* I installed Fedora 43 and it (totally unsurprisingly) worked great.
* I installed Steam from Fedora's software app, and that worked great as well.
* I installed Cyberpunk 2077 from Steam, and it just... worked.
I later got a hankering to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. This time, the game would not work and Steam wasn't really forthcoming with showing logs. I figured out how to see the logs, and then did what you do these days - I showed the logs to an AI. The problem, slightly ironically, with MD is that it has a Linux build and Steam was trying to run that thing by default. The Linux build (totally unsurprisingly) had all kinds of version issues with libraries. The resolution there was just to tell Steam to run the Windows build instead and that worked great.
I've heard it said in jest, but the most stable API in Linux is Win32. Running something via Wine means Wine is doing the plumbing to take a Windows app and pass it through to the right libraries.
I also wonder if it's long-term sustainable. Microsoft can do hostile things or develop their API in ways Valve/Proton neither need nor want, forcing them to spend dev time keeping up.
This is where the argument goes back to Win32 is the most stable API in Linux land. There isn't a thing such as the Linux API so that would have to be invented first. Try running an application that was built for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Good luck with that. Don't get me wrong, I primarily use and love Linux, but reality is quite complicated.
The exact same is true here. If large enough volumes of folks start using these projects and contribute to them in a meaningful way, then we end up with less noisy updates as things continue to receive input from a large portion of the population and updates begin more closely resembling some sort of moving average rather than a high variance process around that moving average. If not less noisy updates, then at least some fork that may be many commits behind but at least when it does update things in a breaking way, it comes with a version change and plenty of warning.
Yea, this is a really bad state of affairs for software distribution, and I feel like Linux has always been like this. The culture of always having source for everything perhaps contributes to the mess: "Oh the user can just recompile" attitude.
[1] PDF: https://app.sensortower.com/vgi/assets/reports/The_Big_Game_...
I also wonder about the developer availability. If you're capable of handling the more advanced APIs and probably modern hardware and their features, it seems likely you're going to aim at a big studio producing something that big experience, or even an engineer at the big engine makers themselves. If you're using the less demanding tech it will be more approachable for a wider range of developers and manageable in-house.
The support in this space from Valve has been amazing, I can almost forgive them for not releasing Half Life 3. Almost.
If they decide to do this in the gaming market, they don't need to mess up their API. They can just release a Windows native anti-cheat-anti-piracy feature.
Unless it's a competitive game and it's a significant improvement on current anticheat systems I don't see why game developers would implement it. It's only going to reduce access to an already increasing non-windows player base, only to appease Microsoft?
Also in order to circumvent a Windows native version wouldn't that be extremely excessive and a security risk? To be mostly effective they would need to be right down the 0 ring level.. just to spite people playing games outside of Windows?
On the other hand, using an official Microsoft anticheat that's bundled in Windows might not be seen as "installing a rootkit" by more privacy-conscious gamers, therefore improving PR for companies who choose to do it.
In other words, Microsoft would steamroll this market if they chose to enter it.
These things are always sold as general security improvements even when they have an intentional anti-competitive angle. I don't know if MS sees that much value in the PC gaming market these days but if they see value in locking it all down and think they have a shot to pull it off, they'll at least try it.
In theory a built in anti-cheat could framework have a chance at being more effective and less intrusive than the countless crap each individual game might shove down your throat. Who knows how it would look in practice.
It's like a flatpack, stabilized libraries based on Debian.
Sometimes the API stability front causes people to wonder if things would be better if FreeBSD had won the first free OS war in the 90s. But I think there's a compromise that is being overlooked: maybe Linux devs can implement a stable API layer as a compatibility layer for FreeBSD applications.
Not while they continue to have the Xbox division and aspire to be the world's biggest publisher.
Containers. Or even just go full VM.
AFAIK we have all the pieces to make those approaches work _just fine_ - GPU virtualization, ways to dynamically share memory etc.
It's a bit nuts, sure, and a bit wasteful - but it'd let you have a predictable binary environment for basically forever, as well as a fairly well defined "interface" layer between the actual hardware and the machine context. You could even accommodate shenanigans such as Aurora 4X's demand to have a specific decimal separator.
We could even achieve a degree of middle-ground with the kernel anti-cheat secure boot crowd - running a minimal (and thus easy to independently audit) VM host at boot. I'd still kinda hate it, but less than having actual rootkits in the "main" kernel. It would still need some sort of "confirmation of non-tampering" from the compositor, but it _should_ be possible, especially if the companies wanting that sort of stuff were willing to foot the bill (haha). And, on top of that, a VM would make it less likely for vulnerabilities of the anti-cheat to spread into the OS I care about (a'la the Dark Souls exploit).
So kinda like Flatpak, I guess, but more.
Running the anti-cheat in a VM completely defeats the point. That's actually what cheaters would prefer because they can manipulate the VM from the host without the anti-cheat detecting it.
Even if you run games in container you still need to expose the DRM char/block device if you want vulkan,opengl to actually work.
WINE and Proton seems to always require hand holding and leaks dependencies on things installed on the host OS as well as dependencies on actual hardware. Used it for decades and it is great, but can never just relax and know that since a game runs now it will always run like is possible with a full VM (or with DOSBox, for older games).
Unfortunately it seems supporting Linux natively is pretty quickly moving target, especially when GPUs etc are changing all the time. A lot of compatibility-munging work goes on behind the scenes on the Windows side from MS and driver developers (plus MS prioritizing backwards compat for software pretty heavily), and the same sort of thing now has a single target for peoples efforts in Proton.
It's less elegant perhaps than actual native Linux builds, but probably much more likely to work consistently.
It's sort of a philosophical bummer as an old head to see that native compatibility, or maybe more accurately, native mindshare, being discarded even by a relatively evangelical crowd but,
- as a Linux Gamer, I totally get it - proton versions just work, linux versions probably did work at some point, on some machines.
- as a Developer, I totally get it - target windows cause that's 97% of your installs, target proton cause that's the rest of your market and you can probably target proton "for free". Focus on making a great game not glibc issues.
I mostly worry about what happens when Gabe retires and Valve pivots to the long squeeze. Don't think proton fits in that world view, but I also don't know how much work Proton needs in the future vs the initial hill climb and proof-of-success. I guess we'll get DX13 at some point, but maybe I'll just retire from new games and just keep playing Factorio until I die (which, incidentally does have a fantastic native version, but Wube is an extreme outlier.)
