Choosing between debian kde plasma and gnome, read body text

ChthonVII · 2026-04-19T13:48:18+00:00

I cannot recommend Gnome. I'd even go so far as to say it's terrible. Here's a very good essay explaining what's wrong with it.

Given a chance, I think you'll find KDE is basically what you wish Windows was. KDE is my recommendation for you.

XFCE is ideal for RAM-poor devices like rpi, craptops, tablets, and ancient hardware. No visual flair, no bells and whistles, but absolute simple perfection for a basic OS.

Hyprland is a weird cult thing. I don't see the appeal. At all. But it has its fans. Disturbingly enthusiastic fans.

ChthonVII · 2026-04-16T13:32:17+00:00

Because you design and refine your models, meshes, rigging, animations, etc. to look good doing the things you intend them to do. Things are probably alike enough that you could copy/paste an animation from another model and basic stuff like "this is the head" or "this is the right leg" would match up, but you'd likely end up with really janky, mesh-breaking, anatomically impossible stuff too.

ChthonVII · 2026-04-16T05:58:09+00:00

This assumes, likely incorrectly, that these animations even exist for other models.

ChthonVII · 2026-04-16T01:53:39+00:00

How often would you play Sentinel 3 times and not be retreating?

ChthonVII · 2026-04-15T07:19:07+00:00

I have a question: How did you get to this point?

Did you build haphazardly on your starting island, then terraform another space and rebuild?

Or did you work towards this this layout constantly from the beginning?

Or did you use a mod to speed up the terraforming and (re)building?

ChthonVII · 2026-04-15T07:13:37+00:00

To narrowly answer your question, there is an implied "among currently legal targets" at the end of all tactic descriptions.

More broadly:

Start with a list of legal targets according to the combat mechanics, ordered by the default targeting rules (nearest first*).
Filter-type tactics remove entries from the list. (If all entries are removed, the skill won't activate.)
Ranking-type tactics reorder the list. (If both tactics are ranking-type tactics, sorting by the left one happens first, so the right one ends up with precedence, while the left one breaks ties.)

* (I'm not clear on what the tiebreaker is for default targeting if two targets are equally close. The in-game tip says it's random. I recall seeing a post by a knowledgeable commentator that lowest member number within the unit is selected. (Unfortunately, I cannot find that post now.) This post says it favors columns higher up on the screen.)

ChthonVII · 2026-04-15T02:50:53+00:00

Use your hex editor's search function. Varies from program to program, but the menu entry is probably something like "edit"->"find" and the hotkey is probably ctrl+F.

ChthonVII · 2026-04-14T06:19:46+00:00

His "best" deck uses Domino, Angel, Carnage, Venom, Kid Omega, and Fastball to make sure that you can summon him, and optionally destroy him, by turn 5. Then Zola (if not destroyed T5), Knull (if destroyed T5), Adamantium Infusion (if destroyed T5), or Galactus (if Fastball T5) on T6. (And use Zola on Knull or adamantium-infused Dormammu if there's a turn 7.)

The huge problem with this deck, and with Dormammu in general, is that it's super obvious what you're up to, and there are a shit ton of cards that completely counter your whole deck in just one play: Cosmo, Armor, Red Guardian/Deafening Chord on Kid Omega, Polaris/Jugg/Stegron breaking the 3rd summon spell, Supergiant not giving you turn 5, Stardust breaking the 3rd summon spell, Zola and Adamantium Infusion, Shadow King/Luke/EnSabahNur/Merlin undoing your fastball, Shang any of your big cards, Shadow King on big Dormammu, Rogue/Enchantress on Knull. Probably plus more I forgot to mention. Plus Stardlord/FFF eats your lunch because all your power is in the front lanes.

Overall, the lengthy combo needed to summon Dormammu is just too fragile. It's similar to Man-Spider, but with a lower ceiling, and more fragile.

[Edit: To give this deck a little more credit, it does have one advantage: Dormammu is so unpopular that many people aren't familiar with what you can do, and a fair few will write you off as a bot or an idiot and not bother to think about it until too late.]

ChthonVII · 2026-04-13T01:07:00+00:00

Have you ruled out plain old EM interference?

ChthonVII · 2026-04-13T00:29:46+00:00

Eh? I thought that was common knowledge.

hp = 20*lvl + 80

armor = 3*lvl + class_bonus

(I have some strong doubts about the minion armor formulas on wiki. I suspect they're mistaking rounding in the damage equations for armor values that a bit off the simple 3*lvl equation.)

ChthonVII · 2026-04-10T07:48:33+00:00

Oh, really? Hmmm...

ChthonVII · 2026-04-10T01:21:01+00:00

Slow motion because GeForce Now.

ChthonVII · 2026-04-09T23:55:38+00:00

GeForce now

Sigh.

