sudotstar
I love the DualShock 4 and DualSense controllers’ support on Linux, but I’m not a huge fan of the controllers themselves despite exclusively using the DS4 as my PC controller. I’m perfectly okay with the layout since I grew up on the PlayStation, and in fact prefer it to the mainstream Xbox/Nintendo options due to being the only controller to have a touchpad, and both gyro and analog triggers, but the abysmal battery life on the controllers has been a frustration for my couch PC gaming setup, my fairly old DS4 controllers barely last for more than 30 minutes on battery now. The biggest thing holding me back from buying a new DualSense to replace those controllers is the fact that it, too, has terrible battery life.
I’m hopeful that Valve’s desire to make a Steam Controller 2 pans out, as I expect that such a device will also provide stellar Linux support (or perhaps already does if it ends up reusing as much of the Steam Deck’s input setup as it can), and would hopefully offer much better battery life than Sony’s attempts.
I think this is a good change overall, especially for high DPI screens running at non-integer scaling. I think I personally prefer the older icons as I always run at 100% scaling on my displays and I prefer the “crisp” look of the 1px lines, but I think this is a necessary change to align Plasma with modern display trends.
I was aesthetically a fan of the Fossil watches, and was using a Fossil Sport (1st gen) for quite a while. Unfortunately the layers of proprietary-Fossil required software/watchfaces on top of the layers of proprietary-Google WearOS hampered the software experience a tiny bit, and the frankly poor hardware quality marred the experience significantly. My charging band coil in the watch completely dislodged itself (it appeared to be held in with glue), rendering the watch unusable.
Fossil’s customer support was excellent, replacing the device fully when this happened, though that was when that model was still on store shelves. I recently inquired about getting a replacement battery and was told I can just trade it in for 50% off a current-gen model, which while being far more generous an offer than I expected, still leaves me hesitant to upgrade to another device that suffers from the same problems and is in danger of being outright discontinued.
At this point I don’t really need/want a WearOS device specifically, and would actually prefer something that’s less tied to Google’s whims, the hardware OEM’s whims, and whatever the interplay is between those two companies. I’ve been eyeing more hobby-oriented projects like bangle.js or the PineTime smartwatch, but the fact that I’m even looking in that space shows that it’s become a device I would get for tinkering, not one I strictly “need”.
I’m a big fan of the series and would consider it to be my favorite JRPG series, not just for the story but because I enjoy the gameplay it offers as well.
It’s a fairly “cheap” series to try out and see if you’re into it. The entire series is a singular, continuous story, so the recommended place to start is Trails in the Sky First Chapter, which can be picked up fairly cheaply on Steam, especially during Steam sales. It’s not as long as future games in the series, and is fairly representative of the pacing and storytelling format that later games will follow (though it is considered one of the slowest-paced games in the series). Basically if you’re not a fan of Sky FC, you’re not likely to be a fan of the future games in the series either (especially given that the substantial improvements to gameplay over the series’ 20 year history likely won’t have much appeal to you).
There are also demos available for some of the newer games in the series (e.g. Trails of Cold Steel III), and while I would not recommend actually playing through those games out-of-order, they may serve as a quick/cheap way to see if the format of the games is right for you.
I will say that while the combat of the games is rarely very difficult, and the game provides difficulty modifiers to make it even easier if you’d like, that the combat system is still fairly fleshed out and quite good casually IMO, but if you’re really not into doing it even at easy difficulties, one option (PC exclusive) may be to download completed game saves and play through the games on New Game+ and completely trivialize the combat.
Thank you for your review, I think this is enough information for me to hold off on this game, potentially until a non-Switch release or some other updates.
I am a huge fan of the original DQM series. DQM2 (released as Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 in the West on GBC) is a game that I put in a lot of time into as a kid, and is a game I still regard today as one of the best experiences I have ever had in a monster catching game, or even most JRPGs in general. The balance between the game’s minimal-but-still-present story, the immense amount of post-game content (seemingly infinite randomly-generated worlds to explore and find new monsters in), as well as the incredibly in-depth monster breeding trees is, for me, the exact perfect balance I want out of a game and few others have really scratched that itch as well as DQM2 (mainline Dragon Quest IX is probably the closest I’ve gotten). While a lot of those mechanics, particularly the “randomly generated content” as well as the “deep” monster breeding trees, don’t really hold up to modern scrutiny and are put to shame by what hardware more powerful than the Game Boy is capable of, I haven’t yet found a more modern game that provides a better version of that specific experience.
The newer Dragon Quest Monsters games (I’ve played through Joker 1, and tried the definitive versions of Joker 2 and 3) haven’t really done it for me, and a big reason is just how “clunky” the games felt to play compared to the original. I was hoping this game going back to the “mainline” branding would also signify a return to DQM2’s seemingly infinite content, but that does not appear to be the case, and the atrocious performance of the game on Switch would probably just leave me reaching back for my GBC and DQM2 again.
On my Thinkpad 2in1, the behavior your desire is what I get. I’m on Fedora KDE (Kinoite) which pre-installs Maliit by default though, I’m not sure if it comes with some additional configuration.
In this case it’s referring to the fact that the OS is built upon the same containerization technology used on cloud platforms such as Kubernetes. As a marketing tool it’s a bit buzzwordy, but it’s not about running the core OS components outside of the physical machine here.
I’m curious to hear about yours and others’ experiences with containerizing Java applications in such environments. I used to work in a place that traditionally had such restrictions on JDK versions, but after the internal IT environment moved towards running applications within containers, either on Kubernetes or on public cloud platforms’ container runtimes, that restriction became unnecessary since the application would be shipped to production alongside its compatible JDK.
While there were still restrictions on exactly what JDK you could run for other reasons, such as security/stability, common developer experience, etc, it at least allowed teams to immediately adopt the newest LTS release (17 at the time I left) with little restriction.