What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.

I daily drive Pop!_OS, which uses the GNOME desktop environment. I know that DEs are a hotly contested space among Linux users, and my use of GNOME wasn’t so much a choice as it was a default: it’s what came with my distro.

I like GNOME. I don’t really understand the hate it often gets, but I also don’t really have the legacy understanding of Linux that a lot of people do, and it seems like a lot of distaste lies there. I’m as casual a user as they come — Linux for me is like a Chromebook: it “just works” in that I pretty much need it to get me online and manage some documents. (I do also play games on it, for which Steam and Proton have been a huge boon.)

I also have a Steam Deck, and it uses KDE’s Plasma on the desktop side, so I got to see what that was like. I also like KDE. It’s very different from GNOME, but I can see the appeal. It feels more like Windows but also has a lot of little nice touches and additions. Also, no ads.

This got me thinking: what if I tried using KDE instead of GNOME on my laptop?

I assumed that this would be a big deal. Like, I would have to completely gut my distribution, or reinstall it fresh. Multiple hours of work. Lots of preparation. Looking up myriad terminal commands I don’t understand and hoping they do what they’re supposed to, because if they don’t I’m really screwed — as soon as something goes wrong “under the hood” I’m dead in the water when it comes to fixing it.

But I was looking on System76’s support site and they made it seem super simple. A single terminal command to install the whole DE?

It can’t be that easy, right?

I am astonished to say that it WAS.

I ran the command, had to select between gdm3 and sddm (a choice which I didn’t understand at all so I searched around a bit before just going with the default: gdm3), and then rebooted.

I can now select between GNOME and KDE on the login screen, and both work flawlessly. It was so easy.

I don’t know who to credit for this. Did System76 do a great job of making this easy on their distro? Did the KDE team work hard to make their DE effortlessly plug-and-play? Is this just a general product of the way Linux handles its different components?

I don’t know but I’m willing to spread the love around to anyone and everyone who contributes to Linux and all of its facets. It’s wild to me that I can so easily reskin my entire operating system in the same way that I used to do with Winamp back in the day. I keep waiting for something to go wrong, but after a few days of this, I’ve realized that everything still “just works,” automagically.

A big thanks here to anyone who has a hand in open-source software and making computing better for people like me, who have (mostly) no idea what they’re doing.

I watch Countdown every day. For the last year I've had a t2.micro for free from AWS. Its been pretty good, but my year is coming up. I am looking for the cheapest VPN possible, which is often having my own VPS.

Does anybody have any suggestions? Most are around $6, which isn't too bad, but I'd love to get something cheaper; either in a reliable lowend box or a proper provider.

Second edit: It has been pointed out that my collaborators don't necessarily need to upload my files in order to work on them, and that the bigger the project/organisation, the more likely they are using their own system for managing content rather than the Adobe Creative Cloud. I didn't realise that not using the CC is an option. In conclusion, I can still collaborate with Adobe's customers as long as I ask them to never upload my work to the Adobe CC.

Edit: After sleeping on this, here's my biggest gripe with terms like these.

Regardless of the contents of Adobe's TOS, I cannot be forced to accept them as long as I'm not their customer. Similarly, people who don't use an imaginary social media app called "Twitter" can't be subjected to Twitter's terms of service even if for some reason Twitter had access to these people's data. If Twitter wants to make an agreement with non-customers, they must get these people's explicit consent. Writing stuff in their TOS doesn't cut it because those are directed at customers. Corporations absolutely can't have the right to make me a customer without my informed consent.

As it stands, given Adobe's market share, I would either have to accept their terms when it comes to my work that gets uploaded by third parties, or I can never get my work published again. This is completely unacceptable. Even if the terms were the most gracious and reasonable terms anyone has ever seen (which they aren't), I would still have the right to refuse them. This right cannot be taken away from me. Adobe has done nothing to show how they intend to separate non-customer content from customer content, which most likely means they have no plans to do so and certainly aren't doing it at the moment.

Organisations that are Adobe customers and want to publish/edit content produced by non-customers will have an insurmountably tough task trying to draft a solid contract with these people. In order to protect themselves from future disputes, they will have to get explicit consent for everything that I quoted in this post, for all imaginable and unimaginable purposes. The rest of the TOS (the parts that I didn't quote) is legally too fuzzy to be put in a contract, and as far as I know, the term "generative AI" doesn't even have a legal definition yet. Essentially, Adobe is making their own customers do their dirty work for them. Good luck with that.

Original post:
Adobe receives an unrestricted license to use all uploaded content however they please, according to their TOS.

