Though I haven’t had a chance to taste Swiss Vivi Kola yet, most of the German Coca-Cola alternatives just taste better anyway.

So this probably isn’t just a win for the Made in Europe movement, but also for the tastebuds of travelers.

Oh boy, here I go ranting against misinformation about recycling again.

Your claim that 60% of these bottles will be burned is false. The recycling quota for single-use plastic bottles in Germany is 97.6% (2023; source).

60% was the quota of all non-recycled plastic packaging material combined, back in 2018. This quota has further decreased since, and is now at about 30% (2023, source), so almost 70% of all plastic packaging in Germany is recycled. It’s still not perfect, but far, far better than just burning everything.

Recycling isn’t an easy and cheap process, but it can definitely work and be steadily improved, if it’s properly implemented. I’m so tired of this dumb suggestion, that recycling is bad because it’s not perfect (or, in the case of the US, full of corruption). Every bit of plastic that isn’t polluting the environment is a win. And recycling is definitely helping with that. As opposed to propagating false information on the internet.

Cool project, but it seems to be very similar to PairDrop with the major downside of not being open-source. What would be the advantages of using this project over existing FOSS-solutions?

I think Ghostfolio might be what you’re looking for.

And that arrogant “I understand it, why don’t you?!”-attitude is exactly what’s so often the main issue in the design process of open source software.

I’d recommend watching this recent talk by Tantacrul, the design lead for MuseScore and Audacity. In it, he shows some videos of first-time user tests he conducted for Inkscape recently. It’s really fascinating to see, how users fail to do what they want because of confusing UX choices. And often it isn’t even that hard to fix. But open source image editors are just full of these little annoyances by now, which really smell like the result of inadequate user testing. And no professional would prefer to work all day with software full of little annoyances when there are alternatives.

I mean, just try adding text in Krita, for example. There’s a giant pop-up where you have to format your text without actually seeing it on your image. That’s just klunky and far more time consuming than a WYSIWYG approach would be.

This isn’t Adobe.

And as much as I want to like Krita, GIMP and such, their workflows just can’t compare with proprietary software in many cases. Also, especially for photo editing, their feature sets can’t compare with Adobe’s or Affinity’s either.

I use Krita, GIMP and Affinity Photo pretty regularly, and while there have been great improvements to the open source alternatives recently, I just get stuff done with Affinity, while still having to constantly search the web for things Krita and GIMP hide somewhere deep within their menus.

All open source image editors I’ve used are in dire need of a complete UX rework (like Blender and Musescore successfully did) before being more than niche alternatives to proprietary software.

So, as of yet, I can definitely understand the wish for a feature-rich and easily usable image editing suite on Linux.

I think Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais explained their plans for a Steam Deck 2 pretty well in this interview (starting at 8:36).

Paraphrasing: They are happy to work with other companies, but the people at Valve also have their own ideas and goals for hardware. And they want to be able to set the bar for these ideas themselves. That‘s why they‘re working on a Steam Deck 2.

And when you look at how well that setting the bar worked with the Deck, I‘m really glad that they want to follow up on that.

I own a GPD Win 2, a handheld PC from a few years before the Deck was a thing. That device couldn‘t be charged while using it, it had its speakers wired the wrong way, it constantly overheated and was a pain to use because of that. Ever since the Deck came out, the whole handheld PC market, including GPD, improved their device quality by a country mile.

And that‘s one of the best things about the Deck, in my opinion, and will hopefully also be one of the best things about the Deck 2.

I think I‘ve stumbled across this at some point, but I think it has been updated since.

Thanks for finding it, I‘ll keep it in mind when I get around to trying VR on Linux again in the future.

I’m doing all of my PC gaming on Linux for years now. Except for VR. It’s unfortunately not running well at all for me. I’m running an Nvidia GPU with a Valve Index and whenever I was able to even get a picture on the HMD in the first place, the latency from movement to screen was about a second or so. Which is an incredibly efficient way to feel incredibly sick.

I’m not sure about your setup, maybe it’s better supported in some way, but, from my experience, I’d unfortunately recommend keeping a Windows partition for VR and saving yourself the (quite literal) headache.

It‘s possible to use VR headsets with the Steam Deck. It‘s just far too weak for a pleasant experience.

It‘s worth noting though, that, according to this interview (37:30), Valve is probably working on a new VR HMD which will make use of the things they‘ve learned from developing the Deck. So I‘d guess there‘s a standalone headset coming from them at some point in the future.

You just need to learn from big automakers and use Volkswagen!

They also always have a countdown on the top of the page, suggesting their unbelievable 80% off deal is about to end and you should buy it now or it‘ll be gone forever! Quick!

It‘s not ending. It never ends. It just resets at the end of the day. The guys running this site are dickheads.

Great picture, but that‘s actually Tower Bridge, not London Bridge.

This is absolute nonsense.

In Germany, between 38-48% of plastic is recycled (source). Sure, that‘s far from all of it, but still far, far better than nothing.

The recycling rate might be lower in other countries, but just giving up and putting everything in the regular trash is probably the worst thing you could do.

I‘d be really surprised if Apple tried that.

They have to know that it violates the DMA. And the penalty for violating it can be up to 10% of their yearly worldwide revenue (not earnings!) for the first violation and up to 20% for repeated violations. I don‘t think they‘d risk that, especially as the EU really isn’t known for its leniency when someone intentionally breaks their rules.