Thank you for the context. I was an Affinity Suite user for a long time after I dropped Adobe.
I now use a mixture of GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape for visual things. I don't have a good alternative for InDesign - even Affinity Publisher wasn't one. Since my tabletop RPG business closed, I haven't had a need for a powerful layout application. I just use Typst or LaTeX for my personal projects that need a layout engine.
It doesn't come close to InDesign, but for some purposes Scribus [1] might be a viable alternative. I use it (in combination with a lot of Python scripting) to produce a printed diary every year.
There really is none, at least not that is comparable. InDesign is perhaps the one product where Adobe really shines.
Aldus PageMaker and Quark XPress were worthy predecessors; I used both back in the day, but Adobe bought PageMaker and discontinued it. As for Quark, not sure what happened to them but they're not around anymore.
I used Quark XPress, and it really felt like it had a monopoly on the professional market in the UK at the time. It didn't really innovate, it was slow and clunky. Then InDesign came along and it was a breath of fresh air.
Took many years for the transition to happen, but a lot of people in my circle wanted to see the back of Quark.
When I worked in desktop publishing (35 years ago, sigh) we used Ready, Set, Go extensively. Certainly seemed like a more intuitive UI than what little I've seen of Quark, at least.
After using InDesign CS6 for many years, (small-scale print/publishing), and trying Affinity Publisher for a time, I stumbled across VivaDesigner a while ago: https://viva.systems/designer/
I don't know how it compares to QuarkXpress, but it's a pretty good commercial replacement for InDesign / Publisher in my personal opinion: it has decent typography, styles, and good options for PDF/X-4 export (with FOGRA39 as a destination etc). I've also successfully imported .idml
They have various perpetual / subscription options (I'm on a commercial perpetual licence), a decent trial version, and they even do a Linux version, which works great for me on Mageia9.
I've contacted their support a few times, and they've been very responsive, professional and helpful, which was a pleasant surprise.
It also works the other way. A nuclear war between two countries nowhere near the US and that doesn't draw in any other nuclear powers could still have pretty annoying effects in the US.
Here's a paper [1] and an article [2] based on that paper that looked at what a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could do to the rest of the world.
The scenario they look it is each firing 100 nukes the size of the bomb used at Hiroshima at the other, aimed at major population centers.
Here's the abstract from the paper:
> A limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could ignite fires large enough to emit more than 5 Tg of soot into the stratosphere. Climate model simulations have shown severe resulting climate perturbations with declines in global mean temperature by 1.8 °C and precipitation by 8%, for at least 5 y. Here we evaluate impacts for the global food system. Six harmonized state-of-the-art crop models show that global caloric production from maize, wheat, rice, and soybean falls by 13 (±1)%, 11 (±8)%, 3 (±5)%, and 17 (±2)% over 5 y. Total single-year losses of 12 (±4)% quadruple the largest observed historical anomaly and exceed impacts caused by historic droughts and volcanic eruptions. Colder temperatures drive losses more than changes in precipitation and solar radiation, leading to strongest impacts in temperate regions poleward of 30°N, including the United States, Europe, and China for 10 to 15 y. Integrated food trade network analyses show that domestic reserves and global trade can largely buffer the production anomaly in the first year. Persistent multiyear losses, however, would constrain domestic food availability and propagate to the Global South, especially to food-insecure countries. By year 5, maize and wheat availability would decrease by 13% globally and by more than 20% in 71 countries with a cumulative population of 1.3 billion people. In view of increasing instability in South Asia, this study shows that a regional conflict using <1% of the worldwide nuclear arsenal could have adverse consequences for global food security unmatched in modern history.
BTW, both India and Pakistan rely on the glaciers in the Himalayas for freshwater. The glaciers in effect act as a natural reservoir system.
Something like 70% of Pakistan depends on that system, and a similar percent for northern India. Overall in Southeast Asia about 1.9 billion people depend on those glaciers.
As global warming reduces those glaciers it is not a stretch to imagine disputes over allocation of the remaining water getting heated enough for war to break out. I've read that if we let it get to 3℃ above pre-industrial levels we lose about 75% of those glaciers.
This is Trump. He's not going to war with Russia but if he gets out of the wrong side of his bed and reads the wrong social media post he might have to get talked out of nuking Portland
... but with China instead. The trouble with this guy is, you can't be sure if what he spouts from his mouth is him being actually serious, him just parroting whatever the last person to talk to him said (seems to be a common trope regarding anything Ukraine) or if he's just out of his mind and gone off script, off rails. And on top of that you got stuff like the sinking of the "Venezuelan drug boats" that would be seen as and dealt with as a declaration of war if the aggressor weren't the USA.