Let's say I am a professional photographer, but I don't use Adobe software to edit my work because I don't want to grant Adobe a license to do whatever they want with it. Now, let's say that High End Art Magazine wants to publish some of my photos in their Hot New Photo Artists section. Most likely they are using Adobe software. To create the magazine layout, they are going to have to upload my photos. I haven't used Adobe since they put everything in the cloud, so I wouldn't know how the process actually works, but I doubt that Adobe asks about the ownership of each uploaded file. Do they? The magazine editor does not have the right to grant Adobe any sort of license to my work. It's not their content, they are merely presenting it. The end result: Adobe has content on their servers that they do not have a license to use however they wish, no matter what they put in their TOS, and they most likely have no way to tell this content apart from the rest.

The above example is simplified. I am actually not a photographer, but an artist in another field. Publishing my work involves images that are put together by a team of people, each of whom must be able to deny using the resulting photo without their explicit consent. How can cases like these be handled? If I care about how and where my and my team's work is used, will I have to stop collaborating with anyone who uses Adobe products? Even that won't necessarily protect us. Uninformed people can still grab an image form somewhere and use it for a school project or something. This used to be okay as long as you didn't publish the result, let alone try to profit from it financially. But now, if you use Adobe software to edit your project, ethically you can only use unlicensed content as your source material and everything else is off limits.

From the Adobe TOS:

...you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to do the following with your Cloud Content:

reproduce
distribute 

create derivative works 

publicly display 

publicly perform and
sublicense the foregoing rights to third parties acting on our behalf

And:

“Content” means any text, information, communication, or material, such as audio files, video files, electronic documents, or images, that you upload, import into, embed for use by, or create using the Services and Software.

To be clear, I get that the TOS is meant to enable Adobe to run their services in the cloud. At least for now. But there are no guarantees that this will remain the sole purpose of that license. I prefer to simply not grant them any sort of license to use my work. Obviously, I must have a right to deny corporations such a license for whatever reason, at all times.

For comparison, when I started using Reddit, I read through their TOS and decided that it looked predatory. I have always refrained from posting things that I wouldn't want them to use for extracting financial gain. I was happy about that decision last year.

Does anyone know if the Adobe TOS are different for organisations that routinely handle large amounts of content that they do not own the rights to?

The embargo on Shadow of the Erdtree lifted yesterday. Codes were sent out last week some reviewers were able to complete the expansion while others spent their time exploring. General consensus is glowing (95% on metacritic).

Below are some reviews I enjoyed. Light spoilers in most, IGN spoiled the most. I skimmed the review where they discussed some things I want to discover on my own.

• (Ars Technica) Shadow of the Erdtree has ground me into dust, which is why I recommend it
• (Kotaku) Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree Review: Massive, Menacing, And Magnificent
• (New York Times) Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree Review: Faith, Meet Futility
• (Rock Paper Shotgun) Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree review: yeah, it's basically a sequel
• (Eurogamer) Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree review - a visually resplendent living text made less alive
• (IGN POTENTIAL SPOILERS) Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree DLC Review

I'm thinking something I could use for news, with a feed that I curate myself. I'd open the app in the morning and see that I have a feed with five newstoks in it. I swipe to the first one, general updates from my local news, swipe for the weather, swipe for sports, etc. They'd all be short-form, and take the same amount of time it would take me to skim a newspaper. Once I get through each "card," my feed is done and I can put the app down and go about my day.

I could curate this feed to contain only the sources I want, and ideally content would not be user-generated, and instead more akin to traditional television with regularly scheduled programs. Then I can check at breakfast and see all the early news programs, check at lunch and see mid-day content, and ditto for the evening.

I'm not going to ruminate about social media, content, and news, but this would be a very refreshing change of pace instead of constantly being protective of my time, since everything is designed to suck away as much of it as possible.

A guy can dream, right?

Gonna see DIIV later this month, St. Vincent in August, and Interpol in November.

I saw TOOL earlier this year, and they were awesome, but man, their new songs and album are so much more "Ehh" than the others.

What concerts have you gone to or will go to this year?

Edit: This community is amazing, thank you all for all of your suggestions. Feel free to keep them coming. I have a Google doc full of ideas with my comments that I'm going to drop on him. I was trying to respond to everyone and then discovered that Tildes will rate limit you. So if I don't respond to you, I'm sorry but I definitely read your comment and checked out your suggestions!

My friend suffers from depression and lives 6 hours away from me so the happiest I see him is when we are regularly gaming together. The problem is that I haven't been able to find a game we both wanted to play for a while.

I just cannot get into all the survival crafting games that seem to dominate co-op gaming these days. I am looking for suggestions for anything else. Also, it needs to be an online co-op instead of a couch co-op.

His computer isn't the best so that needs to be a consideration, nothing wrong with older games. Ideally we are talking about PC games on Steam.

Examples:

• we played a ton of Risk of Rain 2, probably the last game we played a lot together
• we have played through Halo co-op a bunch of times.

Who has ideas for me?