- It is true that the proprietary player was discontinued years ago, but it is still usable, even on Linux. I installed it through the AUR package on Arch Linux, but it can also be installed on any distribution through the Flatpak package. From my experience though Ruffle has much better performance, so I use it whenever possible.
- He wouldn't be. AetherSX2 is based on LGPL-era PCSX2 code and license changes don't apply retroactively like that (otherwise, imagine if SDL changed its license to GPL and instantly forced half of PC games to go open source).
It would only prevent him from using code added after the switch to GPL, which is not a problem because AetherSX2 ended development long before PCSX2 switched to the GPL.
- 'Courriel' was coined by French Canadian translator André Clas, not by the Académie Française. The Office québécois de la langue française successfully promoted its usage in Quebec in the 90s and the Académie Française unsuccessfully tried to do the same in France.
'Courriel' is still commonly used by French Canadians, but indeed it was never widely adopted by France. As a French Canadian, I usually use 'courriel", though the anglicism 'e-mail' is also quite commonly used. Can't say I've ever seen anyone use 'mél', tho.
- The popular narrative seems to be that Yuzu had something to do and/or profited in some way from the Zelda Tears of the Kingdom leak, which isn't true. The Patreon-only Early Access builds could not play the game any more than the public Nightly builds could. Both versions needed an unofficial game patch for the game to launch, a patch which the Yuzu developers had nothing to do with. Yuzu developers also did not implement or work on any bug fixes involving the game before its official release. Perhaps you were alluding to something else, though.
- I don't think the built-in tiling in Plasma was ever meant to go mucher deeper than what's in Windows. You're still gonna need to use extensions if you want full tiling, I think.
There are two KWin scripts that can be used to add tiling functionality into Plasma 6, which are Kröhnkite and Polonium. Not sure which of the two is better. If you want to use a window manager separate from KWin, I believe i3 still works.
- This is not really true. The about:config flag you mentioned does add a button in the Settings page allowing the addition of custom search engines, but that's only because the intended method for adding search engines is different. The normal way doesn't require setting anything in about:config, but it might be a little hidden (still found it on my own though, so I dunno).
The regular way is to visit the homepage for the search engine you want to add and click the URL bar. This will show the usual search drop-down with the "This time, search with:" row at the bottom. If you're on the homepage for a search engine which hasn't been added to Firefox, there will be an additional button on that row allowing you to add the site as a search engine, which will make it accessible from the regular settings page like every other search engine.
- In that case, could you clarify what instances of this you're referring to?
The death of Citra wasn't really a deliberate action on the part of Nintendo, it was collateral damage. Citra was started by Yuzu developers and as part of the settlement they were not able to continue working on it. Citra's development had long been for the most part taken over by different developers, but the Yuzu people were still hosting the online infrastructure and had ownership of the GitHub repository, so they took all of it down. Some of the people who were maintaining Citra before the lawsuit opened up a new repository, but development has slowed down considerably because the taking down of the original repository has caused an unfortunate splintering of the community into many different forks.
There is some speculation Nintendo was involved with the death of the Nintendo 64 emulator UltraHLE a long time back, but this was never confirmed. If indeed they did go after UltraHLE, then this would just like Yuzu be a case of them taking down an emulator for a console they were still profiting from, as UltraHLE was released in 1999.
The most famous example of companies going after emulators is Sony, which went after Connectix Virtual Game Station and Bleem!. Both were PS1 emulators released in 1999, a period during which Sony was still very much profiting from PS1 sales. Sony lost both lawsuits and hasn't gone after emulators since.
In 2017, Atlus tried to take down the Patreon page for RPCS3, a PS3 emulator. However, Atlus only went after the Patreon page, not the emulator itself, which they did because of their use of Persona 5 screenshots on said page. The screenshots were simply taken down and the Patreon page was otherwise left alone. Of note is that Atlus is a game developer, so they were never profiting from PS3 sales. However, they were certainly still profiting from Persona 5 sales, which had only released in 2016.
These are the only examples I can remember. Did I miss anything?
- This is mentioned later in the document:
> An experimental engine Servo originally launched by Mozilla as a successor to Gecko, is implemented in Rust. It was eventually abandoned by Mozilla when Mozilla Corporation announced laying off a quarter of its staff in 2020 and transferred to The Linux Foundation, then in 2023 to TLF Europe. While still experimental, it has been under active development again since 2023. Servo currently uses Rust bindings to Harfbuzz.
I'd say Servo is going pretty well. The git is fairly active and monthly updates on their blog paint a positive picture of the rate of progress. I try the engine out roughly monthly after the blog posts drop and when I last did a few days ago I was impressed to see a lot of my most used websites being displayed correctly. At this rate, I think it could become viable much sooner than we think. However, the project is still critically underfunded, currently only getting a monthly $2229USD according to their website.
- Well, they could build their UI using an existing toolkit, like GTK or Qt. Though, when I previously tested Ladybird it seemed to be using GTK and the current AUR package lists Qt as a dependency, so it seems they're already doing that.
They could also rely on existing multimedia libraries for audio/video (ffmpeg). Those are the main things that jump out to me. There's so much ground to cover that there's probably more, though. Maybe SDL for gamepad support?
- Pretty incomplete. This seems to be missing a lot of my favourites, including Open Hexagon, Minetest, TheXTech, SuperTuxKart, StepMania and osu!. Libregamewiki has a more comprehensive list:
There are also other factors at play. Montréal has a fairly large community of native English speakers and receives a lot of tourism from Anglophone Canada and the United States due to its status as the largest city in Québec (and second largest in Canada). It also gets a lot of immigrants, many of which are (at least initially) more proficient in English than in French.
I can't say I'm entirely familiar with the situation in Switzerland, but as far as I know the country has four official languages, none of which are English. It also doesn't border any English-speaking countries. It seems English is mostly used as a lingua franca for communication between citizens who don't otherwise share a language rather than due to the direct presence of native Anglophones. Also, Romansh aside, all national languages of Switzerland (French, German and Italian) are spoken in areas that directly border a country where that language is the national language (France, Italy, Germany/Austria). With Switzerland being in the Schengen Area, its linguistic regions may be considered to be part of a much larger individual linguistic communities, which I feel may also diminish the need to learn other languages.