All it takes for stuff to go Seriously Damn Wrong is one person on the other side taking his verbal diarrhoea seriously and literally and acting accordingly.
Just because a period of history is short doesn't make it _not history_.
Studying history is not just, or even often, a way to rediscover old ways of doing things.
Learning about the people, places, decisions, discussions, and other related context is of intrinsic value.
Also, what does "material substrate" have to do with history? It sounds here like you're using it literally, in which case you're thinking like an engineer and not like a historian. If you're using it metaphorically, well, art and philosophy are absolutely built on layers of what came before.
With this hitting multiple communications media for me independently over the last few hours, it has me considering whether I can switch from Windows to Linux for my gaming PC again.
Last time I tried, I used Ubuntu, and I experienced problems with several games via Proton (e.g., The Finals, Fields of Mistria, and Civilization VII, among others). I checked ProtonDB, and it looks like those issues may be resolved.
However, I also wonder what people are using to replace iCloud/OneDrive/Dropbox/whatever on Linux. Or, if they don't use such a thing in the first place, how they handle off-site backups of files and images.
Dropbox works fine on Linux so you should be good. OneDrive has a community developed client, not sure how good it works.
Gaming works great on Linux, arguably better than on Windows. Show stoppers are mostly aggressive anti-cheat or DRM stuff so multiplayer can still suck but for anyone doing single player it is amazing. I have a windows installation I can dual boot into but I haven't in like half a year, I prefer gaming on Linux.
Linux Mint with Cinnamon has a traditional Desktop close to Windows. I highly recommend checking it out.
This go around, I'm thinking of trying Kubuntu. Specifically 25.10 Kubuntu, since apparently Wayland fixes a lot of the problems I had trying to game on Linux before.
Besides a master's degree and an internship at a nutrition AI app startup, I'm taking another pass at procedural dungeon generation for my world-building website.
I knew a guy that was extremely upset to find out that there isn't a lenticular garage door product so he could have it display an "animated" image as it opened/closed.
I got Finals working on an i3 nvidia system basically by doing nothing more than installing Steam and then installing The Finals and playing through proton. What issues did you run into?
According to the game's Steam store page, it uses Easy Anti-Cheat, which generally does not work in Proton. Pretty common problem for people who want to play modern online games. I'm surprised you say it works for you.
EAC has an option for Linux/Proton support, but it has to be explicitly enabled by the developer. I believe it ships a Linux binary that runs alongside the game, poking into the wine environment. EAC works just fine in proton with Halo Infinite, for example.
> I'm afraid I only play a small number of titles, and none of them are particularly stable on Linux.
>
> I'm not going to change the type of gamer I am just for an OS.
Could easily make the argument you are doing that for windows currently
I shut down my server the other day after people on HN were sharing horror stories about runaway bandwidth bills. I could not find a good (easy) way to ensure that my gemini server shuts down if hit by DDOS. I want to set it up again, but need to find some place to host it that has a guaranteed maximum bandwidth cost.
Just run it on Hetzner. You get 20TB egress monthly per server, which should cover a lot of DDOS activity.
You could also probably create a script to run on another machine that uses the Hetzner (or other cloud provider) API to monitor usage and shut off your server if it exceeds usage limits.
It was running on Hetzner, but I did not like the idea of having to rely on some script to try to avoid a disaster as opposed to just be able to set a limit (that they do not support?).
* Even if the risk is obviously very low, the value of running my gemlog isn't great. Not really worth any non-zero risk of significant costs.
It is rather easy to have one running alongside the other and the gemtext syntax is such it is quite easy to make automatic converters. Did you encounter issues maintaining both?
I mean I truly believe anyone can do small websites using HTML standards so for the actual content producer Gemini doesn't have much appeal. On the other hand using Gemini provide the users/visitors a guarantee they will not end up following a link and ending up in a bloated, privacy and ad nightmare. So I think it is sane to offer that even if you believe in small regular web.
I now use a mixture of GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape for visual things. I don't have a good alternative for InDesign - even Affinity Publisher wasn't one. Since my tabletop RPG business closed, I haven't had a need for a powerful layout application. I just use Typst or LaTeX for my personal projects that need a layout engine.