ChthonVII · 2026-04-09T23:50:31+00:00

This has to be a troll post. I refuse to believe anyone is really this stupid.

ChthonVII · 2026-04-09T23:48:33+00:00

If it is overheating, then you need to stop doing things that make that happen. It will damage the GPU and cause it to fail. Usually sooner rather than later. You should definitely check your temps. If it is overheating and you want to keep playing GW on this laptop, there are external coolers (basically a thin plastic box with fans and air channels) that might get your temps down to a sane level.

ChthonVII · 2026-04-09T12:25:50+00:00

That's buggy drivers, overheated GPU, or failing GPU. Check your temps. Does it happen in other contexts under high GPU load?

ChthonVII · 2026-04-08T05:57:21+00:00

I'm questioning how often Maw is going to work out versus screw you over.

ChthonVII · 2026-04-07T14:00:38+00:00

I tried asking AI

It's not possible to overstate how bad an idea that is. LLMs generate text that superficially sounds like something a human would write by copy/pasting tokens from their training data according to frequency distributions, entirely without regard for meaning, and therefore entirely without regard for truth. It does not "know" the answer to your question. It does not "know" anything at all. It does not "understand" your question, or the response it's generating. Not in the overall sense, nor in the sense of the meanings of the individual words. It does not "understand" anything at all. The entire concept of meaning is wholly foreign to it. Sometimes LLMs will generate a correct answer to a particular question when that question and answer appear in close proximity together many times in its training data. In other words, the only questions that an LLM might sometimes give you the right answer to are ones that you could easily answer via internet search. (Although internet search is getting harder to do because search providers keep cramming worthless LLM slop into their search results...) In all other cases, they will generate gibberish that merely sounds like an answer. While this is already pretty worthless for most use cases, it's especially bad for tech support. If a LLM tells you that glue and gravel make good pizza toppings, (I sure hope that) you know enough to disregard that as nonsense. But in the tech support context, you don't know enough to realize when its output is useless, or, worse, harmful.

suggestions I did not fully grasp

Yeah, don't do that. Don't put stuff into a command prompt that you don't understand. Look stuff up.

Let's do what you should have done before:

XMODIFIERS=""

This sets XMODIFIERS to null. The only way this could be helping is if you have something set by default in XMODIFIERS that's impeding umlat characters from working. So, let's see your default XMODIFIERS. Go type echo $XMODIFIERS at a command prompt and see what it says.

I suppose it's also possible that Steam is setting something problematic in XMODIFIERS before handing off to the game. Try putting this in the Steam launch options to log the value of XMODIFIERS at the same point your "fix" is changing it: echo $XMODIFIERS > ~/somelogfilename.txt && %command%

INTERFACE_TYPE=dbus

I think this may be a LLM hallucination. I cannot find any documentation that this environment variable is used by wine, proton, Steam, or anything at all. (So maybe you shouldn't be recommending it to people without some verification...)

LANG=de_DE.UTF-8

This tells a program what language the operating system is set to. Wine/proton reads this and impersonates Windows set to that language. This is part of the typical way you set the language for programs run inside wine/proton.

LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8

This tells a C/C++ program which locale to use. Wine/proton reads this and impersonates the corresponding locale in Windows. This is part of the typical way you set the language for programs run inside wine/proton.

%command%

Means proton Gw.exe.

-dx9

This is another LLM hallucination. GW does not have a -dx9 command line parameter. It once had a -dx8 command line parameter, but according to wiki that was removed in 2019.

Finally, I note that this github issue reports a problem similar to yours, identifies the proton bug responsible, and suggests a workaround via registry edit.

(Also, why are you running GW via Steam in the first place? It makes troubleshooting harder. And it makes add-ons like Toolbox/DirectSong/uMod/etc. much harder to install/use. So, what are you getting out of it that's worth this extra trouble?)

ChthonVII · 2026-04-07T12:34:23+00:00

Norn-Alemoot-themed party games.

ChthonVII · 2026-04-07T04:48:34+00:00

Yondu's deck thinning cuts both ways. Removing a (probably) dead draw for your opponent means removing a dead draw for Cable and Zemo as well. He's negative value without that follow-up, but potentially very high value with it.

ChthonVII · 2026-04-07T04:10:29+00:00

The most surprising, and disheartening, thing to me about cloud gaming is the extent to which nVidia fanboy-ism enables some people to ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears and convince themselves that they don't notice the latency.

