TheTechnician27

You’re missing a second “they fuck you over” edge from the big tech vertex back to yours.

Good thing it’s pretty easy to break windows.

I didn’t know what a meth den smells like until I saw this picture of Kid Rock.

Yeah, I have to back you up here. This person’s alleged experience is completely divorced from my experience working on PCSX2 and tells me they have no idea what they’re talking about. We have to answer questions over and over and over again, but usually there’s a command to quickly give a canned answer.

And the questions aren’t repeated because there’s no way for users to search (there is); it’s because it’s usually lightning-fast in that kind of environment to just ask and because dedicated help forums are a form of selection bias. You’re generally going to get more thought-out questions from users who use dedicated, thread-based support forums because either a) they needed to make an account just to ask that question, b) they already have an account and so are more dedicated than the average user, or c) all the others who didn’t want to make that investment either just gave up or found the answer some other way.

Edit: I guess people who have no experience with FOSS user support are upset at reality. Next time, give me a list of things you want me to say, and I can bring that along with some choccy milk and some ointment for your sore ass.

We do also maintain docs. I put a lot of effort into the Setup ones but got burnt-out before really getting into the other ones (which need a lot of work). And for actual bugs, we use GitHub.

Discord’s search functionality is reasonably robust, and as long as you’re already there, you can usually find old conversations about the problem you’re having. The biggest problem is that it’s gated off from the wider Internet, which is shitty.

I think what we all like about it over forums for providing support is that it’s closer to real-time communication, it’s more flexible (conversations can flow in and out of each other instead of being permanently stuck in one subject-specific thread), and it’s more casual.

I can say as a member of the PCSX2 project that I understand why we and other FOSS emulators use it as official support – but nevertheless wish that we didn’t. We’ve discussed practicalities before, and the project doesn’t stay there just from inertia or because of personal preference; there are major practical reasons to prefer it over a forum (which we have), a wiki (which we have), or Matrix.

I’d be willing to endure the pain points and to scale back support in order to be off of that shithole, but I also get that’s a fringe minority sentiment shared by only a couple others. All of us would be tech-literate enough to use a client like Signal or Element for intra-project discussion, but very few people would come to Matrix for support (nor would we probably want them to due to the much greater moderation burden per end user), and the chatroom model – to most of us – is much easier for support than a forum. The only reason I’m still begrudgingly on Discord is for PCSX2.

I share your hope, but I seriously doubt this will come even close to dislodging us. Smaller projects, perhaps.

“Too bad [some shit I just made up with no empirical evidence].”

sitting in a wall-e chair chugging Alfredo sauce

This is an unfair and libelous depiction of my utopia where I sit in a Wall-E chair chugging Alfredo sauce with, I’ll thank you to remember, fettuccine noodles mixed in.

I want a world where I can use those things without doing irreparable damage to my body and mind. I can fantasize about them when divorced from the practicalities.

I do want the Wall-E chairs, but I would never actually accept them. It’s like how I want a 20-liter bucket of fettuccine Alfredo, but I would never accept and eat one.

It took me an embarrassing number of seconds to realize this headline was talking about car dealers.

Linux really doesn’t get bragging rights for “install[ing] old applications”. Linux ironically has been somewhat better for me than Windows for running older Windows applications thanks to WINE, but when it comes to installing old Linux applications, even when I wasn’t on a rolling release distro, it’s been a total crapshoot.

If, for example, there’s a native Linux game that hasn’t been updated in a few years, my experience buying it has generally been hoping the Linux version works, it doesn’t, and I’m stuck running it through WINE.

PCSX2 1.6.0, which used wxWidgets, released May 2020, and even five years after that, opening it on Linux shows you a frozen, unusable window that you have to manually kill. (citing PCSX2 because it’s a use case of mine as a contributor.) IIIRC, on Windows, you can straight-up go back to versions from like 2010 and still have them work.