#you get so caught up in modern minecraft and just keeping up with updates and watching things like hermitcraft and just

[juneboat]

so anyways the latest rtgame video makes me want to cry /very pos

[trippin-over-my-fandoms]

I’ve seen this done before but here are my modern!rdr2 social media headcanons for the Van der Linde gang.

some of these are LONG and then some are shorter. doesn’t mean I love any of them any less however. I just did my best with all of them. 

* I treat the gang as family especially for my modern au 

Dutch

frequently uses Facebook and has dozens of friends he doesn’t even know. like if he gets a friend request he’ll accept it. John tells him he might as well just make his page public and Arthur pleads with him to make a facebook PAGE so that his random friends will stop liking posts that Arthur tags Dutch in. 

Dutch has no idea how to make a facebook page. 

he also has a Twitter and a massive following at that. He’s VERIFIED. 

all of his twitter posts are vague though

are they a joke? are they political? is it what he’s eating for lunch that day? literally no one knows.

Hosea

also has facebook but doesn’t use it because why does he need to look at pictures of events he was at. he only uses it to see things he didn’t partake in

also has snapchat but just to keep up with the kids 

because life360 was too much to deal with for everyone

and snapchat is cool

also he can and will spam you with bitmojis 

Arthur

used to use facebook a lot but stopped because he was tired of his posts getting likes from people he didn’t know and friend requests from people Dutch was friends with. 

plEASE

he has a private facebook for a reason, he doesn’t want other people to know his business. 

he also has an instagram but anything he posts on facebook also goes on there. it’s not aesthetic or pretty or anything and he doesn’t even caption over half his pictures. 

he literally only uses social media so that his friends and family know he’s alive

has snapchat because of Hosea but barely knows how to use it 

doesn’t get why everyone wants to use snapchat when teXTING AND CALLING ARE RIGHT THERE

John

the question is what doesn’t he have.

john has been trying to make it big on social media since youtube came out.

his youtube used to have videos on it but he deleted them because they were cringy and arthur liked to send them to the group text. 

plays twitch games on the weekends and sometimes with Jack but he thinks most of the subscribers are there for his kid since most of his solo streams don’t do as well

has a twitter, doesn’t follow Dutch, literally envies that he’s verified. 

he’s tried everything but no matter what he does nothing pans out

uses tiktok to promote twitch streams

instagram feed is mostly selfies of him but 99.9% of the time he’s wearing sunglasses and the caption is some random quote 

also has facebook but only to appease Arthur and Dutch, he doesn’t even have a profile picture. Claims only boomers use it. 

an avid reddit user. if he’s got problems he’ll go to reddit. claims reddit saved his life. everyone’s tired of the story so they stopped asking. 

also uses snapchat more than he should and the only social platform he has more than 100 followers on. 

Charles

same as arthur and has both facebook and instagram and posts the same on both except his are pleasing to look at. 

they’re unintentionally aesthetic 

he uses a psd on all his pictures and won’t share what it is

has monthly life updates that start with some inspirational or deep quote and then text that pushes the instagram word limit

also has a deviantart , has shared psds there before , constantly tries to convince Arthur to get it. 

used to use tumblr but he forgot about it

Abigail

the definition of a facebook mom. 80% of her facebook posts are about Jack or parenting. 

Instagram is similar but also different, she’s actually a relatively successful influencer with over 1,000 followers. 

all of her friends and family (who have instagram) follow her

has snapchat solely for the cute bitmojis and to send John adorable snaps of Jack playing with all the fun filters. 

she also won’t take a selfie unless it’s with snapchat because she no longer trusts her own camera. 

also uses pinterest and has a collaborative board with all the ladies. 

but in general, on her own, she has too many boards. she uses pinterest for EVERYTHING 

Sadie

bold of you to assume she uses social media. 

she does just not a whole lot. 

checks it once in the morning and once at night. 

except pinterest because how dare Abigail get her into it. but even pinterest she only uses in downtime. 

has facebook and instagram but there’s maybe only five posts.

if anything she’ll post on her story

will only snap Abigail and Arthur otherwise she doesn’t use snapchat

all of the social apps are mostly offloaded on her phone anyways

if she needs to know anything she just checks the group text which she has on do not disturb because they text way too much. 

