Oolite Bulletins

Not far off 20 years ago (yikes is it really that long ago?) whilst I Linux was a pipe dream and windoze was the only option for a desktop pc OS. I got into a game which was so brilliantly atmospheric (especially with surround sound enabled) that it remains one of my favourite PC games of all time.
I am of course talking about Thief : The Dark Project.
Anyhow since then with one thing and another I finally fell out with Mr Gates & co and vowed never, ever to touch anything associated with Microsoft and use only Linux.
But the other day, I found this website:

http://www.thedarkmod.com/main/

As I'm still nervous / lazy about doing anything that doesn't have a GUI front-end (old windows bad habits die hard!) I install everything from Manjaro / Arch repositories (oolite being the only exception as I trust oolite.org).

What I wanted to ask is if any Linux users have installed or had any experience of thedarkmod and can advise whether it is safe or not?
As much as I really long to play this game again, I find it a huge leap of faith to trust an installer to download from an unknown source.

Any advice that anyone can offer would be greatly appreciated and if you are on a windows machine that is capable of running the Thief series of games (I played the first 2) then I heartily recommend giving them a try - albeit that you will have to take into account that the gfx are that of a 20 year old game and may appear jaded by todays standards.

Looks like the install process works without root rights in a "portable" way ? It installs into the directory they ask you to create ? So the OS itself should be safe at least.
I always look in the distro's repos first, if it's not there, there is usually a ppa, but I think they are ubuntu-only.
Anyway, looks pretty "safe" to me, they also provide the source code. What exactly are you afraid of ? A virus ? Not on Linux. I'd install it in a virtual machine if in doubt.

Damocles Edge wrote:

the gfx are that of a 20 year old game and may appear jaded by todays standards

Doesn't use as much system resources as shiny flashing tiles in one's start menu at least.

Anonymissimus wrote: ↑Fri Jun 15, 2018 5:46 pm

Doesn't use as much system resources as shiny flashing tiles in one's start menu at least.

That's not saying much Win 10 used over half my mem when sat idling (hence the reason why I gave up with win 10 around 6 months after launch vowing never to return to any ms product ever again).

It was just me being paranoid regarding using rsync(I presume that's what the install process is using) with a source I know little about (I like to think that a healthy measure of paranoia and scepticism is a good thing as it helps keep you safe - it just limits your progress with new things

Anyhow - I took the plunge and installed - so far it all looks really good.
I have yet to thoroughly play - even the training missions seem a lot harder than the original series of games - maybe it's me being out of practice or maybe it's time showing that as we get old(er) we adapt more slowly.

Cheers again for feedback