2. You’re discarding the shifting software landscape. Steam OS and Linux are trending towards higher PC gaming market share. macOS has proven you don’t need much market share to force widespread (but not universal) compatibility.
3. I don’t see the value in a purist attitude around Linux gaming. The whole point of video games is entertainment. I’m much less concerned with if my video game is directly calling open source libraries then if my {serious software} is directly calling open source libraries.
Gaming is much more meaningful to me as a form of story and experience, and it is important to me that games keep working and stay as open and fair as possible. In the same way it is important I can continue to read books, listen to music or watch movies I care about.
With the container-based approach of the Steam Linux Runtime this should no longer be a problem. Games can just target a particular version and Steam will be able to run it forevermore.
Parity between DX12 and Vulkan is pretty high and all around I trust the vkd3d[0] layer to be more robust than almost anything else in this process since they're such similar APIs.
The truth is that it's just a whole lot harder to make a game for Linux APIs and (even) base libraries than it is to make it for Windows, because you can't count on anything being there, let alone being a stable version.
Personally I don't see a future where Linux continues being as it is (a culture of shared libraries even when it doesn't make sense, no standard way of doing the basics, etc.) and we don't use translation layers.
We'll either have to translate via abstraction layers (or still be allowed to translate Win32 calls) to all of the nasty combination of libraries that can exist or we'll have to fix Linux and its culture. The second version is the only one where we get new games for Linux that work as well as they should. The first one undeniably works and is sort of fine, but a bit sad.
0 - vkd3d is the layer that specifically translates D3D12 to Vulkan, as opposed to vkdx which is for lower D3D versions.
and it worked surprisingly, also i see people joking about how win32 is the only stable api on linux xD. Also heard red dead redemption 2 also works well on linux that might be the next game i will check out.
https://www.protondb.com/app/337000 for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
This is not inaccurate, however every time I've had to interface with either Microsoft or Adobe issues, both the professional and community support have been abysmal. Both community forums seem to incentivize engagement to the point where every response is 3+ hyperlinks deep to someone else's vaguely related post.
Maybe the linux forums self select for independent problem solvers..
* Question with reasonable amount of detail.
* A reply from some "Community Helper" (Rank: Gold): "did you try reading the help files?"
* Another person with a "Staff" badge: "this isn't our department"
[Thread closed.]
* Helper: This is a great suggestion which I'll flag for the team to add support (5 years ago)
"Talk to the sales about this functionality. [Thread closed]"
Granted, Oracle charges a lot just to even use the software, but I still don’t think it’s unreasonable to limit certain types of requests for higher paying customers. Pay base price and you get to use the software, get updates and call tech support. Pay a premium and they prioritize bug fixes and features for you.
That said, yes, they still handle that bit better than most large companies.
You could make such a clause illegal, but then all software would have to come with those two or three extra zeroes.
For myself, those issues have been largely evitable; I think my longest current uptime on a running linux install is approaching 5 years..
But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. some Linux distro needs to adopt some hardware line and partner with them to release a known good line of computers and polish the hell out of it. Like System 76 but nicer.
I'm asking for help because I don't want to just try random things.
I had one where I was trying to get mongosh (or similar, I think they have had multiple shells) to change some print behavior I had multiple users coming in and giving me incorrect answers to a different question that was easily found in the docs and then begging me to mark the question as solved with them as the respondent and they were always written as though I was some sort of child-king that needed to be kow-towed to.
This kind of gamification of support fora incentivises responding rather than responding with correct answers.
Conversely Linux fora always have people who are at best polite and largely know their shit. They will help you hunt down the problem until the point where you hit that it's actually a firmware bug and you gain skills along the way.
Please run sfc /scannow closes topic
Both MS and Adobe's forums are a complete joke, LLMs give better support than their respective "communities."
The absolute worst location for this was, of course, the Azure or dotnet documentation sites. Cmon Microsoft you make both of these products surely this is a huge use case for your customers?
You've entirely omitted the `dism /cleanup-image /(scan|check|restore)-health` rain dance
I've been using Windows since v1 or perhaps 2 - we had a "CAD" workstation at school back in the day. It was a RM Nimbus with a 80186 (yes!) in it. I own a Commodore 64 from 1984ish (still have it - it now has USB).
I also recall using telnet to access the internet (gopher, WAIS etc) and being asked by my boss in 1994ish to investigate this www thing that was making waves.
I found it after a lot of navigation through menu systems. This is a discussion about the real differences by Sir TBL: https://www.w3.org/History/1992/WWW/FAQ/WAISandGopher.html
My report was: it looked pretty much the same as the rest, which shows exactly how prescient I was! To be honest, back then it was hard to tell what on earth was going on in a telnet session. At the time I could get at a sort of hyperlinked system on my telly (CEEFAX) and there were other similar systems around the world.
In hindsight, I think graphics cemented the www's dominance. I remember discovering the Mosaic browser and leaving telnet at around the time when a MS President (yes the speccied one) decided the web was not going anywhere), and thinking "fuck: that's the future".
Yikes. This is the main issue of Discord, it's not publicly searchable.
As a total sidenote, I do wonder when exactly stack exchange/overflow saw the writing on the wall with AI coding?
I don’t need to look for Denver 069 2004 post about MQTT request response options where someone pointed him to a now 404 link, I just talked to Claude about it and we came up with a solution directly to my problem, using my code as an example.
It really feels like everything is lined up for the year of Linux in the living room, and it’s great to see.
Twenty years ago I was in university and had a Debian install on a cheap-ass Acer laptop and I managed to get exactly two and a half games working under Wine: the first two Fallouts and about three hours of Civ IV before crash. Getting games to run at all was A THING so a podcast for that makes a lot of sense.
Today I have a full-time job and deleted the Windows partition from my expensive PC about three years ago... pretty much every game I've ever wanted to play since then has just WORKED. Better than on modern Windows, even. Not a lot to talk about there, I guess.
One thing I wish is that Valve could publish a 'Proton spec' that people could build against to ensure compatibility, but I imagine that that this would be an IP nightmare.
You can be a true gamer™ even if you don't play the latest $90 AAA multiplayer FPS. To me not having a proprietary rootkit is a feature, and Windows is always there for those that are OK with being spied upon.
I'm sorry, but 98% of video games are not competitive multiplayer IAP fests.