Molly

she’s verified on instagram 

it’s also the only social platform she’ll use, which frustrates Dutch because he wants to be friends with her on facebook

but she’s happy with just instagram 

she keeps it simple 

and the main theme to her posts are fun outfits in her ever expanding closet

the other posts are usually of plants that she’s managed to grow. she’s not the best at being a plant mom but she’s still a good one to the ones she’s managed to keep alive. 

the only thing she contributes to the pinterest board are her own pictures of her plants which are overly aesthetic. 

Karen

started out with a normal instagram account then made a spam account which she ended up using way more often.

all of her posts are extremely chaotic

and usually reposts from her snapchat

has a reddit just to troll John

reposted his cringy youtube videos to reddit and got hundreds of upvotes

if you wanna see the most raw and chaotic videos of Arthur and John then she’s the one to follow. 

also if you wanna see Abigail when she’s not all put together. 

is the reason there’s so many memes in the collaborative pinterest board

Mary-Beth

has a instagram but also has a second instagram for art and book reviews

or basically anything she’d post on her tumblr

which is her second most used social

also uses facebook but only because she is an admin for one of those multifandom blogs. 

also begs Arthur to get a deviantart. 

uses pinterest most but only second to Abigail

literally the queen of pinterest DIYs

Micah

has twitter

as far as anyone else knows that’s all he has

maybe he has snapchat?

maybe they saw him on snapmaps once? 

all he ever does with twitter though is retweet anything Dutch posts.

yet somehow he has so many followers. 

Lenny

anyone who has snapchat has streaks with Lenny

even Hosea who doesn’t understand why it’s a thing

he also posts a lot on facebook but it’s mostly travel or vacation photos everyone is just a tad jealous of. 

Lenny always seems to be busy but still has time for streaks with his friends. 

he’s also an up and coming youtube vlogger

Sean

also has reddit to troll john

but he also legitimately uses it too. 

he’s also really popular in the minecraft subreddit , don’t ask

also has twitch and also has way more subsribers than John

and a youtube which he’ll upload (overly edited) twitch streams to

everyone subscribes to him but they don’t tell John that.

also has a tiktok and is up to date on all the trends because of course he is

Kieran

got facebook when he was 10 and just never left.

literally doesn’t use any other social media

he’s not in the group text either so he has to facebook message Arthur to know what’s going on. 

but he shares a lot of memes and cute pictures of animals

he used to follow Dutch but unfriended him when he was the only thing he ever had on his activity feed. 

Susan

has facebook but claims she doesn’t have time to use it

Arthur knows this to not be true because she will like a lot of his posts. 

she’s also guilty of liking every single picture in one post or album. 

Arthur has also caught her looking at memes and using recipes she finds on there. 

also part of the pinterest board but never contributes. 

Trelawny

he has an account for everything

like

litereally

everything. 

even whatsapp and linked in and kik

even tinder

the only one anyone knows about are his facebook, twitter, and instagam

but there’s no posts on any of them except twitter

he’s also verified

but for unknown reasons

any posts on his facebook are ones he’s tagged in

he’s also in a lot of facebook groups

Strauss

runs a subreddit

a paid facebook admin of several pages

the only person who actually knows this is Dutch because Strauss has told him about it

he has no online presence whatsoever out side of those.

Javier

spotify king

has over 500,000 subscribers on youtube

uses instagram but as another platform for his music

edits his own album covers

top tier playlists too

Tilly

aesthetic queen

the most put together and pleasing to look at instagram feed next to Charles. 

uses pinterest a lot as inspiration and for making moodboards.

also uses tumblr to share moodboards

part of the sims global community facebook group

she keeps saying she’s going to start a youtube vlog but hasn’t yet

keeps trying to convince John to let her help him with his youtube.

she also uses twitch to play minecraft and sims

oh and she set up a minecraft server for everyone

Bill

facebook boomer

that’s it

I don’t know how else to put it

probably shares heavily republican posts

Swanson

didn’t use social media until tiktok.

he doesn’t do dances or anything but he does post weirdly obscure and chaotic videos that end up trending on more than one occasion

it’s usually drunk ramblings in his car that end up being hilarious

or videos of the others almost dying or ending up in the ER

Pearson

facebook boomer but make it cool.

also shares conservative posts but less offensive ones compared to Bill’s

likes almost every post any of his friends share

also comments on them too

Uncle

does he have social media? no one knows for sure. 

yet somehow he knows what’s going on

even if nobody can find any of his social accounts or have ever seen him using one before let alone doing anything on his phone other than playing cheesy mobile games.

