Hrm… I suppose I spent 15 years making other people’s games first. >_< More seriously, just start with small stuff. Make a simple 2D game with a something like the Love framework or Pico8. Then try to scale up a bit or use something a bit more powerful. If you are really want to make a game solo, then the best thing you can do is learn to control your scope. You’ll never be able to be good at every part of making games, so figure out what parts you want to work on and figure out how to make a game around those skills.

You also don’t have to make do it alone. You can hire out art, programming, sound, music, writing… really anything. Most “solo” devs do that to some extent. Also try and seek out your local gamedev community. Asking online is fine, but you’ll get more out of an in person conversation with someone who’s done it before.

Lastly, game jams. There are smaller game jams going on all the time, but the big one is the global game jam in January. I’ve always liked that one because there are always new people. In my experience, fresh gamedevs are always perfectly welcome. You’ll have someone else on the team that can rough out the structure for you, then you just need to apply what you already know as a software developer to fill in some blanks. People also like to do role bending at jams too. Programmers will try making art, artists will try making music, and sound people will try programming. Jam games are usually bad, so nobody will expect anything you make to be any good, but people generally have a blast doing it anyway. :) I like to rope people into making NES games every year because even as experienced game devs they are so sure they can’t write C code, let alone for something 40 years old, certainly not in 48 hours! They do just fine once they dig in. :D -> https://www.slembcke.net/nes/

Anecdotally Windows is the only platform I’ve used where printing (and scanning) didn’t tend to “just work”. The only issue I’ve had printing under Linux was with a second hand printer my dad got that we couldn’t get to print from any computer. (shrug)

I use Lua for this sort of thing. Not my favorite language, but it works well for it. Easy to build for any system in the last 20-30 years, and probably the next 20 too. The executable is small so you can just redistribute it or stick it in version control.

Doesn’t Windows break dual booting semi-regularly? I’ve always avoided it as I’ve had friends get burned by this in the past. I guess I just keep different OSes on different drives, but that obviously isn’t feasible for everyone.

Oooh. So I keep a Dell Mini 10 (1GB RAM, ~1GHz Atom) around with Haiku on it. It’s brilliant! The UI is super snappy even on such an old machine, and I can even run pretty modern software on it. I used it yesterday to work on my website a bit. :)

Speaking personally. I had the same reaction. I realized I could sign in using my GitHub account for MCC, which was… weird. Since it was just their normal web/auth page you could click around and do it in that tiny little webview. -_- Ridiculous, but I wasn’t going to make a new account to play a single player game. I did nearly refund it out of spite, but didn’t.

I totally pulled a LTT and removed my kernel. >_< There was a “real time” kernel listed in apt, and I installed it because I was curious if it would reduce lock latency for a project I was working on. (I wasn’t trying to solve a problem, just curious) It didn’t and I figured it was probably a bad idea to leave it installed. So I did an apt remove, and the rest went something like this.

Apt: Are you sure you want to remove the your kernel? Y/N

Me: Oh jeez… I don’t want to do that.

Motor Memory: Y <return>

Apt: Are you really really sure? Your computer will not boot if you do this. Y/N

Me: Oh, crap! That’s not what I meant to do. Definitely not!

Motor Memory: Y <return>

Me: No! Why would my brain betray me!?

Fortunately this was on a PopOS machine, so I booted into the recovery partition. Even if fixing it only took a minute, I still felt very very dumb. >_<

Hmm. I still have my old 2013 MBA that I’ve used with Fedora, but it’s an HD 4000 IIRC. I feel you on Apple’s locked down stance to repairs. It was ultimately what pushed me off of OS X. I needed a newer laptop in 2020, and they only sold hardware with non-upgradable RAM and SSDs. So long and thanks for all the fish… I had already replaced my desktop machine with Linux a few years earlier. I used the Mac 70% as a Unix machine anyway, so it was a pretty comfortable transition.

My Air worked great as a stand-in laptop when my System76 Lemur died last summer. Honestly I was blown away by how perfectly usable it still was for basic tasks. Parallel stuff like compiling was slow, but single threaded stuff still ran just great. Heck, I was even using it again yesterday to test OS X builds of my game on older hardware and it ran like a champ.