Hadn't touched Windows in more than 10 years, and it's as bad as I remember it, everything is clunky, badly designed, no polish whatsoever.
The moment developers find a way to get their anti-cheat working in Linux I have absolutely no reason to ever boot a Windows machine again...
The trouble is that kernel-level anti-cheat sounds like something useful but it doesn't actually get you anything because the cheat developers are going to analyze and modify the anti-cheat code the same as they do the game code. And then having it running in kernel mode on the non-cheater's PC doesn't buy you anything when the anti-cheat code you wrote isn't actually running unmodified on the cheater's PC.
The cheat developers do have to put in the effort to analyze what it's doing in order for that to work, but the same is true of user-mode anti-cheat. Being in kernel mode doesn't solve or improve anything, it just creates a hazard because then bugs or malware in the anti-cheat code can compromise the entire system and are effectively granting themselves access to things you didn't approve, e.g. a game running as the kid's user account can't normally access the parent's tax returns, but in kernel mode it can. So what you want is for them to stop doing that.
Meanwhile the Windows kernel and the Linux kernel are completely different, so you're not going to be able to take Windows kernel anti-cheat code and run it in the Linux kernel even if you're not attempting to cheat. You'd have to have them to make a Linux-specific one, but you don't want them to, because they shouldn't be doing it at all.
To be frank, the argument that kernel level anti-cheats are invasive has never been all that accurate or compelling. Any user-space application already has numerous privileges which could ruin your day. You trust a developer and application every time you run it, irrespective of its access level. Valve has an opportunity now with SteamOS to impose technologies like SecureBoot and "safe" deeper layer anti-cheats which actually work. Yes, Linux enthusiasts would be up in arms, but it would mean that the most popular online FPS games would be supported on Linux, and I think that's far more important.
The modal user likely doesn’t even know anti-cheat exists, and if they did, wouldn’t care at all. They just want to play the game.
This is The Way.
Bonus: No game files junking up my home directory.
Valve could build something into their chipset and start signing the Steam Deck drivers, create secure boot etc and essentially create an Apple SIP equivalent. Wouldn't work for the rest of the Linux ecosystem or other devices, and people would absolutely howl about it, but they could do it.
> Few people are bothering with native support
Was the podcast an attempt to increase porting efforts to Linux? But Proton (and now Steam Machine II) took the wind out of your sails?
i really doubt this very much. i hope i am wrong.
I'm really enjoying Linux. It's one of those things that makes me somewhat passionate about computing for the first time in a long time.
When I see the adware monstrosity that Windows appears to have turned into, I'm actually quite shocked to see sharp folks using it. I must be missing something, like do they have cheat codes to make it usable?
If I wasn't super tech savvy, I can see why people would pay the absurd Mac tax - just throw money at the problem enough to make it go away.
There's at least a few factors:
- like boiling frogs, where things worsen gradually and you don't notice / hurt enough until it's too late
- accumulated bandaids over time to keep it bearable. e.g. knowing what settings to disable, perhaps having powershell scripts to debloat new machines, etc
- inertia. Hard to make big changes in general, even if they would help, because change is hard and usually costly
- forced to use Windows at work
I am confident that the lovely folks working on Wine are working as hard as possible to get maximal compatibility, and Wine (and Proton) is really a marvel of engineering at this point, but man I wish they would figure out how to get MS Office 2024 working.
To be clear, this is not a dig at the Wine people; I suspect MS Office is made purposefully difficult to get working on Wine, but man if they could get that working then there could be a huge exodus.
Given that the dropbox is some 4TB, but I often need to access things that I didn't previously need access to, this is a bit of a deal breaker.
I _can’t_ get equivalent functionality of Excel’s tables (named range, but it dynamically expands and applies formulas as you add more data). If you’ve got excel handy, open it up select a range and press control-L to see it.
There are endless forum threads of Libre Office boosters misunderstanding what the feature does and offering the halfway there equivalent.
I want this to work, but everyone uses excel’s feature set slightly differently and something will be missing for everyone. It’s incredibly annoying.
Yes it’s petty, yes it means I just don’t do something easy. Yes in the end it’s only my problem.
I’ll probably just do it on excel for the web.
One of these days, I should probably go through a tutorial series for LibreOffice and Star BASIC and properly learn it.
If I need to do any kind of number crunchy stuff I usually use Julia right now. I really like Julia, it's a very cool language and platform, but for small things it's kind of overkill. I should really learn how to properly use LibreOffice.
This has been a nice interaction which is increasingly rare online, thanks.
I think he could get over the different interface but I don't completely blame him for not wanting to redo all his work.
O&O Shutup: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
All the missing privacy switches you'd want. Run it after any updates.
PowerToys: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/
The real utilities you'll want to control your UI as a power user. Just autohide the taskbar and disable showing badges and flashing. It's a lost cause, and you can mostly just forget it exists. Use alt+space to launch things and keyboard or mouse shortcuts for window management. It's actually pretty good at mixing floating and tiling.
WSL: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install
I'm sure you know about it, but it works well even for most GUI apps these days, although it still doesn't support fractional scaling.
I've used Linux for work (and school before that) for a long time, so I'm not intimidated by it, but it just feels like more effort than it's worth each time at home. I won't deny that Windows keeps getting more annoying though, so I'll probably give Linux an N-th try soon.
Edit: also, I'm a PC gamer, and I like having the option to play games like Fortnite or Valorant, even if I don't do so very often. But of course, I can solve that with dual booting if I really want to.
Some of us are in the weird spots where no OS "just works" and will require inordinate amount of setup and adjustments anyway.
I recently did an arch and Ubuntu install for two machines, and spend half a day each to get something mildly viable, and still tweak things from time to time two weeks after. Sheer hardware support was only a third of the pain.
Back in the days macos also took me about the same time to setup the local system , configure input and disable/workaround the silly stuff. Windows is on par IMHO (stuff are sillier, but disabling them takes about the same effort). For any of those I end with a fully working *nix system/subsystem, so the end setup makes very little difference to me.
The huge difference is windows having exotic[0] form factor support turned to 11, where linux will be rougher.
[0] I only care about tablets, I wonder if Bazzite could help, I'll be giving it a try in. few months I think.
I think the sad reality is a lot of people simply don't care.
I specifically avoided Windows 10 because of the telemetry and the whole forced reboots for updates seem pretty annoying, and I didn't see it getting any better which is why I decided to try and move to Linux.