[retronator]

The last 10 years of pixel art

Retronator the blog is exactly 10 years old right now (+ an hour or so more since I can’t seem to stop editing this post)!

I want to take this opportunity to look back at the teenage years of the 21st century and reflect on how the pixel art scene has grown over the years. I only promise a personal perspective, pieced together from my faulty memory and a bit more reliable archive of 1,700 posts on this blog.

2010

Social media sites emerged already in the late 2000s (Facebook launched in 2004, Twitter in 2006, Tumblr in 2007), but it took quite some time before they caught on, especially outside the US. I joined Tumblr in July 2010 and there were relatively few pixel artists active on the site. @jinndevil​ and @unomoralez​ go the farthest of those that I followed. The first post I reblogged was a Back to the Future piece from @megapont​ (via some blogpost share, since Megapont duo didn't join till 2013).

What was huge on the network however was sharing retro-gaming artworks by blogs like @it8bit​ and @gameandgraphics​. This included many pixel art pieces and it helped grow a community of fans that adored both old games and pixels.

2011

I'd put 2011 down as the start of the hi-bit era of pixel art games, championed by the release of the iconic adventure game Sword & Sworcery. Pixel purism of the initial pixel art movement was left behind by mixing pixels with high-res special effects like soft shadows and vignetting. Also, spaghetti legs started their fad period.

Artists such as @probertson​, @drewpixel​, and @merrigo​ started their days on Tumblr, gathering huge audiences over the years. Meanwhile, Retronator grew to a whooping 100 followers by the end of the year.

2012

Tumblr's fan spirits were going stronger and stronger, to which I threw my own logs on the fire by releasing Tribute, my biggest and most popular piece of fan art I created so far.

The highly anticipated FEZ got released (to critical acclaim and other more controversial consequences), further bringing pixel art in front of the mainstream gaming audience.

From newly-followed artists, @johanvinet​ was damn inspiring with his smooth animations. Anything GIF did immensely good on the Tumblr dashboard.

2013

This was THE year for Tumblr. So many new artists joined, it was hard to keep track. Anyone from established names like Mojang's art director @jnkboy​ and @konjakonjak​ of Noitu Love 2 fame (later Iconoclasts) to pixel art beginners such as @waneella​, now one of the most well-known illustrators in the scene.

The push for modern art direction with pixel art games wasn't stopping either. Not that amazing, more traditionally styled titles (with fresh color palettes) weren't present, as Chasm's debut on Kickstarter showed, but it was Hyper Light Drifter that really stole everyone's heart (machine) on the same crowdfunding platform. Gradients and smooth dynamic shading became unapologetically part of the pixel art (gaming) vocabulary from then on.

When Papers, Please got released at the end of the year to universal appraisal, a new example was set for showing that pixel visuals don't necessarily need to be the most polished, technically-impressive pieces of artistic expression, they can also be simple—the majority of detail-filling can be offloaded to the player's imagination.

2014

Pixel purist ideology was a highly debated topic. Dan Fessler, the background artist on Chasm, did a strong push against the tighter set of constraints which said you should only use 'clean' tools such as the pencil and color fill to complete your artworks. Dan instead only cared about clean results, pioneering in the process the technique of HD Index Painting that used the depths of Photoshop layer magic to get otherwise identical results. And there were plenty of others right around the corner that wouldn't even care about keeping the results married to traditional pixel art ideals.

Still, the majority of pixel art at this point was very orthodox. I started the Artist Feature series that showcased my favorite artists and none of them did anything controversial (nor they needed to). The biggest break from the old days was mainly highly increased color counts that allowed for subtle transitions without dithering, and free color picking without creating predefined color palettes. Octavi Navarro started his highly iconic @pixelshuh​ scenes, and the completely unknown @8pxl​ started her journey towards experimentation with pink sky gradients.

