blind3rdeye

Firefox is a commercial product. Is it not?

Well, it's partially a matter of semantics. Perhaps different people have different understandings of the word 'commercial'. For me, I'd say that Firefox is not something a user pays for. It's existence is not about making a profit, or strengthening a business, or anything to do with money at all - and therefore it is not a commercial product.

I agree that the engineers should be paid, and that browser development is very difficult. But nevertheless, Firefox historically has not been about maximising a profit - or even making any kind of profit at all. (Although it does seem Mozilla leadership are looking to change that.)

The text you quoted sounds like a reasonable and normal definition of a sale to me. i.e. transferring to another business in exchange for something else of value.

So yeah, Firefox previously promised not to do this, "not ever", and now they say they need to do sell your personal data "in order to make Firefox commercially viable".

But hang on a second... Firefox is not a commercial product. So making it 'commercially viable' is highly questionable in itself.

It's a shame that Mozilla's current leadership is more interested in self-enrichment than in the past. But Firefox is still the very best option by far. I hope that the Ladybird project becomes strong the future, if for no other reason than pressure Firefox into staying good.

I'm no expert, but it seems to me that global politics is growing more and more unstable. China has gradually been becoming more assertive and provocative as they grow in power. The USA has become unreliable and somewhat unpredictable. And I'd say this makes other wars and tensions around the world a more volatile, and it makes it harder for Australia to maintain good relationships.

It doesn't require magic, or intervention from otherworldly spirits, etc.

Perhaps it is you who failed to see clever anti-humor in the post you are replying to!

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive-humor)

Let's hope they find out about it at all. Entrenched social media platforms deliberately discourage discussion of alternatives.

Well we are talking about the greatest repository of human knowledge ever created. So we can afford to spend a little on it at least.

I guess one way of looking at it is that it as time goes on, it gets harder and harder to find a set of assumptions to support inaction.

Google is an enormous beast. It doesn't care about you, or me, or the good of anyone. Sometimes its goals happen to align with a common good for awhile - and so good stuff can come from that. But often their goal do not, and they cause harm while crushing any possible alternative path. And as time goes on, less and less of what google does is for the common good.

For that reason, I think it is unwise to support google. Supporting them further entrenches their power, preventing others from contributing.

The smart engineers you spoke of would still be smart engineers with or without google. Google didn't create them. They can still contribute with or without Google. But Google did direct their efforts to suit Google's own needs. - Sometimes that's also good for other people, but often it is not.

When you switch Wine to a newer version, if the Wine developers have updated Mono or Gecko, Wine will show a popup asking if you want to download them. That happens when your version is outdated or missing.

Hmm. But I'm not manually installing Wine. As far as I'm aware, the only implementations of Wine I have have been installed via Bottles (and via Steam, I guess). So for me, getting a new version of Wine basically means going to the 'runners' tab in the Bottles preferences menu, and clicking download on a newer version of something. And that has never shown any kind of popup. It just downloads it, and then I later select that new version in a menu for to choose to use it. So I guess I don't really know when or if mono and gecko ever get updated. If it is integrated into the runner, I suppose they are upgraded like that - but I suspect they are not, because I manually installed wine mono to resolve that first error message.

I reckon somewhere in this business is where the problem is.

I don’t know how familiar you are with Wine, but for the future remember: dxvk is not the default Wine implementation for DirectX 9–11. By default Wine uses wined3d, which is slower but often more robust. So if something doesn’t work, just try disabling dxvk.

However, in Bottles there’s currently a bug (I think) where to switch properly you first need to change the Wine version to an older one, and then back to the version you actually want to use.

I didn't know either of those things. And that's good info for testing purposes. Thank you again.

I believe that Heroic Launcher is good and trustworthy, but nevertheless I don't particularly want to be giving my GOG details to a third party. And in general, I prefer things to be simple and isolated. So I don't really want integration with different accounts anyway. I'd prefer to just say "this is the thing I want to install, and this is where I want it to be installed".

It might be possible to use Heroic Launcher in a way that would suit me, but the one time I did try to install a game with it, it didn't work and I wasn't sure where it had tried to install it, or why it didn't work... and so I basically just went back to what I was doing in the first place - which was installing games in Bottles. (And although I've spent ages trying to work out this particular problem, the fact is that I can still play every windows game I have with Bottles, including this new one.)

[edit] I feel like a lot of the replies past this point kind of ignore what I've just said. The short of it is that I'm not intending to use Heroic in the near future. I understand and appreciate that many people think its a great product. But different people have different priorities and values. I have my reasons for not using it, and the testimonials don't really address the topic of this thread. Note: the main goal of the thread is 'how can understand and fix this bottle problem', rather than 'how can I get this game working'. I can already get the game working.

I use Linux on my home computer, and Windows on my work computer (begrudgingly).

Windows 11 does not feel like an 'upgrade' at all. One obvious downgrade is that when I try to change the settings when printing a document, the settings window does not fit on the screen. ... I don't blame Windows for that - its a big settings Window. But the issue is that Windows doesn't allow me resize it, or scroll down on it, or even let me drag it partially of the screen. And so the result is that it is impossible for me to click the 'ok' button when I'm done. The only way to save my changes is if I memorise which button is ok, then press 'tab' the exact right number of times to have it select the ok button while I can't see it, and then press enter. That's pretty crap. I didn't have that problem on windows 10. (To be honest I don't remember exactly what was different. Certainly the window with all the settings was the same, but I believe it had a scroll bar, maybe? In any case, I could certainly press the ok button before 'upgrading'!)

There are so many annoying features in Windows 11 that I've spent ages trying to turn off. For example, I was happy with the way windows could be snapped to the top and to the sides of the screen in windows 10. In Windows 11 they've expanded that feature, but made it worse. The snapping brings up menus, and behaves different ways at different times. It's fiddly and harder to predict. It tries to do more, but ends up being less useful because it is unreliable. I've disabled most of the differences in the settings, but not all can be disabled.

And there are heaps of weird inconsistencies in Windows 11. For example, when I rename a file in file explore; often stays in the same places even though it is no longer in the correct file order with the new name. So with alphabetically ordered files, there are often a few things that are out of order - because Windows is inconsistent. (Closing and reopening reorders them.) There are also some weird glitches. For example, I often see graphical glitches while using Excel in Windows 11 which I never saw in Windows 10. Things like rows partially overlapping other rows after scrolling, or the outline of the selected cell sometimes not being visible in parts of the document until you minimise and restore the app. It's pretty bogus. Obviously they've tried to change some backend stuff and created some bugs in the process.

Anyway, the point is that it easy to see why someone would be reluctant to 'upgrade' to Windows 11.