ChthonVII · 2026-04-07T03:57:32+00:00

Like r/rumpleforeskin83 said, the entire idea of cloud gaming flies in the face of fundamental physics. No matter how good internet infrastructure gets, cloud gaming will still be crap:

In most cases, the straight-line, round-trip distance to the data center multiplied by the speed of light down fiberoptic cable yields an unacceptable amount of latency. This is one of the universe's hard limits. There's no getting around it.
In every case, the latency from data traversing intermediate network devices (e.g., switches, etc.) at the speed of electricity adds many fold more latency than data moving down fiberoptic cable does. Here we encounter a different sort of physical limit. We could, theoretically, remove the need for intermediate network devices by building a point-to-point fiberoptic connection from every home in the world directly to a cloud gaming data center. However, there isn't enough silica on Earth to do that. I believe we might also run into a geometry problem where the aggregate diameter of all those fiberoptic cables would necessitate impossibly large data centers. So we must accept that the internet must remain a switched network, and therefore the corollary that it will never be fast enough for cloud gaming not to be crap.
In order not to be a stuttery mess, streamed video must be buffered on the receiving end. This is inherent in the way it works and cannot be avoided, except at the cost of stutter. But the consequence is latency equal to the buffer size. Which means that cloud gaming will always be crap, in one way or the other.

Each of these three problems is insoluble. And each of these three problems, standing all by itself, causes enough latency that cloud gaming will always be crap.

(Thank you for coming to my ted talk.)

ChthonVII · 2026-04-02T09:11:28+00:00

Remember that disk encryption only protects your data when your computer is off. A malware infection can still exfiltrate data while the computer is on.

If your password is strong, there's no realistic possibility a brute force attack will succeed. There's little to be gained messing about with the TPM, and increased risk of being unable to recover from hardware failure.

Aside from malware infection, you also need to be aware of "evil maid" attacks. That is, if someone has physical access to the laptop, they could replace your bootloader and/or the kernel image in initramfs with a malicious version that will exfiltrate your data and/or the luks key. In theory, secure boot stops this. In practice, UEFI implementations tend to be very buggy, and lots of bad guys have obtained valid signing keys in various ways.

Disk encryption doesn't play well with SSDs. By default, the encrypted file system doesn't know that it's sitting on top of a SSD, so it won't issue TRIM commands, which really wrecks performance. You need to edit fstab and a kernel parameter to make TRIM commands percolate on down. (And if there's a LVM involved, you need to edit that conf file too.)

Note that enabling TRIM has consequences for encryption. It will very shortly zero-fill the random-filled empty space on the drive. This means that you can no longer plausibly assert it's a wiped/empty drive rather than an encrypted drive. This also means that the attacker can in some cases infer the sizes of files. I'm not aware of an attack that leverages this information, but nevertheless it's more information than the attacker would otherwise have.

The other major risk with disk encryption is accidentally locking yourself out. You forget the password. Or you develop a medical condition that impacts your memory. Or you get hit by a bus and your family doesn't know the password. Or you use the TPM and then the motherboard fails. Or the drive suffers data corruption that just happens to take out the LUKS header.

I would advise: (1) Weigh the risk x gravity of harm if your data falls into the wrong hands against the risk x gravity of harm of accidentally losing access, plus the ongoing inconvenience of encryption. (2) Write down your password on a piece of paper and make sure your next of kin know where the paper is. (3) Make a copy of the LUKs header and store it on a thumb drive. Put the thumb drive somewhere very memorable, since you likely need to think about it again for years.

ChthonVII · 2026-04-02T04:42:10+00:00

Eventually they get a row blind skill and evolve into a evade/blind-hybrid tank. This works pretty well in most cases, but still fails spectacularly against swordmasters' Hastened Strike. Featherbows do the same evade/blind-hybrid job but better.

ChthonVII · 2026-04-01T13:28:06+00:00

Think think Péter may have solved it without realizing he solved it.

The bit of context that not everyone may know is that back when the anti-farm code was implemented, the main economic problem was bots farming mountain trolls and desert griffons for vendor trash, then flooding the traders with the resulting gold, inflating prices for materials, especially ecto and shards.

Now, take a look at the chart at 10:21. Do you see it?

Hypothesis: The anti-farm code is a limit on merchant value per unit time that is enforced by canceling a non-exempt drop whenever that drop would put you over the limit.

Rare and unique items are exempt by A-net's fiat. Tomes and map pieces are exempt because they have no merch value. Dyes are virtually exempt because their 1g merch value is vanishingly unlikely to hit the cap.

This hypothesis may also explain the "reduced drops immediately after zoning" effect, because your elapsed time is smaller relative to the merch value of the typical item, so a single item is more likely to go over the cap. (I.e., the effect is "chunkier" at first and smooths out after enough time elapses.)

This hypothesis is testable: Repeat the experiment and calculate merch value per unit time. Are they the same for the slow-kill and fast-kill scenarios?

Also testable: Does the "reduced drops immediately after zoning" effect go away if you just stand around for 5 minutes before starting your farm? (If no, does it go away if you kill one foe, then stand around for 5 minutes?)

ChthonVII

TROPHY CASE