Oh yeah, I love game jams and do them all the time! I've done some on itch.io and global game jam, but mostly do ludum dare.

Have you considered publishing your prototypes?

I've considered it before, but most of them are unpolished/not in a state I'd be proud to share, and would require more work. It's also logistically complicated for some, since I also build things without a game engine sometimes, and those don't have a standard build process for clean binary releases. If I release the source code, then I have to do the whole software licensing thing, possibly provide support for people who try to build it, and feel bad about AI scraping my work.

I'm also an unreasonably optimistic person and always feel like I'll be able to finish them some day. My rational brain knows that's not true, but that one's not in the driver's seat.

This is extremely relatable for me. My game dev projects are basically just me entertaining myself by implementing difficult or interesting things that I'll never release. I've been in the exact same position as this guy more than a few times, and have basically accepted that I'm probably never going to actually release a game lol. I have a lot of cool prototypes that never turned into a real game, even when I tried scaling down to something smaller. Luckily, I've gotten good at identifying when it's time to move on before dumping years into polishing an incomplete concept (iirc, my longest project was nearly ten years long!)

Maybe some day I'll partner with a designer to help me get over the inevitable design barrier, but honestly I'm pretty happy with the prototypes I have made over the years. Some are very unique, some are technical achievements, and some are even fun. I'm not motivated by the idea of profiting from any of this. They're just arts and crafts projects to me, like old doodles you'd keep in a box somewhere. I'm fortunate to be able to do this without worrying about making a profit from it, and hope other people find a way to get into this for the sake of it too. It is a uniquely rewarding hobby.

at keast encourage those going this way so e/os can grow big enough to work with a manufacturer to make their own phone

Graphene is doing this already. They announced a partnership with an Android OEM to produce a GrapheneOS phone some time in 2027.

Have you ever tried installing a Windows game manually with Wine? You need to create a wine prefix, install dependencies (msvc runtime, dotnet, fonts, etc) and maybe create a launcher script. Lutris helps you do this all through a UI.

It's not the only tool, and Steam does the same now by allowing you to add non-Steam games to your library and configure them to use Proton. But Lutris has been around longer than that feature, and it's fully open source and independent. It also has a library of community scripts which automatically apply game-specific tweaks to work around known issues.

opponents of truth, freedom, and systemd

Do you get paid by the Systemd Hate Club™ for your efforts? Are you full-time, or just a freelance clown?

Why bother? It's not like there's a shortage of login managers out there.

But when it comes to youtube, I get most of my scientific education there, all of the developments in astrophysics and sciences are there. I think I’d go bonkers without it,

It's hard to tell on the internet; is this sarcasm?

1. Why the fuck are you posting YouTube comments?
2. Why the fuck are you using Brave?

Stop using the YouTube app/website, get an alt frontend like FreeTube, Grayjay, Revanced, etc. Not only do they remove ads and make it impossible for Google to track you, they have better UX than the official apps.

Feeling embarrassed is a weird reaction. If it actually helps you in your job, there's nothing wrong with that. Get that money. Whether you like programming enough to actually get good at it is a personal choice. I'm someone who has been extremely passionate about it my whole life, and when I was younger, I had a much lower opinion of people who only did it for a paycheck (the "9 to 5 people" who didn't know the difference between Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows until they took computer science in college). These days, I couldn't care less. The tech industry stopped being a meritocracy long ago. This recent wave of AI slop is just the boot stomping on the population of people who exist within one standard deviation from the average.

But as you're sitting around scratching your balls while the agents generate your code for you, take the time to think about this bit of doomer outlook:

The "vibe coding" thing is a fad that won't last. The only reason it exists now is because the current state of LLMs isn't good enough to do everything on its own. These agents currently need a human in the loop to babysit them when they fuck up, as you've no doubt noticed. They're also highly subsidized because the AI companies want to collect data in order to train them and make them better. If/when they're truly able to build a product on their own from prompt to ops, then the price hikes and layoffs will come. Maybe they won't even raise prices, maybe some billionaires will take the company private and only give access to their friends, family, and the young white christian men they're using as blood donors in their longevity experiments...

Not everyone has GitHub's infrastructure. You can try doing a shallow clone to avoid pulling the full history, as QTs is probably huge, then you can pull the full history ("unshallow" it) overnight.

yes

Because Rock Band represents a major milestone in Linux kernel development. Why do you think Linus had been building guitar pedals in his free time?