u/NelsonMinar

I like Dinkum! I love the gentle vibe. And the unique rendering, it's really nice to have a light 3d game instead of all the 16bit-wannabe pixel art games like this out there.

But I didn't like Dinkum. I played nearly 40 hours and just got bored. I think I got fairly far: fully clearing the first mines level, Franklin's built me a couple of fancy machines, I've got some animals and some farms and all the teletowers. I know there's a lot more in the game to unlock and enjoy but I just couldn't bother.

I feel like I was playing the game wrong, or had the wrong expectations. What am I missing?

I like cozy crafting games but I'm pretty hooked on progression systems. I love the Stardew Valley loop of upgrading and advancing the town story. More hardcore automation games like Factorio are absolute catnip for me. But I like more casual games too. Really I just like gameplay systems and building up my infrastructure.

Dinkum just felt so very slow to me. The grind is a little too repetitive, the rewards are too small. Is that just me?

Maybe the closest comparable is Animal Crossing. FWIW I had the same complaint about that game too, I got bored pretty quick.

My Nobara system did something new to me: on reboot it went to a grey screen with some text on it about "Installing the Nobara system update. Keep the computer powered on: this can take several minutes.." followed by "Checking the updated system and building boot files. Keep the computer powered on." That then failed and it rebooted to the previous system.

What was that update doing? The "previous system" still booted the latest kernel so I don't think this was a GRUB/kernel thing. The initial ramdisk? Some systemd magic?

FWIW after I rebooted I got an error log about this update:

> plymouth-set-default-theme failed with exit code 1: /usr/share/plymouth/themes/bgrt/bgrt.plymouth does not exist

That indeed does not exist but why not is a mystery, I didn't remove it. Perhaps something went wrong with the app center updater? I'm trying nobara-sync repair now.

Update: I fixed this problem by manually installing plymouth-theme-spinner, which contains that theme. I'm guessing the Nobara packages are missing it as a dependency.

I realize this post may not be popular here but... holy cow is Claude Code a lot better than Jules.

These past few months I've gotten a lot of good work done with Jules + Gemini Pro 3.1 (or Flash, I used both). I really like the product, in particular the asynchronous web and sandbox design. And I was already paying for Google AI so it was nice it was a freebie for me. Jules is a good product! But I'd characterize it as being about like a software engineer with one year experience. Capable but needing lots of guidance.

This week I gave Claude Code + Opus 5 a try, first time in awhile. Paid the $20/mo. And goodness gracious is it a lot smarter. Just way more capable and able to do much higher level tasks. In general I'd characterize Claude as being about like a software engineer with five years of industry experience. I can give it an open ended job and go away for an hour and when I'm back it's built the thing and proved it works.

Claude is better than I am at things I don't know how to do. And I'm trusting what it's doing despite not being able to review it. That's the first time I've trusted a coding agent that much. (I have it building a NixOS config for a server I run. I can verify the server works correctly but I don't know Nix so can't really read the config files.)

I still miss Jules' web application. Claude Code for Web works and isn't bad but it doesn't feel quite as solid. I've mostly been using the CLI, for the sysadmin task it's a better fit than the web sandbox model. It's fine, way better than when I tried it a year ago, but still a little weird to me.

I knew Opus was a smarter model than Gemini: Google's still playing catchup. I just didn't realize quite how big a difference it'd be. I also have a sense the agent prompts in Claude Code are more sophisticated. It's very good at figuring out how to test its own assumptions and work around problems, better than Jules was.

Jules hasn't gotten much love from Google lately. I wonder if all the energy is in Antigravity? No one I know uses it. They don't use Jules either. It's all Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or Oh My Pi.

(This post is 100% human written.)

Interesting notification today when I updated my Nobara system

> August 25, 2026 — Nobara's updater has been updated to update packages prioritizing important groups first, with full rollback per-group automated in case of a failure, including dkms/kmod compile failures and initramfs regeneration. Ordered transactions: Kernel → Graphic stack → System core → Desktop environment → Non-essential (any packages not defined in these groups will be appended to non-essential). The goal here is so that when a large set of updates is available, it updates important bits first group by group so as to not break the system, as opposed to all packages at once being attempted in one massive point of failure. Hoping this provides a better overall update experience. Large updates in Nobara are something that have always been a controversial pain point, and we're constantly working on making the experience better. I shouldn't have to mention this but this is specific to nobara-sync/nobara-updater, (which is also used in the dnf app center) -- not the default dnf command. For those using Nobara you may already know nobara-sync is the recommended and preferred method for updating the system as a whole.

It sounds like a reasonable change, I think I saw it in action today where it updated Nvidia drivers first, then KDE settings, and then more ordinary userspace.

