Minetest: A Game that's MINE

Posted on Feb 8, 2023

I’ve played Minecraft extremely casually for awhile. Recently I’ve moved to a linux main computer

Tried out Minetest(specefically Mineclone2), its surprisingly good! I’ve never really played a FOSS game, so my expectations were really low. I saw some stuff that said “don’t go into it expecting Minecraft” but I was trying to see how close to Minecraft it could get

But it got pretty much exactly to Minecraft. I’m very casual, so I don’t really care if pork chops aren’t quite the right color. I can ride in a boat, and punch zombies. I can watch a sunset over a blockey mountain.

This was surprising for me. This is a game made by a bunch of people in their spare time. and it keeps up to a game made by a trillion dollar company.

I’m writing this on a laptop also powered by FOSS. I feel like we’re at an inflection point. Imagining 10 years from now, what is the software world going to look like? I have a hard time imagining that open source is going to suddenly slow down.

The economy isn’t looking… great right now. What big tech companies are flat out going to collapse in the next few years? If there’s a viable FOSS replacement, what if that takes over? We saw a big bump with mastodon. Can we dare to hope that this is a pattern?

Open source has always felt like a pipe dream to me. Something to aspire to, but its not like it’ll ever actually replace any software that matters. But here we are.