Konsole Re-Flow Lines

One day I was looking at the MR (Merge Request) and saw Tomaz Canabrava’s sketch showing the terminal re-flow lines while it shrinks, and I just thought it would be great to have it fully working. The first thing to have a line re-flow is define how to mark a line with “continues in the next line”. This is the most important thing, otherwise you can’t go back to original state. My first thought was to set a next line char with something not printable, and then the first screen re-flow on both ways prototype was done. To improve speed, and hold lines before send to memory, the next thing I did was change the _screenLines holder from an array to a QVector type. It was an improvement in speed, specially to re-flow. No need to a new memory allocation, no copy and no delete, it was just update the QVector content and send from the QVector to history, if needed, and resize it.

Is Oracle Linux a valid replacement for CentOS?

By now you're probably suffering from CentOS exposure--it's been all over the place. Every day, someone is writing about what Red Hat did to the beloved Linux distribution that powers so many data centers and services. The reaction has been so sharp, that many forks of CentOS have begun to pop up. Some of these forks look seriously promising, even drop-in 1:1 binary compatibility with RHEL 8. When those forks appear, the landscape will most likely shift. However, until then, where's a business to turn? Do you go with CentOS 8 Stream? Some might. Others, on the other hand, see Stream as an impossible option, due to cPanel pulling support, which is a very big deal. What do you do? You could turn to Oracle Linux. Before you protest, I didn't say you should turn to Oracle Linux; I said you could. Why did I feel the need to make that clarification? Let me explain, and then I'll get into why Oracle Linux is a viable choice.

Games: Siralim Ultimate, Maia and Much More

• Seriously deep monster-catching dungeon-crawler Siralim Ultimate releases in March | GamingOnLinux

  Ready for a run through the dungeons? How about to catch 1000s of monsters? Siralim Ultimate will see return of the deep RPG when it enters Early Access on March 12. As confirmed in a Kickstarter update, the Linux port is also now available and ready for the release with Beta backers already having access.

• Colony building sim Maia surprises with a big feature release, gets ray-marched shadows

  I always have a soft spot for Maia, a colony building sim from Simon Roth of Machine Studios with its very different take on building up a space colony on a distant world. Unlike RimWorld and other colony building games, Maia is more about looking pretty and providing some hard-science. It's a little difficult, in some ways a bit buggy but it always has such huge potential to be awesome. After a break, Roth is back to updating the game and this latest release is huge. One of the big additions is a new "ray-marched voxelised shadow system" which is pretty fancy and allows "every light in your base to cast accurate dynamic shadows into the world".

• Try out Luxtorpeda, a Steam Play tool to run games in native game engines | GamingOnLinux

  There's quite a few games available on Steam that either don't support Linux, or do support Linux but like the Windows release there's a better way to run it perhaps with an open source game engine. Luxtorpeda will help with that. It's a project we briefly mentioned in a previous article talking about Boxtron, another Steam Play compatibility layer to run games on Steam that use DOSBox in your native install of DOSBox. Remember - Steam Play is just a feature, that runs different compatibility layers on Linux so anyone can make one. What Luxtorpeda does, is allow you to run various games (an expanding list) on Steam inside a native Linux game engine be it open source or otherwise. The original Luxtorpeda project only supports a few titles, but there's also the much newer Luxtorpeda-dev that is continuing the development which will hopefully merge together one day. Luxtorpeda-dev works with games like Cortex Command, Caesar 3, DOOM 3, Doki Doki Literature Club!, Freespace 2, Good Robot, Gothic 2: Gold Edition, RealRTCW, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, RollerCoaster Tycoon 2: Triple Thrill Pack, WRATH: Aeon of Ruin, Warzone 2100 and plenty more.

• Super sweet chilled-out game Kind Words has a nice free content update | GamingOnLinux

  Kind Words is one of the most chilled-out games around, although calling it a game feels a little weird. You write anonymous caring letters to real people around the world and it really is sweet. The developer mentioned how over 3 million messages have now been exchanged in game and thousands go through it each day. Writing about the update, the developer said "We are humbled to have Kind Words become a regular part of so many people's lives and, in keeping with long-standing international custom for developer-player relations, we offer you this traditional gift: a giant, looming beast and some mittens."

• GraviFire is a block-pushing puzzler with a gravity twist now on Linux | GamingOnLinux

  Love your block-pushing puzzle games? GraviFire released back in November 2020, and it recently gained Linux support. Taking the basic idea and pushing around blocks, it mixes things up with a few nice twists. The biggest one being that you're also dealing with gravity, so all blocks will be sliding around towards the same direction at the same time. It looks like it adds a nice bit of complication to the genre. "The green fire has been abducted by evil aliens, who force him to solve puzzles for tests. Need to pass all the tests to be able to return the green fire back to his home. You have to brainstorm over 50 levels. Gravity, movement, killing lasers... What else the aliens have prepared?"