightyear was a good movie. I really enjoyed it and didn't really understand why it got so much flak.

Seems like it

• https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/employees-witnessed-co-worker-stab-company-president-court-documents-show/ar-AA1w6DXF
• https://wwmt.com/news/local/employee-stabs-anderson-express-president-staff-meeting-muskegon-fruitport-township-police
• https://www.woodtv.com/news/muskegon-county/police-look-for-motive-in-stabbing-of-company-president/

Sounds good to me. My only gripe is that I don't think Ciri needs to go through the Trial of Grasses. She kind of already had well-established abilities (Elder blood) that made it easy for her to deal with most threats and we got to see that on full display in like half of The Witcher 3. Frankly, I had more fun playing with her abilities than I did with Geralt's.

Do you need to own a platform to have a de facto grip on game distribution?

It helps immensely to own the platform you're also distributing software for if you're planning to enforce platform-specific restrictions, such as restricting which storefronts can even operate on your platform. Yknow, like Apple ~~does~~ did. But that aside, Valve does not have a de facto grip on game distribution because multiple platforms exist where Steam doesn't even distribute games (Microsoft Store, PlayStation Store, Nintendo eShop, etc.), and the only gaming platform that Steam does occupy has multiple competitors (Epic, Uplay, EA Play, GoG, itch.io, etc.).

I like Steam as much as the next guy, but it’s totally douchey the way nerds fall all over themselves to shit on Apple, but not Valve for charging the same thing

There's reasons to shit on both of them, but Valve taking an initial 30% cut of games sold on their own platform makes sense. They offer way more services than the competition, and frankly developers don't have to use Steam. They can use any of the other aforementioned platforms to distribute their games, or just roll their own platform if they're daring and patient.

But, I guess not “owning” a platform makes you immune from criticism.

No idea how you came to this conclusion. Both companies have legit criticisms made against them that have pretty much nothing to do with the case discussed in the article. Apple does flat out anti-consumer, and sometimes anti-developer shit all the time, Valve's work culture isn't near as diverse as it should be in the 21st century, and they don't seem to do any sort of audits of new games they distribute, they also don't seem to care about abandoned titles people have already paid for, etc.

Given that “owning” the platform is the problem, then I’m hoping to see an equal amount of rage at Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft for their online stores that charge 30% to distribute games.

That's... not the problem though. Did you read the article? This is in relation to a class action lawsuit made by some disgruntled developers being put off by Valve's 30% cut on a platform where they have the option to use some other service lol. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are the only official distributors of digital games on their respective platforms.

Did this studio ever actually produce anything? Or did Netflix just have these highly-compensated C-suite guys on payroll for 2 years doing nothing?

"We have investigated ourselves and have found that we've done nothing wrong." has been a line that's come up quite a bit in the last few years specifically when a company or organization starts investigating itself. Let's see how that plays out for Ubisoft.