userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records by dylanmtaylor · Pull Request #40954 · systemd/systemd
github.com
Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc. The xdg-desktop-portal project is addi...
    • CatLikeLemming@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      4·
      13 hours ago

      Stripped down to the bare essentials, those are similar. But surely you realize, that the sheer amount of content that was added over the years, and the enormous amount of mods, and the entire community, aren’t remotely comparable, right?

      This is less of a Photoshop for drawing vs Krita and more of a Photoshop for image editing vs GIMP situation, and even that comparison is kind of unfair to GIMP.

      • utopiah@lemmy.ml
        1·
        13 hours ago

        the sheer amount of content that was added over the years, and the enormous amount of mods, and the entire community, aren’t remotely comparable

        Are they compatible though? Like can I load content, connect to open source servers, uses mods on any client? Please don’t presume I know anything about the topic, I’m genuinely trying to understand exactly why alternatives are not good enough.

        • CatLikeLemming@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          1·
          10 hours ago

          I’ll just assume you’re serious and not trying to be a troll. Those aren’t launchers or different clients for the same game, they are different games. It’s the same as how Tux Cart isn’t compatible with Mario Kart. It’s just not the same thing. You also wouldn’t assume a Teardown mod works in Minecraft, just because both are voxel-based, right?

          There are open source Minecraft launchers like Prism, those are cool and useful, and frankly way better than the official one, but they use a Microsoft account too, as your ownership of the game has to be verified, and you can’t connect to servers without one.

          • utopiah@lemmy.ml
            1·
            8 hours ago

            Yes I’m serious and I’m not a troll. I don’t know what in my questions or suggestions make it sound like that but feel free to dig deeper.

            Anyway, AFAIK Minecraft has an official client which connect to official servers.

            It’s possible to replace clients, as listed earlier, but they might still rely on official servers with their accounts as you pointed out. There are though, AFAICT, compatible servers too, e.g. https://glowstone.net/ so one could connect an unofficial client to an unofficial server and thus have a similar experience with no reliance on anything related to Microsoft, no?

    • njordomir@lemmy.world
      2·
      5 hours ago

      Thanks for the suggestions. I’ve tried minetest, but I’ll have to take a crack at she others. If it was just a game I played by myself, I would absolutely use those alternatives. I’ve played on a string of “civilization” servers for a decade or two now. Hundreds of people forming nations and interacting with real economies, diplomacy, and wars. A few key mods create the conditions of scarcity and balance destroyability/defensibility of the buildings. All of it is perched on a stack of custom mods. I’m not sure how hard porting them to Minetest would be. Some of these relationships are longer than my IRL friendships at this point.

      When I started, we were using FOSS tools like Mumble to communicate, then they used Reddit and Team Speak, then eventually most nations moved to Discord for voice and text. I HATE discord. Maybe it’s because I’m too old, but I can’t follow a conversation for shit on there. At least everything is Linux compatible.

      If I could find some interested devs to make the mods compatible, I’d gladly pitch in to help run a fully FOSS mineman civ server.

      While the players can span all ages (a few grandparents on there), most are Gen Z and for some reason, Gen Z seems to care less about FOSS and open software. They’ve been propagandized fully by the proprietary web 2/3.0.

      • utopiah@lemmy.ml
        1·
        5 hours ago

        Thanks for the clarification. Unfortunately I’m no expert in the matter. I bet that some mods are compatible, I bet some aren’t. I bet some open source client/server pairing implementation might give more freedom but aren’t necessarily as popular. I have no idea how that impact culture or the size of projects. I imagine that the community of each project, e.g. Minetest, would know better if the limit itself is technical, e.g. mod compat, or not, e.g. network effect and thus a lot of people “sticking” to the “original” proprietary implementation not because it’s better but solely because their in-game friends are there.