Censoring in computer games. Here in Germany, a lot of games were censored aggressively when I was young, because God forbid the youth is able to play games in their original form! They will turn to the dark side when they see some red pixels! Politics got even worse when we had a school shooting incident (not that regular here) and the attacker played a video game.

A lot of games where either not available at all or we had robots, green blood or missing assets in them.

I also liked to listen to electronic music (still do), but I grew up in North-East Germany and the only radio stations here played pop, rock and old people music. Couldn’t tape techno music, was too poor to buy it (and too far away from a good store anyway), so I looked on the web and found a lot of great stuff.

I still remember the first online music stores, with horrible DRM and 128kbps WMA files…it was not a good time.

For a while I had Netflix and Spotify, almost didn’t pirate anything anymore. Then Spotify started draining my phone’s battery, they didn’t shuffle properly anymore and I got recommended songs that were definitely sponsored (fuck you, A State of Trance). Netflix lost a lot of content and we got many more streaming services in return. So here we are again.

Ah, the good old Word 97 key…

Something like Bottles could work, but since the installer portion of recent Adobe apps is broken, there would be no way of creating a useful installer.

I hope, support for these apps will improve in the future, as wine gets better. Just a few years ago, running Photoshop was a much bigger PITA, which is why I stuck with Windows for so long.

You’re in luck, I just had this problem today and got it solved! :) Also on Fedora (38) with an Intel UHD 620. Proof:

First I got Photoshop 2020 from m0nkrus, because that’s a patched version without the online activation. I installed it with qemu on a virtualized Windows 11 to get all of the files (because the installer depends on an unimplemented mshtml function and is just a white, unuseable window in wine).

Then I prepared a custom wineprefix with all of the neccessary files: WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-adobe winetricks -q allfonts fontsmooth=rgb gdiplus atmlib vcrun2008 vcrun2010 vcrun2012 vcrun2013 vcrun2022 msxml3 msxml6

I copied all of the files in the C:/Program Files/Adobe and C:/Program Files/Common/Adobe directories into the same directories in ~/.wine-adobe/drive_c.

That’s enough, you can now run Photoshop with a command like this: WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-adobe wine ~/.wine-adobe/drive_c/Program\ Files/Adobe/Adobe\ Photoshop\ 2020/Photoshop.exe or create a nice looking app shortcut with wine-create-shortcut.

Some things to note: The “new” file open dialogue doesn’t work, you have to disable it in settings. Otherwise, nothing will happen when trying to create a new file.

Adobe Illustrator 2021 also works fine, but you need to build your own variant of wine with a patched gdi32.dll. The most annoying part was getting all of the -devel.i686 packages in Fedora, which took a lot of googling around. Haven’t documented the full list while doing it, sadly.

Man, I spent 15 bucks to watch it at the movie theatre. Why is the rent option more expensive than that? Even with the popcorn and drink I stayed below that.

watchsomuch.to works pretty well for me. Their filtering options can certainly be improved, but they have most of the 4K TV series content I need.