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My Personal Blog. (Search box coming sometime in the future...)

Fellow Gamer Dudes, Dudettes. Don't use PlayonLinux. 11/25/2019

Seriously, don't. Here's why:
  1. It hasn't had a major update in years.
  2. Almost all scripts are outdated for it. I mean all of them. Game Scripts, Depedency Scripts, etc. All of them are outdated.
  3. Still has NO winetricks integration, which is sometimes VITAL to get a game running.
  4. Old scripts use older version of wine (Note to newcomers: Always use the latest version of Wine.)
  5. There are better alternatives, such as q4wine, lutris, or just using steam (If you haven't heard of proton, USE IT.)
I'm not going to downplay how much of a vital role PlayOnLinux used to have on Linux Gaming. It used to be THE way to run games. But times have changed, and we have much better tools at our disposal.

Crypto-miners should be de-stigmatized. 11/12/2019

When it comes to big tech tracking you online, their one reason for doing it, is to target advertisements to you. This one concept is why they track almost your every move, and yet when we were presented a way out, when we found a way to monetize websites/content, instead of finding an ethical way of doing it, we instead flat out rejected it intensly. I'm of course talking about Crypto-mining while visiting a website. In my opinion, this is one of the most ethical and best ways to monetize your website, and yet, big tech has labelled it "malware" and "a waste of energy". They would of course say this because this isn't their market, advertising is, and crypto-mining presented a way to become independent from these guys. Think about it: Who do you have to go to in order to get ads on your site? If you said Google, you'd be correct, and guess who one of the biggest rivals to crypto-mining is? You guessed it, Google. I'll be quick with why crypto-mining is better and more ethical:

1. Independent: You don't need to partner with some big company in order to get ads, anyone can set up a cryptominer on their website, and there's nothing they can do about it.
2. More Privacy: The only data a visitor will be giving up is their processing power. That's about it.
3. Probably uses less energy: Think about it, how much energy does Google, Facebook, and all those other big tech giants use on their datacenters, AIs, and algorithms? Probably a ton. I'd argue crypto-mining uses less or about the same amount of energy.

The main issue with crypto-mining came down to one thing: Transparency. Websites that used crypto-mining were not honest about: A. How much power they were using from your device. B. That it was even running in the first place.
I think if crypto-mining is to become a alternative means of making money to privacy violating advertising, websites need to be more upfront about those 2 things. A simple pop-up saying "Hey, we're running a crypto-miner to fund this website, and we're using 1 of your cores and 5% of its power." Would go miles for mass adoption. That's about all I have to say on this really. I just hope to put a new perspective on it. I think maybe in the future i'll add one, but it'll be as transparent as possible to the visitor.

My Migration from GTK to QT. 10/21/2019

So, i've pretty much moved from GTK to Qt. How did it happen? Well... it all begins a few months ago. I've known for a while that GNOME and by extension GTK has been at war with themeing for pretty much since GNOME 3 was released. I didn't really feel the shockwaves of this because I used XFCE which since 2014 was using GTK 2 with a little bit of GTK 3, all my themes worked and worked great at that. However, in August, XFCE updated and with that came GTK 3. Suffice to say, I hated it. All my themes broke literally over night, and the themes that DID work were flat themes which I have a strong disdain for. I switched from Desktop Environment to Desktop Environment from August all the way to October trying to find a workflow that I liked. Then I decided to try out Qt.

Now, i'm no stranger to a Qt Desktop Environment, after all my first REAL Linux Distribution was CentOS 7 back in 2014, and for about a year I used the KDE4 desktop environment before finding and loving XFCE. The first Qt desktop environment I tried was LXQt, and to say I was dissapointed is kind of an understatement. Not saying it's bad or anything, just wasn't for me. I then tried Deepin but was put off by the fact it's developed by chinese (Wish someone would fork it, it's a great desktop environment.) At this point, you are probably asking yourself "Why doesn't he just use KDE at this point?" The answer to that question is... well... when I first tried KDE5, I hated it. My panels would just randomly dissapear, the window manager would crash CONSTANTLY, and everything was HUGE, like the buttons and the windows were bigger, they looked like they were trying to be "touch compatible" if you know what I mean. But, out of desperation, I gave it a go again on OpenSUSE Leap 15, and I was not dissapointed.

I installed it about 2 weeks ago, and the window manager only crashed once (compared to multiple times a day back when I tried it.), the "huge buttons" issue turned out to be related to DPI, so I just manually set it, and my panels haven't disspeared... yet. Though, one thing I will say is that their Oxygen theme is... wrong. You see, I actually liked KDE4 aesthetically, Oxygen was fucking awesome looking. And when I found out that they STILL develop the oxygen for KDE5 I was really excited. But they got a lot of details wrong about it. The first mistake is the panel, its not the same panel that was in KDE4, looks nothing like it actually. Thankfully someone made a theme that DOES have the right panel, so i'm not too concerned about that. The second thing missing is that KDE4 had a lot of "glassy" stuff. The notification menu was glassy, and so was the applications menu. Unforunately the oxygen theme in KDE5 has little to no transparency in menus. I'm sure someone could fix that (If so, be sure to e-mail me or message me on Jami.) But these are minor, and I just love having Oxygen again (Gradients are awesome.) So, for now, I think i'm going to stay on KDE5. I do wish someone would make a "XFCE of the Qt World" but for now, i'm content.

Thank you for attending my Ted Talk.

My Top 10 VPNs

This is my personal pick for TOP 10 VPNs
1. Tor
2. Self-hosted VPN
3. See above
4. See above
5. See above
6. See above
7. See above
8. See above
9. See above
10. See above
I hope you enjoyed my Top 10 VPN list, stayed tuned for no more lists like this.

Grand Opening of my Website! 4/22/2019

Well, after 2 days of work I got this website all up and running. I got some plans for this site, such as a search feature for my blog, and a very detailed page for software I personally recommend. As of writing this, I only have the links page left to make, after that this website will go live and from there I may or may not update this blog much. But hey, if I ever need to rant, atleast I have a place to yell. haha