Even more importantly, Pixel Dailies were born on Twitter, following Ben Porter's 365 days of doing pixel art daily.

2015

I called 2015 The Year of Pixel Dailies in the end-of-the-year article in my newly started Retronator Magazine. The Twitter community really exploded this year, bringing in many new artists to the medium, with Pixel Dailies serving as a platform to raise visibility to everyone, old and new. I found out about @weilarddrake​ and @orange-magik​ this way, Slynyrd, @iceztiqarts​, @igorsandman​ … Other freshly-discovered people on tumblr were @kirokazepixel​ (one of the most prolific artists on the scene), @faxdoc​ (his learning journey was inspiring enough for its own article), and Talecrafter with @deathtrashgame​ (starting a whole new style of aliased, low-res painting without caring about individual pixels).

The discussion whether pixel art could survive past its nostalgic roots was still in the air, stirred by opinions such as A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art. History is proving them wrong however, with pixel art stronger than ever in 2020. It's not a visual language people born after the 80s couldn't understand.

New-school voxel art pieces started trending with the advent of Magicavoxel, pioneering the development of pixel art's sibling in 3D. The first pixel art convention Pixel Art Park was held in Tokyo. And (important for me personally), I came up with Pixel Art Academy, an adventure game that would take my ambitions in pixel art education into the future.

2016

After 9 years in development, Owlboy released! Also Hyper Light Drifter! And Stardew Valley! And Kingdom! Pixel art games were not dying, they were on the rise.

Edge (the popular British video game magazine) published a special 200+ page issue called Art of the Pixel. It featured contemporary artists outside the gaming context, championing the aesthetic's transition from its video game roots into its own art form.

Pedro Medeiros of @studiominiboss​ started his famous series of GIF tutorials, subsequently encouraging many others to share their knowledge in the popular square format. Tumblr still saw new artists joining the platform, such as @motocross-arts​ and @apolism​ (two thirds of the Japanese trio The Ultimate Pixel Crew), while others like @6vcr​ started their first pixel explorations that year. @brunopixels​, an old-schooler on the platform like me, sparked the Octobit movement, a pixel art alternative to Inktober.

2017

Further new names on Tumblr included @guttykreum​ (outdoorsy perspective pieces) and @scrixels​ (one of the most consistent daily posters with over 1,000 artworks by now).

The annual Shibuya Pixel Art Contest joined Pixel Art Park at promoting the art form in Tokyo, Japan (and worldwide really). Lospec became the new go-to resource site for pixel art, picking up the mantle from PixelJoint and Pixelation that—while still active—stagnated technologically and feature-wise.

More than anything, pixel art games were everywhere. Maybe it only seemed to me this way since I was able to go to the Game Developer's Conference as press and had the chance to interview many many people in the scene, leading to over half a year of daily content on this blog. Indie games felt stronger than ever with so many of us full-on realizing our dreams of creating our own games professionally. The one that left the biggest splash on the scenes was no doubt The Last Night, announced front and center in-between AAA titles during Microsoft's E3 conference. The brothers Soret pushed the art direction even beyond the hi-bit era moniker, fusing 3D, shaders, and modern cinematography with pixels in an iconic combination that, like Sword & Sworcery's spaghetti legs, was so atmospheric that it couldn't be resisted by future imitators.

2018

Another game that pushed technological boundaries was Pathway, finally stepping into full light in 2018 and releasing one year later. I still think it has the most advanced pixel art graphics engine to date, using voxels and other tricks under the hood to deliver a completely dynamically lit environment while retaining the pixel-perfect 3/4 view aesthetic. Pixel art games were firmly part of mainstream gaming by now, with Celeste winning many awards alongisde pixelish Return of the Obra Dinn, further cementing the presence of pixels as an ever-evolving medium capable of expressing very different art styles.

I decided to focus solely on developing Pixel Art Academy in 2018, putting this blog on relative hiatus with very sporadic updates towards the end of the year. But I never let it die. I thoroughly enjoy writing about the scene and my interest in the art form only grows with time.

