this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Linux for Leftists
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I think my old laptop has 8gb ram. This is all assuming it turns on after five or six years!
right now I have a 32 GB ram tower computer playing a small game, a crazy looking terminal emulator, a spreadsheet program and a browser and it's still using less than 2 GB of ram. Debian cinnamon is good for me.
Impressive. Do you need a lot of ram nowadays to play games? Or do you have so much so you can play games at the same time as having other programs open?
Depends on the game. I like playing 0ad and that never seems to use that many resources, but I haven't checked much. Some steam games can be a bit more intense but 8gb should be fine for most games. Steam proton https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton offers a compatibility layer to play steam games as if they were in wine and works pretty good. I'm trying to game less so I stick to open source versions of pacman and tetris. I was playing rimworld but that shit was like cocaine to me. Rimworld runs fine on linux as well as windows. One thing I like to do is use "yt-dlp -f" to download playlists audio only from various sites, save them in a particular folder, then "cd" into that folder, then "mpv *" to play all of the audio files in that in the background. You can play minetest with the mineclone mod (to be similar to minecraft) while listening to various audiobooks podcasts and lectures that way.
8gb should be fine unless you are playing a AAA game, but if you already bought the games, you can try it out.
Thanks.
Oh, so with Linux, you can run a command that downloads files from websites? That's handy!
I've not bought any games for a good while and I usually buy older games. Although I do have my eye on three games that keep getting mentioned around here: Hearts of Iron 4, Victoria 3(?), and Disco Elysium. One day, maybe – part of it is finding the time!
yt-dlp lets you download videos by scraping the site and find audio or video files in there depending on how they are embedded.
wget can help you scrape the contents of a web page. This often allows you to get the html of a web page, but if it ends in a file extension you can download a file there too.
w3m allows you to view a pure html page in the terminal and it will not display css or javascript. This can sometimes bypass paywalls and allow you to read. sometimes not.
I think all of those games are supported on steam.
That's brilliant. Does w3m provide a safe way of reading http sites?
With wget and file extensions, is there anything obvious that I should be cautious of, for being dangerous?
w3m either works or it does not work, but either way you are safe from downloading dangerous things, javascript abusing your computer, but it does not protect you from DomainNameServer or InternetProtocol address surveillance by your ISP.
The cool thing about linux is anything that you download is not marked as executable by default so you'll need to chmod +x the filename for it to run.
File extensions don't need to exist in unix systems but are helpful to know what kind of file they are for practical reasons. (windows and mac force extensions in filenames)
If you are trying to transfer one file type to another in ffmpeg it does use the extension to re-encode it.
for example:
yt-dlp -f 251 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=NfjsLmya1PI #uses yt-dlp to download file in format of the highest quality sound for youtube|
to create a new copy of this downloaded file with an .ogg file extension do the following:
ffmpeg -i 'Present Day, heh... Present Time! Hahahahahahaha! [NfjsLmya1PI].webm' present_day_time.ogg #then you can delete the original and then play the new one that you have if you have mpv installed rm 'Present Day, heh... Present Time! Hahahahahahaha! [NfjsLmya1PI].webm' && mpv present_day_time.ogg
Thanks for clarifying and for the instructions.