The Musings Of The Consensus

 I know, this likely would have been better said at the beginning of the month, but I needed to time to organize my thoughts on the subject, so here goes: 1. I want to cover more FOSS (free and open-source gaming) for ChristCenteredGamer. Used to be, Linux was the backfoot in gaming, but in recent years has been fighting hard to remedy that, and some FOSS games have turned out to be just as good if not better than their commercial counterparts. I intend to try covering more and more of these FOSS gems because I'm genuinely pleased with the strides that the community has taken to stand alongside the profit-based games developers. 2. I want to continue to evangelize for Christ If you read this blog, a few years ago, I was quite the heathen. Won't lie, my past still weighs heavily on me, and while I cannot escape it, nor will I shy from admitting it. Sin is my shackle like it is for everyone else on the planet, and while I still struggle against my own chains, I hope to help other...

 It's been awhile since news of the Steam Deck has been out, and I just wanted to share a few thoughts about it. First off, Valve claims to learned a few lessons from the SteamOS petering out, and the Steam Deck is apparently an application of learning a few lessons from that experience. The particular high points of what seems to be lessons learned I plan to note and comment on. 1. The system itself is rather expensive, especially if you spring for the $699 version, but given it intends to make most Steam games run on a portable system, the price is lower than I expected, though while I remain optimistic they learned some lessons on the hardware side of things, I plan to reserve judgment on whether the price is justified until release. 2. The Steam deck will be using an ARM processor specialized for gaming and a Linux distro based on Arch as its core, which, given the rolling release bleeding edge support for Wine/Proton Steam relies on for Linux gamers wanting to run Windows game...

 For the longest time now, I've been a happy user of both Linux and Windows, but some things I have discovered after extended use of Linux make me facepalm really hard and I'm stunned there is no solution for these issues yet. 1. I use RPG Maker, and even RPG Maker MV, the one with native Linux support, it runs like utter dog crap for all the things I want to do. For one, saving and opening projects is an exercise in pain on Linux because even the Linux version seems to have a terrible time accessing the Sream Workshop for things you downloaded to use. Worse, since all the file folders for Steam are in a semi-hidden folder with a different file structure to the Windows AND the workshop saves all downloaded assets in folders with unhelpful folders named with long strings of numbers, and it's often less torture to just use it on Windows, where Steam is in an easily accessible folder and the workshop folders are slightly less tedious to find manually. Another thing that drives...

 In an era where Linux has clawed its way into being a quite viable secondary alternative for Windows except for a few niche cases and Windows is now the same, if you have no worry about those nice cases, either one does nicely, and the question becomes "do I get a stable or rolling release distributions". Windows 10 has a "Long Term Service Release" option, and Linux has what is called Stable versions. These tend to not get a lot of updates save for occasional critical bug fixes, but after a few years they get long in the tooth and you need to upgrade. Both of these are great for business environments, server operators, and someone who just wants to do simple stuff like browse the internet and listen to music. They are poor for gamers, people doing development and coding work, and anyone who needs the newest bells and whistles because they sacrifice innovation for stability. Windows 10 by default is "semi-rolling", and Linux can either be this too or you ...

As the title says, some enterprising soul made Windows 95 an application that runs in it's own window and runs Windows 95 natively, without the hassle of setting up a virtual machine. It can be found here if you're interested. Now, compared to a VM version, this one has some limitations. This is based on a pre-integrated Internet Explorer copy of Windows 95C, meaning it has the classic interface, no IE stuff. It cannot detect USB drives despite larval support for that being possible in the 95C version (admittedly, they are fluky on VMs too), and while a decent amount of pre-included software is added, you basically have to mount ISO images to add anything else. Regardless, it's impressive all the basics of Windows 95 work out of the box with no special tweaks. It does have some issues. It does not handle restarting the application well, and changing display settings can lock up the program. It's preconfigured to selected values, essentially a locked VM sandbox,...

One game I enjoy on Linux is "MInetest", a free, open-source clone of Minecraft, and in some way, I deem it superior. 1. It's FREE: Might as well start with the best aspect, I pay nothing to play. Granted, I don't regret spending money on Minecraft when I did, it was worth it, but you cannot beat absolutely nothing in terms of price. 2. MODS. Yeah, I know, Minecraft has mods too, but unlike Minecraft, I pay nothing for all of Minetest's mods, and the modding feature is way more granular, meaning I can strip a Minetest game down it's barest essentials if I please, while I can't do the same to Minecraft 3. Open-source. When Notch sold Microsoft Minecraft, all hope the engine would ever be completely free for anyone to mess with to whatever extent possible died. Prior to their acquisition of Minecraft, modders had been doing a lot of fun things unfettered by limits, now it comes with oversight by a third party over the core source and price tags on mod...

I'm currently using Linux MInt 19.2 as the only OS on my laptop currently, and since I discovered a few weird quirks of RPG Maker VX Ace and earlier (MV has native Linux support), here's a few points to things that won't work well and some issues to work around. 1. If using Steam, even though Proton works just as well as non-Steam Wine to make RPG Maker work fine, some things to keep in mind. A. Due to some weird issue, if you don't create a folder to dump all Steam Workshop items into and redirect all VX Ace projects to it, good luck trying to access the folders outside of the program itself. While Windows does this just fine, Linux is bit dense on this topic and forces you to do the step I just mentioned if you want to add resources to the project in any way, thanks to the goofy way Linux handles the Windows file structure and how Steam Workshop saves VX Ace projects. B. The X window interface and DirectX can mostly play nice, but any scripts that dynamically re...