I‘m personally very happy with kagi when it comes to features and, most importantly, the quality of search results. But, as they don‘t have ads, it’s pretty expensive to use.

I‘ve played GW2 a lot and pretty much exclusively on Linux for a few years now and it‘s been pretty smooth.

For the best experience, make sure your graphics driver is up to date (as of now it should start with 550, 555 or 560).

I‘d also recommend installing the game via Steam, as this makes the whole compatibility stuff far easier. The Steam version also works if you want to log in with an Arenanet-account. Just add this launch option (note the capitalization; it has to be exact) and you‘ll be able to log in with your existing account:

-provider Portal

Just make sure not to buy anything via Steam as purchases won‘t be associated with the correct account.

You‘ll also want to make sure (although it‘s probably set as default by now) to use Proton 9.0 or above, as the game‘s launcher is really stuttery in previous versions.

There‘s a great video on that topic by Matt Parker (Standupmaths) which I‘d wholeheartedly recommend.

TLDW: No, terrain elevation isn‘t generally taken into account when calculating a country‘s surface area, though the actual method differs slightly from country to country. Switzerland would be around 7% bigger, if its mountains were to be taken into account.

Am ehemaligen Chef des BND kann man ungefähr abschätzen, wie es um die technische Kompetenz derer steht, die allen Ernstes „Hackbacks“ fordern.

Although I’d love to see that happen more frequently, this is simply not realistically doable for most commercial games.

Almost all of them use licensed third-party libraries which are integrated deeply into the game’s code base, but which can’t legally be distributed as part of an open source project. So in order to be able to open source a modern commercial game, you’d have to put in quite a lot of work finding all of your code integrating with commercial libraries and either replacing or removing it. And if that’s not enough, you’d probably have to have your (expensive) legal team check the entire code base for any infringements just to be on the safe side.

All that work for no monetary gain just isn’t a very good business case. So, unfortunately, I wouldn’t expect a lot of modern games to be open sourced any time soon.

While that‘s true right now, a big patch called „Economy 2.0“ is expected to drop this week (more on that here and here).

I really hope this will be a successful first step of making the game actually better than its predecessor. Unfortunately the economy simulation is only one of many issues which make me want to play something else after a few minutes of gameplay. I think it‘ll be at least another year until they‘re able to fix all these minor annoyances, which sum up to one very big annoyance. Like not being able to place stuff sometimes without any obvious reason. Or those ugly, steep pathways on lots, when the connecting street isn‘t completely flat. Or missing animations for firemen, which currently only have to drive up to a burning building in order to stop a fire.

Cities Skylines was a better Sim City (2013) and was justifiably loved for that. For now, Cities Skylines 2 is unfortunately just a worse Cities Skylines.

This is very speculative, but along the things they’ve learned for VR they‘re mentioning APUs and wireless streaming. This might hint towards a standalone device which can also be connected to a PC.

It‘s possible to use VR headsets with the Steam Deck. It‘s just far too weak for a pleasant experience.

It‘s worth noting though, that, according to this interview (37:30), Valve is probably working on a new VR HMD which will make use of the things they‘ve learned from developing the Deck. So I‘d guess there‘s a standalone headset coming from them at some point in the future.

You just need to learn from big automakers and use Volkswagen!

I think it’s important to remember that LiMux, the Linux project in Munich, didn’t really fail because the software didn’t work. The city had commissioned a study that blamed bad implementation, bad internal cooperation, and bad administration. It explicitly did not recommend that the project be shut down. Unfortunately, this recommendation was ignored by the mayor, who was previously responsible for convincing Microsoft to move its German headquarters to Munich and who calls himself a “Microsoft fan”.

So it’s probably worth noting that the success of such large projects doesn’t only depend on the viability of the software. It’s also very much dependent on the lobbyists the project is up against, especially in the public sector.

Great picture, but that‘s actually Tower Bridge, not London Bridge.

This is absolute nonsense.

In Germany, between 38-48% of plastic is recycled (source). Sure, that‘s far from all of it, but still far, far better than nothing.

The recycling rate might be lower in other countries, but just giving up and putting everything in the regular trash is probably the worst thing you could do.

I‘d be really surprised if Apple tried that.

They have to know that it violates the DMA. And the penalty for violating it can be up to 10% of their yearly worldwide revenue (not earnings!) for the first violation and up to 20% for repeated violations. I don‘t think they‘d risk that, especially as the EU really isn’t known for its leniency when someone intentionally breaks their rules.

They‘re already selling the Shattered Space expansion with the Premium Edition. So that‘s confirmed to be in development. We‘ll have to wait and see if they manage to fix some of the game’s issues with that.