Just for reference, here are my favourites on each platform.
Each support modern XMPP extensions, interoperate very nicely with each other, and (at least in my opinion) look good!
As a note of caution, I used Oracle’s free tier to run a personal Matrix server, and it got deleted without any advance warning after a few months. I migrated to another provider and haven’t had any issues for 2+ years now.
Along similar lines, I’d say Snikket. I feel XMPP often has quite a bad reputation based on the user experience from 10 years ago, but it’s come such a long way and projects like Snikket make it very easy to get started.
I’ve had good fortune converting some family and friends to use XMPP.
People always mention fragmentation, and while there is some truth to it, it can be massively minimised by choosing blessed clients and servers for them to use.
In my case, I run my own server, and thoroughly test the clients (especially the onboarding flow) that I expect them to use, so that any question they have, I can help them out with quickly. Since we’re all on identically configured servers, it minimises one whole class of incompatibilities.
There is still unfortunately a bit of a usability gap compared to Signal - particularly on the iOS clients. But they have come a long way and are consistently improving.
Thank you! This is going to send me down a rabbit hole. I had no idea these phone cooling fans were a thing!
This looks awesome! How would one go about making one of these themselves? Asking for a friend of course :)
My favourites are:
Each of these are quite polished (especially for open source games!), widely packaged, not too complicated to start playing (except perhaps FlightGear) and have been around for a long time. Endless Sky, FlightGear and OpenTTD have quite active development, while Torcs is much quieter nowadays (although there is an actively developed fork called Speed Dreams which is awesome, just not widely packaged yet).
I’ve been meaning to try out FreeOrion and Minetest for a while now, looking forward to seeing what else pops up on the thread!
That was fun to watch! I liked how you pretty much recreated the old Mika Häkkinen move on the Kemmel Straight
I am addicted to OpenTTD at the moment! One of those games where I mean to play for 30 minutes, and then look up 5 hours later and realise what I’ve just done. Thankfully, it’s fun enough that I don’t even feel guilty about it!
Any tips for preparing?
I found getting teammates to sit in the server with me and analyse my driving / give me live feedback was really helpful! We would rotate and give feedback to each other. Often it wasn’t just what they were telling me, but the fact I knew someone was watching made me more focused on what to improve.
This is probably too specific to be helpful, but because the VEC had 3 divisions at the time, in the few days before a race the practice server would have 70-80 cars on at peak times, which was absolute chaos. That was pretty useful for practicing traffic, for sure! But any way to practice with real drivers definitely helps.
It’s one of the things I love about ACC with having to deal with rain and so on which can really mix things up
Definitely, I love how dynamic the sims are getting and hopefully this will keep getting better across the sims! It makes it much more interesting when there’s a bit of rain in the mix :)
Very nice setup! That’s quite a collection of wheels you have - how do you find the build quality compares? Do you have any preferences between them?
Also - how do you find your PC for iRacing? I’ve heard iRacing is much more optimised than rF2 - I had a similar spec of PC but would still get the occasional stutter sometimes. I’m guessing with those specs in iRacing it would be buttery smooth? :)
I played rFactor 2 for a couple of years and raced GTEs and GT3s in the Virtual Endurance Championship and GT3 Endurance Series.
I really enjoyed the team aspect of the races and built some great friendships that have lasted even now I’ve taken an extended break from sim racing. The highlight every year was the 24 Hours of Le Mans - I have really fond memories of doing the night shift at 4am with the one or two other people online, knowing we had to carry the car to the morning.
I really enjoyed the multi-class racing. There was always someone in my mirrors and the first couple of times the prototypes would come to lap us each race would always be so hectic. I can vividly remember the feeling of dread being in a very intense battle at Spa, having the leaders stream past us leading up to Eau Rouge.
Another thing I loved was just racing as part of a team and the pressure of not letting me teammates down. In a weird way I enjoyed the underlying feeling of dread in the couple of days leading up to each race, the peaking in the laps before I took over the car, and then in longer races, the way the fact it didn’t go away after my stint as I knew I had to get in the car again later on! Then when we’d cross the line, there was always such great relief knowing that I wouldn’t have to get in again.
Open-source doesn’t necessarily mean private or secure.
Agreed, especially if you get your software directly from the developer. But if you get your software from a distribution that you trust, with dedicated maintainers, then the chances of such backdoors are greatly reduced.
They are the basics of modern secure OS’s
Also agreed that this is the way things are going in linux desktops as well as commercial platforms, thanks to the increasing complexity of software. These approaches are very useful if I want to run curl | bash from some random git repository, run nonfree software, or have something very important to hide on my computer.
But these approaches also come at the cost of simplicity, ease of configuration and “tinkerability”. So I think it can be valid for some people to choose not to use the approaches you mentioned, given their individual priorities.
Those rain screenshots look so nice. It’s so cool to see how much progress the devs are making at the moment, especially compared to other sims.
Gotcha. Now I understand a bit more about the way input is locked down, it looks like I would need OpenSD to allow for more sophisticated controller input without using Steam.
Thanks for the reply, this is really helpful!
If you don’t, the Steam Deck will essentially behave as a Xbox 360 controller.
I see, this makes sense and I guess the “Xbox 360” experience will depend on whether the games themselves have native support for controllers or a very flexible input scheme.
the touchpads will not behave correctly
This is interesting, do you know what would be the difference between using the touchpads on other distros vs through SteamOS? Are they not just seen as a regular mouse input device by both OSs?
Thank you for writing up such a detailed response!
I run Debian on my laptop and tend to install FOSS games through the regular package manager. However, I don’t spend as much time playing these games as I would like, so when I was looking into the Steam Deck I was hoping that it would let me have a very similar setup, but as a portable device.
I see through your reply that, if I want automagic compatibility out of the box, this is crowdsourced and implemented through some intermediate Steam layer. I was hoping there might be some way to bypass Steam and treat the trackpads as regular mouse input, and map the other buttons as if they are keyboard buttons or generic controller inputs, without having to go through Steam.
I guess this would mean the FOSS games I’m interested in playing would need controller support natively implemented, which I’m not too sure on for the games I’m interested in. Probably time to dust off an Xbox 360 controller and see how they perform!
Over lockdown, I played a lot of rFactor 2. I’m not sure how accurate the physics and tyre models are in reality, since there are a lot of hacky tricks you can pull with the driving style and car setup that wouldn’t work in reality, but the force feedback was always very communicative and fun to drive.
I originally suggested Monal to my friend (who is quite into iOS and really appreciates a well designed application) and she found the same, but then she tried Siskin, and was happy enough to use it to this day.