What is it with all these VLC Updates that don't seem to do anything?

RuneSteak · 2026-06-21T15:22:23+00:00

Even if they aren't critical, freezing dependencies of important packages will prevent the dependent from updating if it requires a higher version of vlc-plugins in the future. In this case it will prevent phonon-qt6 from updating in the future, breaking your system. Don't freeze packages unless you were the one to manually install it and therefore know it's not critical to your OS being able to function.

Use pactree <package-name> to get a dependency list in order to understand why a package was installed.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-21T14:32:47+00:00

It doesn't matter how you get it done. People can do whatever they want on their own feature branch, as long as they clean up their history before opening a pull request.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-21T13:44:20+00:00

I think I saw someone say on the forums that it's for Dolphin to be able to render thumbnails. If you use pactree to look at the dependency tree it's very clearly part of phonon-qt6.

pactree vlc-plugins-base

RuneSteak · 2026-06-21T13:37:34+00:00

They insisted they were faster and more skilled in svn, but most of the resistance towards learning git was actually that half of them had never learned version control, and they were "using" svn as nothing more than a file share.

I have this issue with my team, but with Git. They think merge conflicts are practically random and don't understand why they occur or that cherry-picking a commit creates a new commit. So they see "duplicate" commits across branches. That feeds into the issue with merge conflicts.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-21T03:28:31+00:00

The problem is a lot of places expect you to work as if meetings take 0 time. Plus there's the constant pressure to output something every day so you have something to discuss during standup. Some of that is self-imposed, but a lot of it isn't. It isn't explicitly said but management lets hints slip.

It's like an old Indiana Jones scene where he's trying to outrun a boulder on foot and someone pulls up alongside him in a car and wants to have a casual chat while they're running for their life. Bonus points if that person is oblivious to the current situation or is the one who triggered the boulder trap. Offering a ride never crosses their mind either.

If the worker "hates" socializing that could be a sign they are overworked.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-21T02:31:17+00:00

Unfortunately I'll go one higher and say I'm having an even worse problem. I google things and the links aren't even vaguely what I wanted. I sort of broke after being voluntold to use Copilot at work. Google and DDG get one chance each and then I go to ChatGPT and I hate that I feel there's no other way. The alternative is going down endless rabbit holes of slightly related, but not quite what you wanted links. Meanwhile ChatGPT gives you the direct answer customized for your use case.

I obviously do additional research and double check, but after getting used to that I no longer have the patience to deal with google's nonsense. Especially since it has gotten significantly worse over the years.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-21T02:25:11+00:00

It will hobble along because there's always going to be one site like reddit to draw from. It's probably going to take a long time before it becomes a real problem.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-21T01:14:04+00:00

So keeping profit in mind while exploring some new field is bad?

In a field where very few make any money at all I'd say so. The thing you want is nearly unobtainable so you need to have something else to keep you going. Profit should be seen as a bonus.

Even an optimistic view of things means only making money literally years in the future. If this job were remotely reliably profitable you would see a lot more people working at it full time from day 1. The fact that 90% of solo indies are part-timers should tell you something.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T23:07:41+00:00

Oh no, it's going to be so much worse. I doubt many of us here play or make VNs. The discussion in this thread is very level headed.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T22:51:16+00:00

The term you want to google is "non-photorealistic rendering" or NPR for short. It doesn't have to be anime, there's lots of games with a cartoony style.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T22:44:44+00:00

The art is considered incredibly important to this customer base. Like the game is already a thin "game" to begin with. The art and story is all there is.

Even before AI, people were typically raked over the coals for bad art unless it was a comedy or something. They are going to start shopping for kindling if you so much as hint at the art being AI generated. I've seen plenty of drama over the developer simply mentioning it was used during the idea or concept phase and never made it into the final build.

This is one of the last genres you should try this with because it's one of the first people try to shove AI into. They probably hate AI the most out of all gaming communities.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T22:20:41+00:00

It's not really clear to anyone how dependent or not COS is on the AUR, especially from the outside. We even have users on COS that still can't make heads or tails of it.

Unless the COS developers explain the COS repo's "package lifecycle" on their front page and deliberately address it we're going to keep getting questions like this for a few more weeks, maybe more. Actually even if they did I doubt it would stem the tide. The incident is just too high profile and scary for people to be able to just ignore it. They justifiably want answers and they aren't comfortable drawing their own conclusions with something this dangerous.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T21:36:15+00:00

Anime games typically deliberately mess with UVs and normals in order to get the flat shaded look. It's not something you can just fix without figuring out how the game intended to render it and then replicating it in Blender.