2019–2020

Ironically, the closer the years are to the present, the less I remember what things stood out most. Maybe it's because my brain hasn't had the chance to automatically prune my memories yet from the overload of information that is the interwebs these days. Pixel art seems so out there, so much of my everyday life, encompassing me on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, DeviantArt … Even on TikTok you see kids zooming out of their freshly pixelized Minecraft photographs they call pixel art. The medium is alive, and more than ever.

As for the Retronator blog, from its zero followers exactly 10 years ago, it grew to 100 after a year and a half, 1000 the year after, 10k when it was 5 years old, and 30k just last month. Tumblr is still the platform where most of you follow my pixel art reports and I don't intend to stop anytime soon.

Here's to the next decade! Thank you all for reading. <3

[waynekelton]

The Weekender: Spooky Sales Edition

I'm not really a huge fan of Halloween, mainly because in the evenings I don't like to be bothered. After a long day my priorities are to eat dinner and relax on the couch, and not be answering the door every few minutes to give out sweets. We put out some anyway just in case anyone did come knocking, but it was a quiet year on our street so most of the box is still there.

In terms of the site this week we finally caught up on a review I've been meaning to have done (Xenowerk) and had what will probably be the penultimate look at games are still due out this year. We also reviewed Bad North, which is excellent, if only really suitable for short bursts.

Meanwhile, in the world of mobile gaming...

New Mobile Games

GWENT: The Witcher Card Game (iOS)

There was a lot of buzz around GWENT when it first turned up. A hit mini-game within the very popular RPG The Witcher 3, it had all the hallmarks of an excellent stand-alone experience and, lo and behold, it appeared on PC and consoles in 2018. Not much has really been heard about it since then - it’s still going, and people still seem to enjoy it, and we’ve known a mobile version was on the horizon at some point.

After a recent beta period, that ‘some point’ is finally here, although only on iOS. GWENT is a very different game from the likes of Hearthstone and other challengers, although it’s still at its core a vaguely CCG looking card game. Michael is hard at work playing through the game for us now, and we’ll bring you our thoughts on it over the coming weeks. No word on an Android version yet I’m afraid, but we’ll keep you posted.

The Quest - Basilisk's Eye (iOS & Android)

The Quest is a bit of a PT staple so it’s good to see it’s still going. This is a new stand-alone expansion to the beautifully hand-drawn Adventure/RPG with new areas, new quests and new challenges. As with past expansions, you can purchase this as a stand-alone experience if you don’t own the base game, or enable the new content within your existing save.

If you’re doing it within the base game, go to Mithria harbor and talk to captain Hanty, then select "Basilisk's Eye" as your travel destination. The devs recommend you be at least level 75 before taking on the new content.

Last but not least, A Case of Distrust caught our eye as something that might be worth looking at. It’s a narrative-based murder mystery experience, so not our usual fare, but it won a bunch of indie awards in 2017 and has developed a good reputation on PC and other platforms. It’s now finally on iOS.

App Updates, News & Pre-Orders

Tropico

Feral Interactive released a free update for their mobile adaptation of banana republic simulator Tropico this week. The ‘Absolute Power’ expansion has been made available at no extra cost, which consists of 10 new missions, each taking place on its own island. Don’t forget to check out our review.

Runescape Mobile

While ‘Oldschool Runescape’ is already available on mobile, that’s the old 2007 version of the game. If you wanted to play the currently running modern version. You’d have to play on a PC… until today! An Early Access build has released on Android, although despite being free-to-download, you can’t actually play it unless you’re a subscriber of the game on PC.

No word on an iOS version yet, or if the Early Access will open up to anyone else. I’ve dabbled in Runescape myself on PC, but because I’m a free-to-play user I’m not able to access the Android build.

Mario Kart Tour Multiplayer

Mario Kart Tour has been out nearly a couple of months now, long enough to get a good measure of it. It’s a pretty good way of idling away some time if you’ve got nothing better to do, and the Mario Kart aesthetics make for some good nostalgia, but a true Mario Kart game it is not. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of true multiplayer.

We just heard today that a beta trial of a multiplayer mode will be rolling out in December. Unfortunately, it’s only going to roll out for the Gold Pass subscribers first. The Gold Pass costs $4.99 and unlocks the game’s 200cc mode and then various cosmetic goodies. That’s the same price as Apple Arcade, just so you know.

