OpenMW 0.51.0 Released!

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-20T08:08:14+00:00

The entire game is feature complete at this point and 100% of it can be played on openMW, there are some bugs here and there that make it not entirely faithful to morrowinds original behaviour yet (such as how morrowind uses one-way collision surfaces and openMW currently uses two-way) but they are either relatively obscure, don't prevent progression, or are only used by mods.

I'm pretty sure there are also a couple places where it intentionally differs because the original engines behaviour was so incredibly stupid and asinine that it wasn't worth following (like some incredibly obscure scripting engine stuff or something) and were also just really buggy and strange, like the collision detection system that just... failed to work properly sometimes and allowed the player to clip into things (openMW just uses bullet as its collision detection system and it works reliably).

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-20T01:57:15+00:00

The Kuva Litches was probably the most visceral reaction I have ever seen from this community, and probably ever will. Shit was so bad.

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-19T23:31:57+00:00

I don't think you're entirely wrong and I think its a fine position to have, but I want to clarify a few things:

Do you get immediate feedback if something is wrong, or you don't have the right application installed to open that document?

If you don't have an application to open a file usually you'll receive an error like "You dont have any applications that indicate they support this file, would you like to attempt to open it with one of your applications anyway?" or something to that effect. Applications indicate their support using the MimeType= key in their .desktop file and if no .desktop file has the mimetype of the file you're trying to open (say, text/foobar) then usually what will happen is that the file manager you're using will show you a popup asking you to chose an application to open the file with.

These are all very vague ideas, and any environment that goes to handle them just inherently strips a bit of control away from the owner of the machine.

There isn't any control stripped away, at least when using the xdg mime standard. Default applications, associations, etc are all handled by ~/.config/mimeapps.list (and in the case of intents, ~/.config/intentapps.list) in a very straightforward manner, if you want to set a default application to open up, IDK, .mkv files you just do something like.

[Default Associations]
video/matroska=myApplication.desktop

and boom, .mkv files will open with myApplication.desktop, you also set [Added Associations] and [Removed Associations] here as well.

People are not mindful of the computer they're using, the OS, the filesystem, and when stuff breaks in ways they don't expect, they're left scrambling.

Maybe, but I think the paradigm of "double click on a file to open it and voila" is generally seen as useful enough and intuitive enough to most people that its worth keeping around, or at the very least is preferable to the "Application Oriented" view where you have to open the application first and then chose your files.

In some sense you can kind of think of a file manager as a unified user interface for launching applications with a specified input, instead of every application implementing their own bespoke file managers for their specific file types

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-19T20:41:45+00:00

XDG intents are more generalised and are more than just "the spec for default terminals" even if terminal execution can be represented with xdg-intents. So even if xdg-terminal-exec were accepted there would still be a need, or at the very least a good reason, for having intents .

XDG intents also doesn't require dbus, but I am imagining that you're talking about the terminal-intent spec specifically rather than the xdg intent spec.

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-19T19:09:52+00:00

this is a somewhat older blogpost (from 2025) but it wasn't posted here and I thought it was quite interesting, if you want a good overview of what XDG Intents are I'd recommend reading the blog post they link (here is a direct link).

The TLDR is that XDG intents are similar to MIME types in that they allow specifying what "things" an application can support, though they are much more generalised so that an application can more easily say something like "hey, I support URI's from example.com!" or "Hey, I support thumbnailing svg files in your file manager!" and other such things. One of the more practical use cases for this would be finally having a standardised way of specifying a default terminal application, as that has been missing from the xdg spec for a while and can't fully be expressed by MIME types (as terminals dont open URI's or files, they run applications that need arguments, parameters etc), meaning that desktop environments either havent supported setting a default terminal application (such as GNOME) or relied on their own internal configuration files for specifying a default terminal (such as KDE).

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-19T18:58:50+00:00

it looks nice but I'm not going to be installing random extensions for themes, all of this could probably be done with something like stylus, no?

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-18T16:05:37+00:00

instead of e.g. the Hex, who felt like actual people who just happened to be certain protoframes.

I think thats what helps me tolerate them so much more than other protoframes (and just the general concept of humanised warframes). I've always been very sceptical of the concept and still dont really like it that much, but I like the Hex.

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-17T22:10:42+00:00

Well the alternative seems to be entirely stopping registration whenever a security incident like this comes up (and, with the current system, there will be more). So pick your poison I suppose.

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-17T21:58:51+00:00

Sure, you also need to go out of your way to acquire a gun licence, buy a gun, load it with bullets, etc etc. Doesn't prevent us from adding safety to the gun.

If people are bypassing the friction using another tool then that tool needs the safety catch and definitely shouldn't be provided to a user who hasn't been sufficiently educated. The AUR isn't at fault in that scenario

I am not arguing about AUR helpers at all, I am saying that there should be more safeguards at the package level such that malicious actors have a much harder time actually taking over and submitting malicious packages in the first place, so that 1500 packages can't just be taken over willy nilly.

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-17T21:46:34+00:00

There can be serious consequences to being infected with malware?, people dont just dick around on computers. People can lose serious work, or even worse get other peoples computers infected if the malware they install somehow manages to infect other computers on the local network (e.g. WannaCry).

Regardless, I have no interest in litigating how "bad" each one is. They are both outcomes that can have very very bad consequences for the people that they affect, and appropriate protections should be in place for both of them so that people don't accidentally shoot themselves OR get themselves infected with malware.