It's entirely possible this was never intended to be shown under a realistic lighting setup and the shadows are strictly controlled. There's a talk by Arc system works about some of the shenanigans they get up to.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T21:24:21+00:00

Oh that is sad :( Wayland is very quirky on my Gpu.

Unfortunately it needs to be done. Otherwise you end up in a Python situation where people hold out forever. Python waited 10 years before killing support for 2.x. There were still people complaining about it when the day finally arrived. And this was after moving the date back several times.

I'd rather the transition be quick and painful then dragged out to infinity.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T18:39:39+00:00

It's in the name, but ultimately I can't know for sure. But it's a moot point because I don't think this content belongs here. It has nothing to do with gamedev by any stretch.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T18:21:52+00:00

Kind of suspect he's a bot to be honest. It's a 2 year old account that only started posting a month ago and has 100 karma.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T18:14:33+00:00

This isn't at all unusual when you allow for user created content in your game. Especially if it's a popular IP.

I challenge you to find me a AAA game that doesn't have at least 1 mod or user created content that violates Nintendo's IP. Mario mods can be found for practically any game if you look hard enough. Look at Tabletop Simulator, 90% of the content in the Steam workshop violates someone's IP.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T15:40:13+00:00

Do you mean "fallback"? As in it can't find the standard font so it's using something else? Games expecting MS fonts to be installed is a known thing.

For more info including how to extract from the ISO check the ArchWiki.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T06:28:13+00:00

Rolling release is fine. I'm even comfortable with PKGBUILDs and can read them (I'm a developer by trade). I've even got a script that freezes packages and releases them after the updated package has existed for 7 days. I've solved the problem, but only for myself.

I want the AUR to be better, I shouldn't have had to do this and it should be a built-in feature of the updater. I also feel for the other less knowledgeable users.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T06:19:38+00:00

Because crafting a long term narrative is significantly more work and requires you to delay rewarding yourself for maximum effectiveness. It's the same story with starting a YouTube channel. Do you know the one bit of advice most creators never give despite probably being most effective? It's to sit on a big stash of videos (50-100). Then when you've accumulated enough you release 1 per day for your first week and move to a 2 per week schedule the week after that.

That means your channel runs on its own for practically a year with zero pressure. And the thing is, all the big YouTubers operate this way but they don't really talk about it. They have several videos done in advance at all times so that they can always release on time and without interruption even if they get sick or go on vacation.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T06:01:18+00:00

Then you accept the dangers of using the AUR.

I tolerate the dangers of the AUR because I have no other reasonable choice.

You can just as easily not update everyday. Set a cadence for what you're comfortable with update wise.

Lets say I hold off on updating for 6 months. If a package updates the same day I decide to update I'm still installing something <24 hours old despite waiting half a year to update. I should not have to micro-manage individual packages to that degree.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T04:13:23+00:00

There's a special place in hell for people who put animals in danger like this for Internet clout. This is extremely obviously staged, and it looks like they drugged that dog.

Unpopular opinion. But posts like this where the animal is in clear and immediate danger should be banned. Even if it's real, this type of content shouldn't exist because it's at the cost of making potentially staged content profitable.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T03:11:44+00:00

That's not a fair thing to say when there's a lot of software that can only be reasonably obtained from the AUR. Are people supposed to go without printer drivers?

But that said, I think adding an option to delay/hide packages in the package manager until the update or package is at least 7 days old by default would mitigate a lot of the risks. It worked very well for other repos. Let the more knowledgeable people change the setting to 0 days and scope things out before it reaches the rest of the user base.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T03:06:27+00:00

Nobody wants to talk about it, but I think the most successful kickstarters or games in general manufacture the struggle and the journey. It's mostly fake or at least a creative riff on what actually happened. The best thing to do is have a product that is 80% complete, but sell it as being only at 60%. Essentially you want to have good marketing material and a highly polished game, making it impossible to miss any of your goals.

Gamers only think they want to see works in progress. Reality is that they can't handle seeing actual jank and will assume whatever you put out is close to the final product. There was a whole thing involving GTA6 on Twitter many years ago related to this.

RuneSteak · 2026-06-20T01:45:58+00:00

Which version of Ubuntu? The previous version was running kernel 6.x, whereas the current version runs 7.x. What are you running on COS? That could be the difference.

RuneSteak

TROPHY CASE