The only thing that held be back at the time was I was too ensconsed in my eight-year-old setup, so I needed to be able to do the same things on Linux; and I needed gaming to be viable. Which it thankfully is now to Proton.
And it's even more disgusting how Windows 11 has become considering it has the "we'll take screenshots of what you're doing every five seconds" stuff now. Sure, Microsoft claim they'll never see what people are doing, but what's stopping them from doing that in a future update?
At least people are slowly wising up to this; though a believe a good majority of new Linux users are because they don't want to create e-wase and replace a perfectly good computer just because Microsoft says "No."
Personally, I wish I'd swapped sooner.
As a Linux user since 2006/7, I totally understand. I had atleast 1 computer at home that would dual-boot to either Windows or Linux. Regardless, I had to have a Windows system.
My reasons may not be the same as yourself - but I do still get stuck and HAVE to use Windows from time-to-time. It's not just for playing games or work related. It's sometimes a simple file I have to download, fill in and email back. The file is likely a Microsoft Excel or Word file and while OpenOffice/LibreOffice is good most of the time, there is bound to be something off.
Sometimes my kids will have homework (going back a few years now) and it would only work on Internet Explorer despite the fact Chrome was dominant back then.
(I remember, back in 2008, I would ensure the websites I created had decent support for Firefox as well as Internet Explorer, despite my boss telling me "everyone uses Internet Explorer" - that soon changed by 2010 with Chrome)
Thing is these problems are not the fault of Linux, or the Office suite, or the web browsers. The problem was the people using files specific to a brand, or focusing on specific web browser, etc. However, many people wont view it like that. In these scenarios.. Linux was the problem.
I always remember writing my Resumes for recruitment agencies. I would hand over it is 3 formats. ODT, PDF, and DOCX. I did this because I was not sure how the DOCX version would look on Microsoft Word. Of course, it looked great in Open/Libre Office.
I always encouraged the PDF version.
> I'm really enjoying Linux. It's one of those things that makes me somewhat passionate about computing for the first time in a long time.
100%!
I wouldn't use a condom that broke 3 years ago.
It isn't like this is the original WinXP during the era where computers connected directly to the open internet and caught viruses just by existing, making computers groan and being very visible that something was wrong. Pretty much everyone is connected via a firewall and on top of that Windows has improved its security considerably over the years. And there are still security updates for browsers (the main vector for malware by far) that support Win8.x (e.g. Firefox ESR will be supporting Win8.x until next year and people have made Win7 and Win8 compatible builds for modern Chromium).
So it isn't surprising that for all intents and purposes it isn't broken, especially when the alternative is having to change to something that feels like downgrade in terms of UX. From a user's perspective it is a choice between the unlikely potential of something invisible perhaps happening (getting compromised) versus the absolute certainty of something very visible happening (having to get used to a worse UX). Considering Windows still tie security updates with everything else, it isn't surprising that people judge based on what they perceive the most.
Of course the best solution would be to switch to an OS where such choices are not necessary in the first place. I've been using Window Maker since early 2000s and the UI has remained the same since 1997 when WM was first made, aside from the occasional theme change (which is done only whenever i personally feel like it, i.e. is not forced on me) while at the same time i'm using the latest Linux kernel, C library, drivers, etc with all security fixes. I do not have any choice between having security fixes or using a GUI that i am comfortable with - i get to have both.
The state of security is /awful/ for general users.
But they also can't figure out how somebody keeps getting into their email account, why they get text messages that quickly disappear from history, or what these weird charges that keep showing up on their bank statement are...
ok surely that firewall and home lab and ability to not download and run garbage is enough for someone on the supposed "hacker news" to handle. but no, we got heaps of people using "out of support" as some sort of argument whatsoever to upgrade to absolutely dogshit versions of windows. make it make sense
Having oldass OS and application versions make that a thousand times easier when you have so, so, so many CVEs you can exploit. And LLMs have been show to make this very trivial now.
All you need to do is click on the wrong pop-up, or the wrong link in your email, or tap something on your phone screen, or have a poorly configured (often from the factory) router, and the initial intrusion takes place. After that, an outbound encrypted session quickly gets setup, and congrats, now your network is acting as a residential proxy that can be sold to criminals that want to download CSAM from your IP, AI companies that will use your connection for scraping, and other elements that will either mine the data on your systems (your PII, logins, etc) and scrape your screens.
But if you don't care about your life becoming a living hell, then I can't make you.
This happens all the time, every day.
If you have a car, you maintain it. If you have a bike, you maintain it. Power tools? You maintain them. Your electronic devices also need to be maintained. They have access to your most sensitive data, and potentially private conversations.
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/local-network-access
Did you know that a lot of current home router NAT implementations are currently broken, in particular for UDP traffic handling, and you can therefore spoof your way into the network?
https://www.armis.com/research/nat-slipstreaming-v2-0/
A lot of router vulnerabilities floating around out there.
Ever hear of UPnP/UPnP2? Did you know that applications can trigger your router to open inbound ports for you?
There have also been some 0 click exploits lately, those are fun. You don't have to do anything at all!
https://github.com/Defense-Intelligence-Agency/Zero-Click-Ex...
Yeah, you're still at risk, and moreso because you're not aware of how open you are.
They're fine.
Everybody feels confident until a slip happens. It's really just a function of probability and time acting against you as well as anybody, just like companies shouldn't ask themselves whether they'll be hacked, but when.
It also seems to me that phishing has become vastly more sophisticated in recent years, IMHO mainly due to 3 issues:
1. A growing number of huge data leaks that enable scammers to profile and target possible victims to an unprecedented degree and attack them using unexpected vectors. I remember my feelings sinking the day I received the first phish that contained basically all my personal data to address me. Once it's out there and traded, there ain't no getting back. As a consequence, spear phishing has become much more automated and widespread.
2. Proliferation of 2FA, often via email, as a supposed remedy-for-all which leads to a false sense of security.
3. The sheer ignorance of some actors that continue to undermine all the best awareness efforts and normalize insecure practices. For god's sake, I've received unsolicited emails from my bank as well as from globally acting online retailers telling me to click on a link and log in to solve some issue. To my great astonishment, both turned out to be legit. What the hell were they thinking?
