The tools don’t matter much when starting out. Unreal and Unity are terrible recommendations for beginners. Even installing them is a challenge to a noob.

It’s not necessary to know how to code to design a game. To actually make it, programming helps. However you could just make physical board or card games. A lot translates to video game design.

Make a card game or board game. Start with an idea, then play test it until it’s fun.

The fundamentals of game design are:

• there needs to be a goal or way to win
• all elements of the game either help the player reach the goal or hinder them
• a theme like vampires, soldiers, fishing, abstract can help drive the above.

Something to consider is how players and the game interact. Do the players interact directly or only with the game. So they play against each other or cooperate to beat the game itself.

1. Design a game
2. Make it
3. play test it
4. add or remove elements to increase fun
5. repeat

I recommend starting with a card game. Take a piece of paper, scissors, and a pen.

I’m still mad at Apple for making Swift instead of Objective-C 3.0. It was such a powerful and small language.

C++ has a billion features and Swift is getting more every year.

Objective-C was fast to compile, great in a debugger, and allowed lots of creativity and patching broken system components.

Lots of great software was written with it. CocoaBindings are magical.

There’s a lot of legacy stuff around. I saw some CORBA in the wild recently.

I agree that CLI and keyboard driven systems are powerful and should be further developed. New terminal emulators like Kitty, Nerd fonts, and Lazyvim show what’s possible.

Pure Darwin ist still around.

I tried out a Darwin distribution a few years ago. It was a BSD with some apple flavor. None of the GUI was included, not all drivers, firmware, etc.

The community is tiny. There was also little incentive to try and fix things or add features, because upstream Apple ignored it pretty much. Grabbing the sources and compiling them into an operating system has little documentation from Apple.

Mac OS X used to install XQuartz, a hardware accelerated Xorg/X11 server by default in the 2000s, but dropped it at some point.

Even back when OpenDarwin and such were around, people would rather install YellowDog Linux that supported PowerPC Macs.

I think at some point the old NeXtStep/OpenStep folks left Apple and the new engineers didn’t understand Unix or think it’s important.

What’s your preferred desktop environment?

That was always allowed.

https://www.shadertoy.com/

Exactly

macOS runs on the Mach/xnu micro kernel and is pretty successful with it.

I think going out an meeting people IRL is what I will go for next.

Which terminal emulator copies with ctrl+c?

Niri/Noctalia is a great choice either way. I love using it. Having this as the default would be a reason for me to install KaOS.

BTFS snapshots are such a huge improvement and a live saver if you like to tinker on your system. Also great for backups, which you should make. Use snapper and similar tools.

I’d only recommend ext* for spinning hard drives. For ancient slow machines, go with XFS or ReiserFS (if any distro still supports that even).

The Linux kernel is a tangled mess and not an alternative to the well designed HURD micro kernel.

Systemd ist great and people who hate it, are also likely the same ones running openbox or a similar ancient window manager.

KDE should do what enables best user experience, not bend over for radicals stuck in the past.

I think KDE should force systemd.

Is this a take from the 1980s?

Of course cli and TUIs are great. However they aren’t as discoverable and harder to learn than a nice GUI.

Is vim or eMacs great? Sure, but so is Visual Code for other reasons.

cli and TUI suck at drag and drop and copy and paste between applications.

bat and batman are fantastic.

Still using ls aliases instead of eza, is old school.

fzf is what you really want.