Minecraft

The iOS and Android versions of Minecraft were updated to Version 1.13 earlier this week, the first major patch since July. It’s another technical focuses one looking at fixing bugs and the like, but it also adds Foxes as a new animal, and the Character Creator, which allows you to further customise your avatar in lots of different ways (with even more ways available to purchase). There are few other little content drops as well.

Halloween App Sales

Fuuu- there are a lot of sales to process this week, so you may have to settle for a more general bulletin rather than our usual more specific alerts:

Necrodancer: AMPLIFIED is down to $2.99 (not cheapest price), and the original game is also discounted.

XCOM: Enemy Within is down it its cheapest price of $1.99 again on iOS and Android, as are a couple of other 2K games.

King of Dragon Pass is half price, making it its cheapest price in recent memory. Six Ages is still full price.

Handelabra’s One Deck Dungeon is down to $4.99 on iOS and Android. It was slightly cheaper in June.

All of Acram Digital’s games are discounted on iOS and Android.

Stardew Valley is down to $4.99. It was $3.99 in Dec ‘18 so it might go that cheap again this year, but it’s still a decent price.

A lot of Ironhide’s (Kingdom Rush, Iron Marines) games are going cheap this week on iOS and Android.

Asmodee Digital’s Mysterium, Potion Explosion and Zombicide: Tactics and Shotguns have all been discounted to a couple of dollars.

All of the Holy Potatoes! Games are discounted on iOS.

All of Clarus Victoria’s games (Egypt: Old Kingdom) are discounted on iOS and Android.

And quite a few more! Including Balur’s Gate II and the like.

If this is what it’s like for Halloween, the Black Friday and Christmas sales are going to be off-the-chain.

Seen anything else you like? Played any of the above? Let us know in the comments!

The Weekender: Spooky Sales Edition published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[linuxlife]

Linux Life Episode 31

Hello ladies and gents and welcome back to the my twisted world of me and Linux.  So as I said recently I have rebuilt an i7 desktop and for a few weeks I admit I was running Windows on it for a while.  I have nothing against Windows 10 but after fighting with malware for a few weeks.  I was getting tired of it.

I intended to dual boot the system with a Hackintosh system.  Now I admit I have not used Clover for a while so I was willing to be forgiving to it as I had problems in the past.  I hoped it had improved but apparently I was wrong.  I installed a secondary 1TB drive into the machine so I did not interfere with the Windows installation.  I had been messing around with certain games I could not play on Linux.

However I admit I screwed up the installation and formatted the wrong drive and wiped out the Windows drive (some would say no loss).  Then when I installed the kexts (driver files for OS X I needed) Clover locked me out of the installation.  This is why I stopped using it in the first place.  I hoped it had updated and stopped doing that but apparently not.

So what has all this got to do with Linux I hear you ask.  So with now no working Operating System as I had destroyed my Windows drive and the Hackintosh had failed I decided it was time to go back to Linux where I had less issues.  OK, gaming was slightly limiting but to be honest I am not a huge gamer and playing these modern games realised a lot of them were not much cop.  

Now I originally did not install Antergos on the machine because I was having issues changing from Nouveau to NVIDIA drivers which would not allow me to change the resolution of the screen.

Since then I have changed my video card connection.  I was connecting the NVIDIA card via the VGA connector but I seem to get less problems using the DVI-D connector on the card.  So I changed cables and now the issue seems to resolved and I can set my monitor to 1280x1024 which is the designated format for this Dell monitor I am using.

So as I had no OS I could get working I went through a few options.   I looked at Druager which is a particularly new distro which is aimed at gamers.  It has a low latency kernel in order to speed up response.  Now I am sure this is handy but because its a new distro it still has a few bugs and the store was a bit dodgy.  I did not like they were trying to create an interface that was very gamer orientated for example the start bar was about a third of the way down the page..  Now I am sure if you are a regular game player you think this is ideal.  Sure it could be moved but that was their ideal position decision.  Strange so after about an hour I decided it was not for me.

I then installed Linux Mint and while it is more than functional I think as I have got used to a rolling distribution many of the programs were way back and as soon as I had to start adding PPAs just to get things up to date.  For all Mint 19 has this new rollback system I find it inconvenient.