Really, I wish all of us good luck. But I don't feel so confident anymore, rather like an unwilling participant in a lopsided arms race, where the adversaries have great resources at their disposal, and I have nothing more to rely on than my wits. ... Actually, put this way, it sounds like a classic cyberpunk tale. There's some appeal to it, I admit, but still.
https://www.kicksecure.com/wiki/Unicode
It's also happened with code pushes on GitHub, which didn't get caught in code review, and has compromised build processes by introducing a malicious domain that is visually identical.
Sounds like a HN-type problem.
https://www.knostic.ai/blog/zero-width-unicode-characters-ri...
I'm sure cachyOS will work a treat out of the box, but i'm also sure that one day things will stop working and cascade into a distro hop or reinstall leaving a sour taste in the users mouth.
You do not need a "gaming" distro, all distros use the same software and you will be fine on ubuntu, fedora etc.
Sure, you could use Fedora. But you need to know about enabling RPM Fusion, 32 bit repos for steam, etc. Now THAT is how you get someone to give up.
If you install something like Bazzite all of a sudden you're in the deep end of needing to learn how immutable distros work. It will turn people off that don't give a damn about this stuff.
Ubuntu is simple, easy to configure from the GUI, works with most things out of the box - including Steam - and is supported like a first-class citizen by the vast vast VAST majority of application developers.
It's easy for us. It's not clear how someone coming from windows would even know that they had to do this, much less do it.
My cards have been a 2080, 3070 Ti, 4070M, and 4090. I could barely get an AMD card (6600 or something?) to work.
Now you have talked to someone who has not had that experience. And everyone I have talked to says they have had an experience either like mine, or like mine minus issues with AMD.
The other day I handed my Arch laptop to a friend (a mechanical engineer) who liked tinkering with computers, had a few papers on $RECENT_AI_TOPICS, and was considering moving to arch to learn Linux. I advised him to start with Ubuntu and then move to arch, but he insisted so I gave him a quick test.
Since he was more or less comfortable with reading manuals and searching, I asked him to install nginx on my laptop and change the configs to listen on 8080. He eventually succeeded ... after 70 minutes or so. He installed nginx and started the service pretty easily in a couple of minutes, but then he got stuck on editing the config files. First, he wasn't familiar with the terminal file editors so he had to learn one (he chose vim and went through vimtutor) and then he opened the config file without sudo, so he couldn't save the file. Then he thought that maybe he needed to stop nginx first but that didn't work. And then he started reading nginx manuals and tutorials and SE threads for like 30 minutes. Finally he decided to search the vim error directly and then found the issue.
I have often heard similar stories, and I think the main hurdle for most people is not "the hard part" or RTFM, but it's "the unwritten part" and the conventions.
Chalk mark $1
Knowing where to put it $999
Repeatedly after me: you boot, you buy a game, you play. That’s it.
Speciality derivatives come with attention to detail and purpose-fitting that often isn’t found in general purpose distros, like how Nobara has a system to auto-apply fixes for common problems or how Bazzite includes an overlay for game stats (framerate, etc). Rolling and bleeding edge distros have been popular because people want to use the latest hardware.
Can you get these things with a general purpose distro with older kernels? Sure, but the process varies depending on distro, hardware, use case, etc and isn’t necessarily accessible to many, even with the selection bias towards a technical mindset that comes with wanting to switch to Linux. It’s the same reason why Windows has been popular for so long and why Valve has seen outsized success with Linux: the fiddly bits have been minimized.
Major distros could pull in many of these users by sinking resources into that golden “out of the box” experience and aggressive hunting down and fixing of papercuts.
What do you mean "PC Gamers"?
It's not limited to PC Gamers. The CAD program I use for PCB layout won't run with full functionality under Wayland because "The Developers Know Best".
So, having to choose between Wayland or delivering PCBs, guess what my choice was.
Gnome and Wayland are really user-hostile - if their vision doesn't align with what the majority of users want, its the users that are wrong, not the developers.
It was absolutely bonkers to me and soured me from Linux for years.
I’ve administered thousands of Linux boxes but it’s a totally different ball game.
Which as an aside, I think distros should advertise better. It must be awful to be sold on a distro only to find that it doesn’t support your newish hardware. A simple list of supported hardware linked on the features and download pages would suffice but a little executable tool that will tell you if your box’s hardware is supported would be even better.
You can look up gamescope-session for more info.
Its something that I generally wouldn't expect on traditional mainstream distros.
That's not necessarily true. I mean, you will be fine, but gaming is one of the areas where you can benefit from having everything on bleeding edge. And Cachy is surprisingly stable (and the "one day things will stop working" can realistically be said about any Linux distro, really).
But if you're using your PC like a PC and also doing other stuff imo it's better to install a 'regular' distro like Fedora or Ubuntu. I haven't had any difficulty installing steam and playing games on either of those.
Copy and pasted some change in some file, save, restart, fully totally bricked.
Maybe it's different on Nvidia (wife's laptop had AMD graphics), but I expect a very bumpy road ahead of him.
It has just been rock solid on any machine I have tried. KDE I was just always running into some kind of minor problem or something wouldn't work.
I have dolphin and konsole installed and open right now so once you get use to Cinnamon, it isn't really that much different but so rock solid with Mint.
I just had to update my CachyOS install last night, as some software I wanted to install was just getting 404 responses from the repos. Turns out they don't keep round old packages? I dunno, but the update command above fixed it.
Worked great for a day or two but now updates aren't working because of some signing issue or something :|
Maybe I should switch to Fedora or Bazzite before getting too setup...
The idea isn't that it's a 'gaming distro' specifically, and more that it's suited to performance in general which can be a useful thing. If someone's new to Linux and doesn't understand why they might want to run something like CachyOS I agree they should just pick Ubuntu or similar and be done with it, but personally I rate CachyOS as a daily driver.
When I was running Windows on the same machine I was constantly trying to diagnose why things stopped working, and downloading drivers.
Perhaps my experience with Windows was worse than average, I don't know. But from my perspective there is zero reason not to run Linux full time for gaming.
I play most of my games on Bazzite and anything requiring anti-cheat or use of my Logitech wheel on Windows
I also use the same machine for dev work and everything works amazingly well.
So I went and installed Fedora, and for the most part, everything's working great.
I use my machine for both work and gaming, and there are really two deal breakers right now on the work side:
1. Most of my work is web-based, and it's really surprising that this is an issue, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to get Chrome to use autoscroll on mouse middle click. In Firefox it's just there as an option, and worked great. The LLMs suggested adding a flag to the launch options (which was an additional layer of complexity because of flatpacks) but that doesn't actually work if you're using Wayland.
