I always been a RedHat boy, the first GNU/Linux distro I seriously used was a RedHat Linux 5.0 (please note I’m not talking about RedHat Enteprise Linux, I’m talking about the old RedHat Linux distribution, before RHEL was born) and since then I always tried to stick to the RedHat side of the Linux world, even now If I have to choose a distro I’ll choose Rocky Linux over Debian or Ubuntu.

When I started working on AWS many years ago I tried Amazon Linux 2, and It was good, more or less It was like CentOS 7 and everything was ok… then came Amazon Linux 2003.

I didn’t chose It, someone else did and passed the instance to me, and since the beginning something was not right…

You can’t use EPEL…

You can’t find a lot of RHEL/CentOS/Fedora/Rocky/Alma packages on it…

You can’t even run dnf-automatic or yum-cron to automatically install updates on a scheduled base… updates are shipped in batches and you have to update the whole OS with all the updated packages… manually.

And today I found that even the damn flippin’ cron do not work, you have to manually install it with

sudo yum install cronie -y
sudo systemctl enable crond.service

What on earth?!?!?!?!

No, seriously if you have to choose a RHEL based GNU/Linux distributio choose Fedora, CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, Alma Linux, Oracle Linux but DO NOT CHOOSE AMAZON LINUX 2003…

Amazon Linux 2003 is the devil of GNU/Linux distros, probably one of the worst distros ever made.

Last autumn I posted my2cents on Stalker 2, finally after 143 hours of play I finished it… and I’m disappointed.

Despite patches, despite almost 50 more hours of play I basically can confirm everything I wrote before, plus an even more deep disappointment about the ending of the game.

Boss fights?!?! Really?!?!

What is the meaning of putting boss fights like some stupid console game?

I chose the Strelok ending (as a fan of the series I can’t choose anything else…) and just at the end of the game you have more and more CoD fights, close quarters fight with enemies spawning from thin air and without any cover.

Fights that that end up dying over and over again until you get so frustrated to lower the difficulty level only to finish this agony.. and then boss fights?!?

Flippin’ heck who got this stupid idea? This ain’t some Metal Gear Solid game, this is Stalker for God’s sake…

I admit I always hated the “boss fight” concept in any game, It’s something inherited from console games that makes no sense with PC games, but Stalker… Stalker… is the last game on earth where you can put a boss fight, it simply makes no sense…

In the end, Stalker 2 can be considered a good FPS, nothing more nothing less, but has nothing in common with the Stalker series; Stalker 2 is like a CoD console game settled in the Zone.

If you played the real Stalker games you’ll be pleased when you start, you’ll be pleased when you enter some old facilities and locations rebuilt in this game, but sooner or later you’ll realize Stalker is another story, this game is a CoD style spinoff, period.