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Wait, how does a zoomer end up referencing a game from 1992 (and one of the best games of all time) in their nickname?
In addition to being one of the best games of all time, Star Control 2 also has the unique honor of having been released under the GPL in the early 2000s, under the name "The Ur-Quan Masters" (due to the trademark belonging to the publisher, not the developer, a fact which produced absolutely no problems and embittered legal disputes whatsoever). I encountered it through the open source community where it's talked about as one of the best open-source games. The game is even packaged in debian contrib! UQM may be old, but Linux is taking off among zoomers, and the game has a second life within those circles.
You may or may not have heard that a sequel is coming out, under the new series name "Free Stars." This makes it the third sequel to SC2 to be developed in the past 30 years, but we don't talk about the others. This one is the first sequel by Fred Ford and Paul Reiche, although Paul has since retired.
I've been following the Free Stars development for a while. First there was that huge legal drama with Stardock that got resolved in a really weird way. Now (and admittedly this is much less eventful) every blogpost has some political crap buried within it. I'm not sure if the two original Toys for Bobs devs are super progressive, or their
staffersdevelopers are the super progressive ones, but it's kind of funny to have a giant dev progress update and then have a picture of you protesting fascism in front of the Washington Monument and talking about what a shocking year it's been politically.I hope it gets out of Kickstarter Development Hell. The Escape Velocity Override remake, "Cosmic Frontier Override", was not so lucky. The devs wasted a bunch of time poorly rewriting everything and then apparently Peter Cartwright, the original creator, died while this all was going on. Maybe it'll keep going. The remaining dev is incentivized to keep going, because he somehow made a Patreon account a year or two after the kickstarter to get even more free money to develop freelance.
Or maybe I don't hope it gets out of Kickstarter Development Hell. How can I hope to defeat leftism if I play every game and watch every movie that leftists make? Maybe it's better if they just waste the money of other leftists and desperate 40 year olds. I am also a zoomer who played Ur Quan Masters, by the way. It was really good.
Relatedly, we've been toying with maybe doing a Kickstarter for hw device with a friend and very fast came to the conclusion that the only way we would ever do is if we have a production ready prototype and need upfront capital just to order a limited batch from a contract manufacturer as well as a known set of guaranteed buyers. Otherwise there's far too high risk of ending up at /r/shittykickstarters.
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Seriously? I'd love evidence to that effect.
Depending on your definition of "zoomer" it's possible I've been a Linux fan since before you were born, but it's almost as likely that I've been hearing "This is going to be the Year of the Linux Desktop!", in decreasing ratios of sincerity to irony, since before you were born. I want to say that the increasing irony doesn't feel like as big a deal as it used to. Maybe that's because these days you can use VS Code on Linux to write Linux software and Windows Subsystem for Linux to run it on Windows, maybe it's because Steam has gifted us with more top-notch Linux games (especially if you include top-notch emulatable-on-Linux games) than I'll ever be able to play, or maybe none of that's my true reasoning there.
There was a bit of a bump in the Steam Hardware Survey, but it's held in the 3.5%-4% range, and there's no real breakdown of how and what demographics.
That said, Linus's "linux challenge" this year went from the normal joke where it seemed like he was intentionally trying to fuck things up, to a pretty serious effort where a handful of the people stuck with it at the end, and I have had actual students actually interested in trying it out.
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As a consumer of the tech YouTube space - you see the YouTubers and the viewers really pushing into Linux hard this year, with an uptick in the previous few years.
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It's not taking off in the sense that everyone and their cousin are using it, but among the tech-oriented it's become aspirational. Bazzite has generated some interest. The big mover has been Steam and Proton improving the gaming experience, combined with Windows continuing to anger tech-literate users with increasing telemetry and AI features that make people feel like they're the product. At the very least, Linux is often in the air as an option for young techy people, in a way that simply wasn't the case 10, 15 years ago. It's also riding the wave of PC building as a culture, which is dramatically taking off among zoomers, so much so that my sheltered rural cousin constantly bugs me for advice on what kind of PC he should build. In the same way PC building is "take charge of your computer hardware and do it up custom!", Linux for young tech-oriented people is "take charge of your computer software and do it up custom!", with stuff like Arch having an aura of technology empowerment that zoomers of this type find refreshing compared to the app-and-platform 'enshittification' culture of technology right now.
But I'm also in IT, so I see very tech-oriented people all the time. But it's striking that IT (especially in comparison to software engineering) used to be "All Hail Microsoft!" territory, and now, using Windows is considered the "basic bitch" option for personal use even as AD and whatever Microsoft wants to call cloud directory services/Entra this month remains the enterprise backbone.
I mean, old enough to have Zoomers as children, had I any children, but the first thing I did with my new rig was copy off the default Windoze install and then nuke the drive with a fresh Bazzite install. It's been a ton of fun to play with, and the best part about it is that it's way more trustworthy to me RN than the unholy mess that is Windows 11 and patch Tuesdays randomly breaking $Important_Thing because all M$ cares about is growing its 365 empire, old and decaying x86-based OS monopoly notwithstanding.
Last time I changed laptop, I went to great lengths to avoid getting OEM Windows to specifically avoid paying Microsoft, so the first thing I did was plug in a Mint USB.
(The previous time, I'd looked for a no-OS laptop to avoid Win10's anti-user features, but I wasn't willing to go the full order route and the transition costs were enough that if I was paying for Windows anyway I was willing to put up with it. But by the last time, Microsoft had started bankrolling OpenAI, so they're on the hatelist now and I'm willing to pay more to avoid paying them.)
There's a lot to like about Mint, to me it's always been one of the better Ubuntu-based distros! Coming back to a Fedora-based distro after about a decade plus on the other side of that software divide has been an interesting experience, and I've stubbed my toes on various things several different times, but I'm finding that I really dig the underpinnings of Bazzite much more than I expected to. But anyway, IMO Windoze will continue to rule the corporate roost for the foreseeable future since Office is still the de facto standard, but if you don't need that particular ecosystem and are relatively comfortable running a flavor or Linux, then outside of $specific_thing that can't be run/emulated in Linux land, there's absolutely no reason to suffer with M$ any longer.
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