2. Google Drive. No native app. Was able to mount my drive with RClone, which works, but at the core of my workflow on Windows is using the Everything app (on hotkey) to quickly search my Drive files immediately as I type. I can't seem to get KRunner to index my Drive files. I add the folder path to the indexer, but it's not surfacing any results in there.
Gaming works great though.
I'm using an extension for that: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/middle-button-scrol...
There used to be a more popular one, but it got dumped by Chrome recently, guess it wasn't up-to-date.
This one isn't perfect (eg sometimes it pastes clipboard on middle-click), but still it mostly works.
Now I'm just glad I only have to suffer windows at work.
So they were kind enough to give each one of us a Ubuntu 5.10 CD, one of those from back then when Canonical shipped free Ubuntu CDs to people around the world completely for free.
I can recall poking around that brown-y Gnome 2.x and feeling cozyness, like feeling at home. Everything felt transparent and humble and honest, from the desktop wallpaper, the icons and the typography to the tone the help pages were written. You could feel the ubuntu on it. It really felt like it was made for human beings.
The computer no longer felt like a dark box that only let you do things your license let you to do and if you dared to look at other direction, ever so slightly, things could go insanely wrong.
Granted, I didn't had internet at home back then (and wouldn't have it until late 2008 via a crappy 3G modem) so after nuking the Windows XP install and tried install it, also nuked the partition where I had all my uni docs and stuff and, defeated, had to go back to Windows via a pirate copy - until I had enough spare time to go learn what I did wrong and try again. Never went back ever since.
Things have changed a bit - Ubuntu is not what it what it used to be, I am not who I used to be (ended being a graphic designer) and not even the internet itself is not what it what it used to be - but I'm glad human creations like Linux still exist.
What a mess this thing is. Though, I am definitely not moving to W11, so Linux will be in my future one way or another.
There is the school of thought that Wine is merely the Linux gaming ABI, and I largely agree. Native Linux binaries "feels" better but doesn't bring much from a practical standpoint.
Jonathan Blow is sharpshooting and being intentionally difficult in order to sound smart (he really needs to engage in that behavior less, he's smart enough as-is). Virtually nobody bothers with Linux-native binaries for games. Compile your game for Windows, test it on Linux+Proton, find that it probably works fine, it's not hard.
I really wish more people would mention the option of dual booting. Use another separate SSD to install your linux OS and that way you always have the option of going back to your Windows install. You can even reserve some programs for Windows and do everything else with linux.
There's really no need to approach it with a "screw it" attitude. You'll probably get yourself in too deep with that approach.
I could live with using Linux for web browsing, but because it doesn't do the other stuff I like, I ended up just staying in Windows and eventually uninstalled Linux.
I'm still really rooting for the Year of the Linux Desktop, and it does continue to get better and better, but I'll keep rooting from the sidelines.
I'm really curious what would be the appropriate solution for an anti cheat that runs on Linux in a way that a) does not compromise my OS/privacy/security b) protects the game from cheaters at the same time.
It would restrict you to a series of whitelisted kernels, probably from major distributions, but it's better than the current situation.
i remember their anti cheat was utter crap tbh, not like something that Riot implemented for Valorant (a kernel-level system that runs from boot-up with deep system access)
I don't think an Epic games launcher is exactly obscure. Mind you, I'm completely commmitted to Linux and having the launcher is just in the "nice to have" category, but it hasn't gone well so far.
Steam is working flawlessly. Other than anti-cheat, I haven't run across anything that doesn't play exactly like its windows counterpart.
- git clone the heroic-games-launcher AUR repo,
- makepkg -sc,
- pacman -U.
And it just worked. This was something like a month ago, though so maybe my experience is more recent?
Unfortunately it turns out that I depend on too many desktop apps that runs on the major desktop OSes but not on Linux (or on Wine, for that matter).
* KakaoTalk, the major South Korean IM app ran on Wine for a week, but the updater doesn't work and freshly reinstalling the app broke Wine for some reason. (I tried removing the whole ~/.wine prefix, but it doesn't work.) Now I'm stuck without KakaoTalk.
* Discord is only provided as a x86_64 Deb file and a .tar.gz file. I tried using it from Firefox, and it works fine but audio sharing during screen sharing doesn't work.
* Disconnecting from my Bluetooth AirPods somehow does not stop my music. I'm not sure if this is an AirPods limitation or a Linux limitation (since I've never used AirPods with Windows), but it annoyed me endlessly.
* USB-C DP mode and the fingerprint sensor doesn't work. This is an Asahi Linux limitation, but I've seen various parts of the hardware not working when using other Linux distributions on laptops as well. I feel this is a common occurrence.
Not to mention that the lack of text editing shortcuts that macOS has, which is a big deal to me (but I tried as that is a macOS-ism).
I carried my MBA for 4 days before I gave up today. I brought my MBP today with me.
I think this is by design, not limitation. On android, changing sound device stops music playback. On windows and linux, changing sound device doesn't stop sound. I tried it with wired headphones, maybe expectations for BT are different, but I think that comes from smartphones.
This really is a special case, they've had to write new drivers for everything in the Apple Silicon Macs and they haven't gotten that working yet. I have in fact been waiting on this feature for a few years now as I want to use a MBP with the lid closed and two monitors plugged in, but currently only the HDMI works and not most USB-C functionality. This is not at all the norm in x86_64 land where more normal hardware is used. I'm still using a ThinkPad T440p and thinking about getting a T14 gen 5 due to the MBP I got a few years ago not being satisfying/fun to use, comparatively.
As for Discord and AirPods and such, the more proprietary stuff you need, the worse time you'll have. Though I just saw something in the news that might help with the AirPods. Check out LibrePods.
I would suggest trying something other then Asahi linux! I know that their support with Mac systems is near unbeatable. But it does still tend to have some hiccups. Especially with M3+ systems.
I know that "try a different distro" is a often (user biased) and imo bad answer. But in the case of Asahi as awesome as their work is they are climbing a different mountain compared to the rest of linux development.
I've dual-booted Arch and Windows for about 16 years. I always kept Windows around for gaming, and the occasional "doesn't support Linux" workflow.