Looking forward to giving VRR a shot again. Last time I tried a couple years ago was pretty underwhelming on a couple different machines. Some games worked well with it, but a lot of software felt subtly broken. A lot of weird micro-stuttering and stuff just not feeling smooth even when the average framerate was high compared to boring synced 144 hz.

I guess by real world usage I mean what proportion of code is being made with them. You should be skeptical of their accuracy, but there are measures for that. Like there is this one: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/, but it describes it’s methodology as being about popularity based on articles, news, and other such things. Github publishes a very different chart as does RedMonk. Rust barely shows up on these charts, but Rust fans are very enthusiastic in threads like this. I like Rust well enough, but I also find the over-enthusiasm amusing.

By practical/pragmatic I mean the ability to target a lot of hardware with C. Sometimes the tooling is crap, but it’s very universal. Being built on LLVM Rust can go onto plenty of hardware too, but it’s probably not the tooling given to you by a platform vendor. It’s also been around for a long time, so using Rust would mean a rewrite. Sometimes C is simply the choice. As for ideologically: Rust solves some pretty nasty programming issues, but sometimes I think it’s fans over-estimate the percentage of real world problems it actually solves while ignoring that Rust can be more expensive to write. (shrug) Sometimes there’s no such thing as a silver bullet.

I enjoy the selection bias in the comments for these sorts of posts. >_< There’s a few people saying “I kinda like C”, a few saying “use Python instead”, and a whole lot saying “Rust is my lord and savior”. Completely disjoint from the real world usage of the languages for whatever practical, pragmatic, or ideological measures they are used for.

Well… they don’t like the design of a “system tray”. To be fair, it’s a very Windows centric idea, and the notion that they must provide one because Windows has one seems… similarly questionable to me too. Speaking personally I hate the idea, and always have. It’s a real dumpster fire because:

• Lots of drivers (on Windows) assume you don’t know how to launch programs, and force a permanent launch shortcut on you.
• Programs assume you don’t understand how to minimize or hide a window, and put themselves in the tray instead. (launchers, chat programs, etc)
• Some programs seem to use them just to put their logo on the screen. You can’t really do anything with the tray icon.
• Few icons match stylistically, and even on Windows, they don’t match the system style. (White icons on a white taskbar? FFS)
• Programs often don’t provide an option to disable their tray icons, and it’s rare that I want them.

I guess I found the lack of them to be a breath of fresh air when I first tried Gnome 3 a few years ago. The current iteration doesn’t quite work though… 99% of the time I just want an option to kill the damn things, but I’ve have had some programs that only provide functions through the system tray. It’s dumb, and I hate it, but it is what it is.

Yeah, IIRC the 16 doesn’t have a significantly faster CPU than the 7840U in the 13. If you want a gaming laptop it sounds neat though!

Egh. I kinda sorta agree. I had a 10th gen i7 Lemur Pro. It was nice and had excellent battery life. (15 -25 hours as an average range) The screen was a perfectly nice IPS, the keyboard/trackpad were fine (maybe not great), and the speakers were… well… pretty terrible. The software/firmware support for an otherwise generic laptop was great!

The problem was that I had multiple hardware failures on mine and getting warranty repairs was painful. The 3rd time it happened took several weeks to convince my rep it was a legitimate hardware failure. When he was finally convinced, he said something like “Well, that seems pretty obvious it’s a motherboard failure. What would you like us to do?” The response was obvious. It was under warranty still. I wanted it fixed! By the time it was working again it had taken 9 weeks. (!!!) Less than a year later, it died again. Put a really bad taste in my mouth. :-\ I bought a Framework to replace it.

I had a 10th gen S76 Lemur. The hardware was a mixed bag. Chassis was nice and light (compared to Apple), but enameled so the edges eventually chipped. Keyboard/trackpad were average. Speakers were awful… Battery life was excellent like usually got around 20 hours on a charge (and often more with a little effort!). I also had a number of hardware failures and dealing with their support was pretty terrible… Broken control key out of the box, Wifi died twice, second time they replaced the motherboard (and that took like… 9 weeks), then it completely died a year later when it was finally out of warranty. A real mixed bag of Pop OS being nice, and having great software/firmware support, but also multiple hardware failures coupled with terrible warranty support.