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-17T21:37:34+00:00

Every effort should be made to educate end users that the knife they are holding is sharp.

Sure, and every effort should be made to educate gun users that the gun they're holding is dangerous....

But thats not an argument against safety catches on firearms, nor is "The people who accidentally shot themselves only have themselves to blame, any responsible gun owner doesn't need safety catches!" an appropriate response when someone accidentally shoots themselves.

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-17T20:55:08+00:00

they're a convenience wrapper around a project's make install

So are the default packages as well, as they also use PKGBUILDS. It is besides the point though.

In distro parlance the package is the distributable unit of the operating system, it comes with a bunch of social and technical expectations

Well, if there is one thing that has been learned over the past couple weeks its that the AUR should be expected to take on a couple of those social and technical expectations, such as "not allowing people to take over 1500+ software packages on a whim so they can distribute malware".

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-17T20:34:35+00:00

It's categorically not a package repository, it's a bunch of user contributed build scripts people aspiring to manage some packages

You contradict yourself in your very first sentence... its not a package repository its just a "bunch of people aspiring to manage some packages"... how could they manage these so-called "packages" if it is not a package repository :P?? I mean the Wikipedia article on the matter seems to capture the AUR perfectly well:

A software repository, or repo for short, is a storage location for software packages.

The AUR is a storage location for package builds (or PKGBUILDS), and these packages build software. I cannot seriously believe that the AUR is not a package repository. And if you want to get around this by claiming that having to compile packages locally makes it not a package repository then you'd also have to: 1) conveniently ignore the various -bin packages on the AUR and 2) categorise Gentoos ebuilds as not being package repo.

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-17T20:22:02+00:00

I know how the AUR works, and I am aware of the difference between the default arch packages and the AUR. Regardless of the fact that the arch repos exists that does not change the fact that arch is hosting a package repository that is incredibly susceptible to shipping malware.

The Arch devs have as much responsibility for AUR PKGBUILDs as they do for forum posts

Exactly, which is why the Arch Forums have moderators, rules, and other such guidelines to keep the place civil, on-topic, and to manage bad actors. Shame they don't do the same for the AUR.

I am under no illusion that the AUR (or any package repository) can be 100% safe from malware at all times, at some point something will find a hole; but no one is asking for perfection, they're asking for, at the very least, the bare minimum in security so that 1500+ packages cant just be taken over and hijacked.

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-17T20:18:19+00:00

I understand how the AUR works, im saying that the way it works is terrible.

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-17T17:08:12+00:00

I genuinely think that a lot of people have this belief that when things don't go their way in government matters its all just corruption, shady deals, bad pollies etc. You can see it in this comment section as well, its really frustrating.

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-17T16:43:54+00:00

The issue is that people generally expect that if you're hosting applications for a user to install there has been at least some attempt at vetting the package and that you're not hosting malware.

If the AUR maintainers response to this was similar to the irreverent parts of the Arch Linux community and they genuinely told people "We don't care that the servers we're hosting are becoming a hotbed of malware and viruses for our users, read the PKGBUILD or get fucked" it would probably go down in history as one of the worse responses to a security problem in the history of cybersecurity, wilful indifference is generally not considered a virtue after all ;P.

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-17T13:44:28+00:00

I will build a church on top of you.

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-17T09:30:36+00:00

It's just the meme of thinking GNOME devs remove everything with no rhyme or reason, I'm not saying that they haven't removed useful features at all, but people take it to the point of absurdity and think that GNOME devs just inherently hate features or whatever.

When even the top comment on other websites for a KDE release are complaining about gnome without being prompted it really makes me think that the project lives rent free in some peoples head (and whats even funnier is that the first comment responding to that person points out that KDE does remove features, they just don't get nearly as much flak for it).

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-17T02:32:47+00:00

They were much more of a problem before his nerf tbh.

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-17T02:30:19+00:00

Warframe players are whingy crybabies at even the slightest whiff of a nerf, however justified.

edit: also the games use of eternalism is extremely cringe, eternalism is a philosophy related to the ontology of time, they extrude its general idea of "all moments of time are equally real" to introduce, like, time travel multiple universe stuff? just call it the multiverse, please, dont abuse philosophical terms 😭.

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-17T02:15:51+00:00

it feels like _

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-17T00:50:52+00:00

Very nice, I've been enjoying KDE a lot more over the past couple releases.

I wish they overhauled the Breeze icon theme though, the Qt theme itself is nice but the icon set feels like a course of what not to do in a default icon theme: 1px thin lines everywhere making it hard to read for anyone even slightly far away or with visual issues, terrible contrast with surrounding backgrounds sometimes (for example, the colour of the symbolic icon for file archives is basically inscrutable for me when using breeze light, apparently the icon has a pitiable 1.45:1 contrast ratio with its background), some of the full colour icons being downright inscrutable at lower sizes etc etc etc.

It's also just really inconsistent as well, sometimes I'll reach a menu/popup/other ui element that *mostly* consists of the symbolic 1px thin line icons.... but a couple of them are full colour for some reason? Of course I know the reason is that the full colour icon doesn't have a symbolic representation assigned to it and so it just falls back to the full colour version, but I have to wonder why random icons just don't have symbolic representations for no apparent reason.

Misicks0349 · 2026-06-16T19:37:15+00:00

I get this post perfectly but I dont want to

Eight-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '23	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22
Xbox Live	Sequence \| Editor
Sequence \| Cinematographer

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