We will be forced to rent computers from nvidia soon anywayl

FWIW, simply living with an adblocker for a while will inoculate you to a lot of the most predatory BS. My wife had a similar experience. At first she was annoyed by the dual pi-holes I set up, because they broke her sponsored Google search links. Then she learned to skip those first few links and got used to having ads blocked. We recently moved, and I hadn’t had time to set them back up. I have simply been using the new ISP’s modem/router.

Last week, she basically begged me to find some time to set the network stuff back up, because she hated seeing ads now. She got used to the pi-holes, and then they were suddenly gone. She was like “yeah a lot of my favorite sites are basically unusable now. I don’t know how the hell I ever functioned before you set those things up…” What sent her over the edge was when she noticed an ad on our TV’s sleep screen. Not even in the show we were watching. Just on the sleep screen, because the show had been paused for like 15-20 minutes. That one ad was the straw that broke the camel’s back, because even when the device was idle it was still trying to show her ads.

If Java edition "goes away" it will just become a standalone community distributed platform frozen in development time.

The "Minetest" you tried was likely just the barebones example game that used to ship with the engine. Since so many people got confused by that, they stopped distributing that example game with the engine and now you get asked what fully featured games you want on first start. Voxelibre is the one that is like Minecraft but better.

I tried minetest long ago and was not particularly impressed.

Until a the last couole of years, it wasn't terribly impressive. It is, now.

Has the community grown big enough?

That's a tough question. Minecraft is 3 of the 10 most poplar games of all time. (Measuring every version of Minecraft separately, several versions will crack most "Top 10" lists.)

So compared to Minecraft, the Luanti community is tiny.

But compared to other Indie games, it feels like Luanti is huge now.

Luanti sucks in modding support compared to minecraft.

I'm surprised to hear that was your experience

Modding means something very different in Luanti, and is a first class citizen.

Trees are a mod. The base game left them out, so we can mod in how we want "the concept of trees" to behave.

Luanti mods cannot override game code, so the patches to the game code are impossible with mods.

I get you didn't enjoy it, but I think your comment misleads others.

The vast majority of the code in any Luanti game is in the mods. The last 5% is in the game engine, which itself can still be swapped out, as needed.

Having modded both games extensively, Luanti was a breathe of fresh air, to me.

Due to this limitation, even the basic things like custom controls or shader support cannot be added using mods.

I don't care about shaders, so I cannot comment. Since Luanti manages mod sharing - keeping all clients in sync - maybe that creates challenges? Feels worth it to me.

As for custom controls, the Luanti mods on my server have plenty of custom controls, so I don't know what you experienced? Maybe support wasn't there when you tried it before?

To add to pinball:

…If one wants to code in shader support, shouldn’t they just PR it? This isn’t like Mojang where the source is set in stone.