So I downloaded Antergos again.  Now I have documented many times for all I like Antergos.  Cnchi its installer is very broken but once past it you never use it again.  Some will give up at this point and to be honest I would understand if you did so.

It can be amazingly bad regarding things screwing up.  So I can understand many who don’t like it and go elsewhere like Manjaro.  however Manjaro I have explained my issues with it.  However Antergos do keep trying to fix it, sometimes breaking it worse.

So I downloaded version 18.9 of the ISO and upon starting the installer it searches for an update to Cnchi.  It found the update but as soon as the update went to run it crashed.  I said I have had issues with Cnchi, so I immediately pulled up the terminal and attempted to run it in terminal.

The updated version of it (version 16.2) it seems to be missing certain archives.  I install the ones it lists but still it is not working.  I head back to the internet and find a solution after about ten minutes if searching the Github entries.  It seems the guy has forgot to put the things in the PKGBUILD when compiling.

Now he realised that 10 minutes after I started the installer and provided a quick fix until he managed to put the package correct.  So I actually managed to get the Cnchi installer running.  Its bad when you have to search through bug reports to find a solution just to get the OS installer to work.  but as I knew I liked Antergos  I was willing to do so.

If I had been new to Linux I would have abandoned it long ago and gone onto something else.  Put I persisted then it installed but due to me being so distracted I installed it with the Gnome desktop.  i tried to switch to MATE by installing the certain files and changing the setup but the icons would not display so i must have missed a step or something.

So I had to reinstall it.  Cnchi still had not been fixed so I had to run through the Live CD quick fix again but finally I got Antergos installed using the MATE desktop and everything was good.  As I said earlier I have changed to the DVI-D connection so it defaults to 1280x1024 I did not even have to set it up.

Also the Cnchi setup included the option to install the NVIDIA driver automatically so saved me a lot of time having to download it and play with it.    The reason why Cnchi had updates is 16.2 now includes a few more Window managers.  It now included Deepin, i3 and Openbox which it didn’t before.

They probably have fixed it so it works now but I think I caught in while it was changing over.  I eventually managed to get it installed and set about installing all the usual programs I use.

All was fine until I tried to install Shutter (which is a screen capture tool).  Previously I had issues with Perl when trying to get to install from the AUR but they resolved that.  This time I hit issues with two libraries that missing and would not download so I could not build Shutter first was Orbit2 (a CORBA client) and the next one was Libbonobo which used the Orbit2 library.

So I browsed around the Antergos forum to no avail for answers.  So I had to figure how to install these libraries as the new ones did not want to install.  Luck would happen and on Archive.org they keep an archive of old libraries from the Arch Linux set.  So I managed to find older versions and install them using pacman.

Finally I managed to get Shutter to build but it was a nightmare that I had to search all over before I could compile a program that should have been reasonably simple.  Now if this had happened to me at the beginning of using Linux say back at Episode 1 I would of abandoned trying to do it.  

It’s funny I definitely have a much higher tolerance to dealing with errors which I didn’t have previously.  Reason being I guess once its working it very rarely goes wrong.  I tried other screen capture tools but I found Shutter the best so it was worth the hassle.

People say rolling releases break a lot.  I have had a few programs cock up but nothing major.  Even then it is normally fixed the next day so it is not a problem for long.

So now the i7 desktop is running Antergos which previously I could not really do.  sure I could reinstall Windows but to be honest I really don’t have any desire to do so.  I unlike many Linux users do not have an outright hatred for Windows it has its uses.  But I admit I have less grief with Linux.

When it has its issues they can be harder to solve but nine times out of ten.  Issues are very few and far between.  Or if there is an update issue it’s solved quickly.  Which is why I like a rolling release as opposed to the Mint/Ubuntu models.

I was trying to play All the Mods 3 on Linux but the Twitch program available for Linux does not include the Minecraft mod plugin.  The FTB Launcher does not include All the Mods 3.  Eventually I managed to use MultiMC 5 and by using a zip containing the list I have managed to get it running on Linux.

Anyway I think that’s enough waffle for this episode.  So until next time... Take care.