Hi, I'm the lead dev so I can also answer:

1. Nothing specific to Linux/BSD. The hardest part of the codebase to work with is probably the movement/collision/AI code which is very hard to follow. It's hard to change because any change can break things in subtle ways.

2. Nope

3. Probably the networking code. Sopwith always had network code (it was written as a tech demo for an early LAN) but almost nobody ever got the chance to really use it. Seeing it finally working over TCP/IP was very satisfying.

4. I'm planning on adding a level editor which I think should really open up the game to expansion.

5. Fun and comical gameplay. Trying to avoid debris as everything around you is exploding in complete chaos is hilarious to me.

6. No plans for these at all, I'd personally be against adding them. I want to keep it as a great old game, not a lame modern one. I could talk at length about this kind of thing but that's the brief summary.

7. I've actually considered this, yes. The original HUD is very ambiguous and hard to read; effectively just some small lines with no labels. I've actually gone as far as to mock up some better graphics but there's no integration into the game yet.

8. Yes, support for custom levels was actually added recently and the latest release includes an example level. There is not yet a level editor, however, which is a big obstacle for modders. I also think that to make modding interesting the game will need expanding to support different gameplay types, new types of planes, enemies and items, etc. I have some ideas but a level editor should be the first priority.

9. I've personally lost interest in the modern game scene. There have been a couple of recent games I've enjoyed, Elite: Dangerous is one example. I suspect it's partly because I'm old now and don't have the time to follow this stuff. In general I tend to prefer playing (and modding) older games and have had fun recently introducing my daughter to them.

Calling it abandonware seems like a strange choice of phrase: it has been open source (GPL2) since the early 2000s, and SDL Sopwith (linked in the post) is based on that source. So it very much still is in active development.

Sure. The SDL port (I'm the maintainer) is still under development, and new features continue to be added. The original graphics and sound are deliberately preserved - the goal is to make it a great old game and not a lame new one. The project was admittedly dormant for a number of years and I've just recently come back to start working on it again.

The most significant development recently is the addition of support for custom levels. Until now there's only ever been a single level that can be played over and over. Other features added in previous versions include medals, swappable palettes (to emulate old displays), the in-browser version and TCP/IP networking.

What the fuck? Lossy compression has nothing to do with the quality of data retrieval on a hard disk. If you've got data corruption, it'll affect any sort of file (and `flac -t` will tell you when a file is corrupted). a 320kbps MP3 stored with no intermitent data corruption from 2001 will have exactly the same bits and quality that it did in 2001. (Encoders have gotten better. A 320kbps MP3 from 2001 might sound worse than the song from the same source being encoded as 320kbps MP3 *today*, but that hs nothing to do with magical degradation.)

Of course it's still Ubuntu. It's just not Linux. It's GNU/kWindows.

The new file system is just a bag of bytes for names. You can store ë just fine, any way you want it (though UTF-8 and composed are probably the best options).

Yes, 2.0 supports Windows 8 and 10 compatibility, both 32- and 64-bit. Actually, Wine 1.8 was the first to include Windows 10 compatibility ;)

Maybe more accurately, the Windows ABI being the universal one thanks to Wine. DirectX can be hit-or-miss, especially if you don't have gallium drivers on your system.

Carmack always used OpenGL for his game engines too, a tradition maintained in Doom 2016 as well, despite being developed and released after his departure. The Vulkan version even runs well in Wine.

So... Microsoft has telemetry? You really trust Apple won't copy that?

Apple had it first as well.

So... how can I invoke this deliberately? I would *love* to swap my laptop's line-in/out in software, because one port's never been used and the other is damaged beyond repair.

It comes at a severe price, if that's what you're expecting. The WRT54G is obsolete enough that most aftermarket firmware have not supported it in years.

Random reads and writes work fine, assuming it's sanely implemented. ZFS only compresses per-block (normally up to 128KiB). Reading and writing those blocks doesn't depends on other blocks in the same file. It's not even difficult to have a file on ZFS whose blocks have different types of compression applied to it. Works fine.

2.6.39 was actually the one that directly preceded 3.0 ;)

Nothing particularly special about 2.6.32 compared to the others, but it just happened to be one release in which all the major enterprise distributions landed on for one release cycle (Debian 6, RHEL 6, SLES 11, ...). That fact alone just kind of drove to keeping it maintained officially, and everyone on those distributions could stay happy with new upstream kernels of that series without breaking any sort of compatibility on their systems (eg, any kernel modules installed).

2.6.32.70 should. 80386 support was dropped in 3.5.y and further.

Please note that no mainstream distro has supported the 386 in the past couple decades. You'll have to be building all your own stuff to get it working.