For a few years where I didn't game I found myself almost exclusively in Linux. But then I spent the last 5-6 years stuck between the two as my PC use for daily tasks dwindled, I stopped working on side projects, and I started gaming a bit more.
I hated trying to split my time between them. Most of what I used a PC for was the browser, so I could just stay in Windows most of the time. I wanted to use Linux, but rebooting to use a web browser just didn't make sense. As a result I would accidentally go 2-3 months without ever booting Arch. As a result, I had a couple of major updates that didn't go smoothly.
I wanted to use Linux, though. I like having a customized WM, I like having so many useful tools at my disposal, etc. I just like using Linux, in spite of the occasional technical complexity.
In the last couple months I rebuilt my PC and a major requirement was that I get set up to game in Linux as much as possible. I even bought an AMD card to ensure smooth driver support.
I'm so incredibly thankful that Steam has made gaming not just possible, but relatively simple. Installation was simple. My single-player games seem well supported so far. And most importantly, Steam has made it obvious they're committed to this line of support, so this isn't some hero effort that will bit rot in a couple years.
I still have to reboot to play competitive games, due to their anti-cheat requirements, but that's less of a problem, I'll take what I can get.
There are still glaring bugs, omissions, and regressions in Windows 11 that just are not getting attention because Microsoft is 100% focused on AI instead of improving their product.
I have a MacBook Pro now. I get by. Window management drives me absolutely insane, but this is the best laptop hardware, performance, and battery life I've ever had. Windows is now shoved into a VM that I pop open only when I explicitly need it for a few work things (primarily Excel and PowerBI Desktop).
I'd go back to Windows again the moment Microsoft starts respecting their users again, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
I just felt like I wasn't using the PC for anything but gaming so why run Fedora with FDE and everything, just go full gaming mode on it, keep it simple, and the experience has been great so far.
This will be like the netbook wave, or OS/2 Windows compatibility layer, a celebration until Microsoft decides the show has had its time.
Valve really should push for native Steam OS builds.
Then there are enough shennigangs they might think of regarding APIs, legal actions against Proton, or whatever their creating minds can conjure.
In contrast, Microsoft have pushed the pricing of Game Pass up significantly and are in the process of unifying the next Xbox platform with PC.
Given that, I don't think it's consistent with Microsoft's current strategy to make selling games to gamers harder for the benefit of the OS division.
Now, that conclusion does depend on Microsoft acting rationally, which isn't a given, so I'll also add that I don't think it's actually an option for them: win32 already exists, the cat is out of the bag. And the cat can't get back in the bag to be extended/extinguished unless Microsoft convinces everyone to move to Windows 11.
We'll see for sure, especially if the Gabecube sells well. Right now, SteamOS is still not among the largest players, when looking at units sold. I'm sure Microsoft will ramp something up when it gets more popular.
In case you missed the memo, WinRT last reboot was to make it work on Win32 side, and more recent COM APIs are mostly WinRT variants.
Really interested to see where Valve goes with the new hardware. I love my Steam Deck, so I have faith they'll do a good job.
it's made me want to get into core boot and find Linux laptop hardware that hums along.
Enable the proprietary drivers if you have Nvidia graphics during the install.
Install system updates when the pop up appears on first boot.
Install Steam from the Ubuntu App Center.
Open Steam, install a game and play it. Most of them will work without issue unless it has invasive kernel anti-cheat.
The install-to-game time on Linux is actually substantially lower than it is on Windows now.
Windows 11 has been fine for me, I don't interact with it much other than seeing it for a bit when launching games.
I honestly wouldn't mind giving Linux a go, the only downside is I made the mistake of buying an nvidia graphics card, I'm not sure how much of a pain it is these days but last time I tried it was a bit of a nightmare - the general wisdom at the time was to go with an AMD card.
Though I will say I have encountered issues in the past with a Linux gaming computer which experienced issues with the Nvidia drivers anytime I decided to update the distro (I was using Kubuntu at the time).
It really feels like evertying is ligned up for the year of Linux in the Living room and yeah, it's really good to see.
I've only had to fully reinstall once every ~2 years or so, and it's usually due to some problem with my DE/system not booting that I can't be fucked to troubleshoot. That's mostly my fault for running GNOME on a rolling distro. I just back up my home dir to the storage drive and I'm back up and running in less than an hour. Other than that, it just continues to work and I can be reasonably assured that if I don't touch it, it'll be fine.
oh no
I don't know if I would use the word approachable
IMHO, stuff is moving fast enough in the Linux gaming world that any distro built around taking its time to update things (i.e. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint) is liable to be a bad time. Anecdotally, I've found that redirecting new users interested in gaming away from those distros has dramatically improved their satisfaction.
Based on the marketing it seems to run a sandboxed copilot instance that can impersonate the user to take actions, with their permission?
Something like "hey copilot install Putty"? and it does it?
I can relate to the reluctance to adopt AI features into the OS -- but I would also like to understand how they work and any utility they might provide.
I agree that a "good" implementation of agentic AI can have a lot of benefits, to casual users and power users both. But do I have any trust in Microsoft being the company to ship a "good" implementation? Hell no.
Windows has been getting more and more user hostile for years now, to casual users and power users both. If there's anyone at Microsoft who still cares about good UX, they sure don't have any decision-making power. And getting AI integration right is as much a UX issue as it is a foundation model issue or an integration hook issue.
From the MS support doc:
> "An agent workspace is a separate, contained space in Windows where you can grant agents access to your apps and files so they can complete tasks for you in the background while you continue to use your device. Each agent operates using its own account, distinct from your personal user account. This dedicated agent account establishes clear boundaries between agent activity and your own, enabling scoped authorization and runtime isolation. As a result, you can delegate tasks to agents while retaining full control, visibility into agent actions, and the ability to manage access at any time."
MS showed a little bit of something like it at Ignite yesterday, but for enterprise automations, the AI spun up a Windows 365 instance, did some stuff on the web, then disposed of it when it was done.
My concern is that the Windows Credential itself doesn’t have a ton of value (opening windows apps) but the browser cookie jar (e..g Edge or Chrome) , which the Credential unlocks, has tremendous value — and threats.
The core problem is lack of granularity in permissions. If you allow the agent to do browser activities as your user, you can’t control which cookie / scope it will take action on.
You might say “buy me chips” and it instead logs into your Fidelity account and buys $100k worth of stock.
Let’s see how they figure out the authorization model.
I'm mostly playing MtG: Arena and it works like a charm.