But the seeming fragility of Nobara updates is the one thing that makes me a bit nervous about it. This is my first time using an RPM-based distro in 20+ years. But years of using Debian/Ubuntu dpkg gave me the expectation that I could say "update everything" and it'd just work no matter how complex the upgrades. Is that true for base Fedora? I know Nobara is adding a lot of package complexity, just don't love it has this custom tool for handling it.

Just noticed an unwelcome change: Goodreads seems to be requiring you be logged in to read a person's review. Like mine here. This seems like a recent change: here's a thread five months ago about it.

This may be the final straw that gets me off Goodreads, or at least has me set up my own blog for my reviews. I've been giving Amazon my handwritten reviews in exchange for them giving me a place to easily share that content with friends. Now I can't.

We've talked for a year or two now about the problem of delayed notifications on our Pixel phones. It seemed to me more like a bug than an intentional design choice, even when charged 100% sitting on a wireless charger sometimes my Gmail notifications, etc would come in 10-30 minutes late.

Is it better now?

I upgraded from a Pixel 8 to a Pixel 10 Pro back in December and didn't install any hacks to try to improve notifications. Ever since that upgrade I haven't really been annoyed by any delayed notifications. I think maybe sometimes notifications come in a couple of minutes late but I'm not even sure of that. Every time I test it (like now) they are instant.

Are delayed notifications still a problem? Did Android fix a bug like the article I linked said? Does the improvement I see have something to do with the new phone?

What should Steam and Bazzite do if you play a regular SDR game on an HDR display? I can't tell if what I'm seeing is bugs, or just the way it is, or if there's some straightforward tweaking I need to do.

Windows has a whole thing with AutoHDR where it thoughtfully stretches an SDR game's tone curve to display with extra highlights on HDR but mostly keep the game's core look. It's not perfect but it works pretty well. I think it's tuned per-game. Does Bazzite have a similar thing?

On my Bazzite-Deck 43 system with HDR enabled some SDR games look awful. (AMD 680M, Sony Bravia HDR OLED). Oversaturated, painfully bright. It looks like something stretched the SDR game's brightness linearly to fill the entire HDR gamut and it's blown out. I've fiddled a lot with TV settings to calm it down, I'm pretty sure the signal the computer is putting out is the problem. I've also tried configuring and calibrating HDR in Bazzite without much luck. The only real fix is to turn off HDR entirely.

I also have a Bazzite Desktop 44 system with HDR enabled. (NVidia 5060, ProArt PA32QCV HDR display). SDR games look fine there but I think they are displaying just in SDR. There's no Gamescope running.

I mostly play low-tech games. Don't laugh, but where I'm really noticing my problem is My Time at Sandrock. I'd love to find some sort of test program to verify the display is working right. Barring that, is there some game that's particularly good for testing? Ideally one that looks good both in SDR and HDR?

When you set up a new Linux distro, how do you bring over your personal configuration? The apps you need, the screen layout and look, etc?

It the old Unix days it was easy: you copy over a few dot files and you're set. I've got Chez Moi set up doing that fine. But the problem I've run into is a lot of modern Linux desktop apps are unruly and create lots of files, some of which can't be successfully copied over. It's not like you can just bring all of ~/.config over and call it a day. I'm particularly having trouble with KDE Plasma apps that way.

The other thing I've run into trying out distros is that everything's just a little different. Like the way you install Chrome or 1Password or even Steam is different from stock Fedora to Bazzite to Nobara. I feel like with every new distro I end up having to spend several hours getting it set up the way I like.

I've just had the most lovely experience trying out Bazzite as a desktop Linux, after years of Windows. I love that Bazzite works out of the box without much tinkering and allows me to play games and run LLMs. What I don't like is the atomic Fedora distribution. I'd prefer to be able to install software like 1Password or various shell tools directly in the OS. I suspect what I really like is KDE Plasma, that's new to me.

Is there some distro I can use with KDE Plasma and a fighting chance to get gaming working reasonably well, but that is not an immutable distro? I almost always use Debian or Ubuntu on servers, sometimes under Proxmox. I've tinkered with Arch before but have never seen the point in doing that much work. NixOS is not for me.

Some AI suggested looking at Nobara, Kubuntu 26.04, Tuxedo OS, or CachyOS. Of those Kubuntu appeals to me the most just because it's the most mainstream.

(My hardware is an ordinary AMD desktop system with an NVidia 5060 and a very nice 6K HDR display. Most of the day I'm running web browsers or games from Steam. But I also do software development in Linux and am playing with local LLMs. It really impressed me that Bazzite could drive my monitor correctly and run Steam games and LM Studio with no effort on my part. I'm willing to do more work to install well supported Ubuntu packages for Nvidia drivers, etc as long as they work without a lot of tinkering.)