Yet another rad gaming tool parts ways with Microsoft

As anyone who’s endured hearing me talk about Linux (which is cool) will know, one of my favourite things about the sunlit uplands of free and open-source (FOSS) software is Luxtorpeda, a compatibility tool that will automatically download and install open-source engine reimplementations—and other mods—for supported games you run with it. For instance, fire up a copy of Morrowind on Linux using Luxtorpeda, and it’ll have OpenMW up and running for you in a jiffy.

Well, Luxtorpeda is moving home. It’s become the latest in a line of projects to grow so weary of Microsoft’s antics over at GitHub that it’s picking up sticks. In a post on the Luxtorpeda website, dev d10sfan wrote, “The luxtorpeda project has completed a migration to codeberg! This is mainly from the latest issues with github, from stability, AI, and where they are putting their focus”.

GitHub has been a mecca of open-source development for a very long time, and even Microsoft acquiring it in 2018 didn’t shake loose most of its devs despite some controversy. But the site has recently come under fire, on the one hand because Microsoft simply cannot keep its AI tendrils to itself—training its LLMs on data hosted on the site and constantly badgering devs to use Copilot—and because it also can’t seem to keep GitHub running consistently of late.

Popular terminal emulator Ghostty announced it would leave the site last month, writing that the instability had grown so bad that “I’ve kept a journal where I put an ‘X’ next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work. Almost every day has an X. On the day I am writing this post, I’ve been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage. This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.”

Similarly, the popular (and notoriously complex) Linux distro Gentoo also announced it was beginning a long march away from GitHub earlier this year, though that was mostly due to “the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories”.

Gentoo is moving to Codeberg—a German non-profit—which is also where you can now find Luxtorpeda. The original Luxtorpeda GitHub project, meanwhile, is now archived.

You ask me—which you didn’t, but nevertheless—this is a positive trend. The dominance of big tech firms has had a suffocating effect on computers and the internet the past decade-plus, and if those firms’ greed and complacency is now acting as a surfactant that’s breaking things down—at least a little—into smaller and more open chunks? I’m happy to see it.

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