OBS Studio mostly. It’s not the most convenient for a quick screencap, but I can record 720p@60 fps video downscaled and resampled from my 1080p@144hz monitor and it just kinda works fine. The other nice feature of OBS is that you can have it recording all the time and then press a button to dump the last few seconds when something interesting happens. Handy when trying to get interesting clips of my game. For quick recording I usually just use Kooha or the built in Gnome one.

I’ve been using Wayland daily for a few years (2020 at least?) on intel and AMD graphics and have had few complaints:

1. Some games didn’t work right a few years ago. (Under Proton or otherwise. Haven’t had issues for a while)
2. RenderDoc, a vital bit of graphics debugging software, works poorly on Wayland. (Easy fix is to force X11 for QT via QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb)
3. Had some issues with mixed integrated/NVidia graphics on a laptop I was using for a demo once.
4. Covering or otherwise hiding a Wayland window blocks a program’s graphics thread. This is sometimes problematic.
5. VR development had issues a while ago? (This was for work. It just… stopped working at some point. Dunno if it was a Linux, SteamVR, or Unity3D issue. My work machine mostly runs Windows 10 now as a result. Oh well.)
6. Screen recording didn’t work well a while ago… (continued)

Overall, it’s just worked great though!

My anti-complaints:

1. Mixed refresh rates on monitors “just works” now. (I have a 1080@144 for gaming, and a 4k@60 for work)
2. Video frames don’t have half drawn content. (ex: when resizing windows), except on XWayland stuff
3. Video tearing has basically disappeared.
4. Video timing issues seem to be improved.
5. Input handling for keyboard layouts has improved.
6. Screen recording in Wayland is way better than it ever was on X11 now. I do this a lot to share gamedev stuff I’m working on.

A bit of a zombie thread, but I’m not making anything up here. The blocking issue gets discussed a lot in gamedev circles, and there are issue threads that have been locked by folks with the power to do so because they just said “no”. One of them (Maybe Sebastian Wick? I don’t remember… doesn’t really matter) gave verbatim that use case where a video service they use would stop playing videos when the browser was in the background, and that is why they won’t report . Maybe they weren’t a “core” developer, but they had the ability to say “no” and end the discussion thread.

As for it being not a problem anymore, it still occurs even on Fedora 39. The 1 second present timeout still only works for XWayland, and that’s… not a great solution. Also, realistically unless SDL2, GLFW or whatever engine a gamedev is using handles it for them they just don’t have the time to worry about what GTK, Qt, or XDG shell does. We are already supporting multiple rendering APIs, and combining that with multiple UI libraries just to get a window to draw a triangle into is a combinatorial explosion. Last I remember reading from the SDL folks, they were waiting for the functionality to appear in Wayland before they could implement it, and they weren’t expecting anything to change soon either. Speaking personally, my current game project is single player so I can just pave over the timing issues when they come up:

Long frame detected: 6463.731931 ms. Skipping ahead!

The most frustrating part to me is much more meta. You get discussions with other game devs that have heard about this stuff and they continue to think that supporting Linux is just way too much work. Sometimes they are right, but rarely for the right reasons it seems. I believe in the glorious Wayland future… I just wish it would get here a bit faster. ;) On the other hand, if we rushed it and botched it then it would never arrive at all I suppose. (sigh)

As for how window activation works, you got me there. I just heard other people discussing that one, but it did explain why on Wayland I would just get “Firefox is ready” notifications when opening links instead of just showing me the page like X did. Though I’m quite happy that it’s gone now in Fedora 39. Progress is good!

Yup, don’t. People already covered why. I will add that I tried learning dvorak for quite a while and it didn’t stick until I went cold turkey. It was very frustrating hunting and pecking for a couple days, but I made pretty quick progress. IIRC I was back up to 20-30 wpm after a week which was “usable” at least, and back to 60-70 wpm after a month. I had regular wrist pain before switching, and it was basically gone after. I don’t think it helped my typing speed. Like I can do 90 in bursts for a bit longer, but generally I “cruise” much slower than that. ;)

People keep saying this, but X forwarding seems to work just fine with XWayland. I just tried a handfull of X programs between my machines, and neither are running X11. I don’t use it everyday to know the gotchas, but there you go. Programs that use shared memory pixel buffers (everything that isn’t xeyes realistically) even run better than I remember now that I have gigabit. >_< It’s still a way worse experience than VNC or RDP though.