I could even install Steam via the package manager.
Windows 94.84% -0.56%
Windows 11 64 bit 63.57% +0.53%
Windows 10 64 bit 31.14% -1.04%
OSX 2.11% +0.20%
Linux 3.05% +0.37%
In other words, for Steam users who waited to switch to Windows 11, half left Windows and most people who left went to Linux.
NVIDIA and AMD can decide to undermine it if Linux doesn't yield enough profits for them.
Even if only one of them undermines linux, linux gaming might have trouble progressing and game developers might just ignore Linux gaming.
Microsoft could also undermine it if they really wanted.
Personally, I don't think it will get worse than it is now. Some games are locked to some platforms, be that Windows, PS5 or Switch, and many great games can be enjoyed in Linux.
Can you elaborate what you mean, here? AMD has Mesa drivers for Vulkan 1.2+ compliance; their GPUs will support DXVK and Proton until the hardware breaks, even if they quit today. Nvidia's situation is slightly precarious, but the community has Nouveau and NOVA as hedged bets against them going rogue.
And I can't see why they would ever go rogue - supporting Proton is so easy that many manufacturers do it by accident. Remember, even Apple Silicon supports DXVK on Asahi, despite Apple neither documenting their GPU, writing Vulkan drivers for it or designing their raster hardware around open standards. I'd be shocked if AMD or Nvidia managed to make a card that runs DirectX but refuses OpenGL and Vulkan bytecode in any form.
Honestly I don't have to think too much about it, and that's the way I like it, for a gaming system. It works, it gets updates, it lets me install games, they run ok.
Started with Linux Mint then Debian/Ubuntu, tried some others too but ultimately just stuck with Ubuntu
1. Linux decades ago was not "new user friendly"
2. Wine and PLayOnLinux was all we had with endless problem, and heavy dependency on Windows files like DirectX and libraries
3. Windows dominated the gaming market
4. 3D GPU driver was non-existent
The single reason why gaming on Linux now is better than Windows, has one name: Valve
SteamDeck/SteamOS changed everything, the whole Wine process is managed by the OS and no longer by the user. You may need to change the Proton version, that is all. That also pushed GPU drivers to be better supported on Linux.
Valve single handled what gaming on Linux has become. I run Mint Cinnamon Linux, and even tho it is not "SteamOS", I can play Steam games just fine.
Microsoft terrible takes and AI, is also pushing gamers over to Linux, better FPS on Linux than Windows. The only restriction is kernel anti-cheat software that only runs on Windows, but many games do not use that and the ones that do use it like COD(dead game), BF, etc, isn't everybody cup of tea.
If it wasn't for Valve, Linux gaming would still be as dead as it has always been.
To make it more perfect, users that use their computer for browsing, writing docs (LibreOffice), etc, can be done on Linux for free.
You as a computer user in 2025, you have little to no excuse to try Linux, but try something good like Mint Cinnamon Linux that is extremely new user friendly, good for browsing, good for development work, solid for gaming, video editing is chef kiss, etc, etc. Avoid Ubuntu (they are going proprietary).
Doesn't COD have like over 100 million monthly active users?
I've been utterly astounded by Proton in the last year. Nearly every game I have run has run just about perfectly, often better than on Windows, and I'm able to play them with an Xbox One pad no less.
Valve absolutely deserves a lot of credit, but I do think that the constant effort from the Wine people should get a lot of credit as well. Wine has had constant progress for three decades, with every release getting a little better. I haven't worked on it, but I suspect 90+% of the work with Wine is figuring out all the weird edge cases that have popped up on Windows throughout the years, which is often slow, tedious, thankless work. Valve did a lot of work but there's a reason they opted to improve Wine instead of writing Proton from scratch.
Steam Proton makes the whole process painless, you only select which Proton version to run, and that info can be obtained from ProtonDB if you encountered any issue, it is beautiful.
As for Linux, even emulators works like never before. I could never get PS4 emulator to work on Windows, I got PS4, X360, GameCube, and a bunch of other emulators running on Linux like I couldn't believe it.
You can do the same from within SteamOS itself, you just install an app, select the emulator and you ready which is far easier than me doing this from from Linux.
I just want to give credit where credit is due, because a lot of this wouldn’t be possible without the hard work of the Wine people. “Shoulders of giants” and whatnot.
Knowing nothing about how to configure it, I installed it with the graphical installer, booted into a tty, installed claude-code, checked the config files into git, and proceeded to vibe-code a basic sway (now niri) environment to see what it would feel like.
A month later, my NixOS environment is so much better than my heavily optimized macOS environment that I sheepishly use it inside a VM on macOS (UTM) or VNC to my desktop machine so I can use it from my bed.
LLMs really open the doors of desktop Linux since you can git clone all of your deps locally (your window manager, keepassxc, waybar, your apps, nixpkgs, home-manager, even the linux kernel, etc., etc.) and the LLM can dig into source code and web search to do things for you or debug issues. And NixOS adds a level of observability into what's going on since any changes show up in git-diffed config files.
If anyone is like me and used macOS because you used to use Linux but couldn't be bothered anymore when you'd run into a rough edge, you might find it fun to use NixOS + claude-code (or equivalent) running in ~/nix-config.
But: you will have issues.
I finished my desktop setup last night. The only thing I did was enable SSH on a clean NixOS install and setup sudo settings for CC. After that I used my NAS CC instance to SSH to the desktop and bootstrap an "idiomatic NixOS install of Claude Code". From there, every change on my NixOS desktop has been via LLM.
I keep lazygit open at my nix config root and periodically press "e" to open modified files with neovim to scope them out.
But other than that I barely open the nix config files since, unless I happen to remember a string to grep for in vim to get me where I would want to be, it's faster to type a prompt to claude and then go back to whatever I'd prefer to be doing.
It's also sobering to have claude build a whole TUI or GTK4 GUI, things I used to look forward to doing myself from scratch up until this year. I have some polished TUIs/GUIs for random things like managing sway/niri monitors or managing blocky logs, and it almost feels pointless to share them online like I used to because you can just vibe-code them yourself. And any of the iterative polish I've had to do now is just going to be next year's vibe-coded one-shot.
But I try not to think about that last paragraph too much...
Not once in initial setup or first week of use did it use dark patterns to try to trick or force me into something I don’t want to do.
A good deal of VSTs run in Wine already, Ableton works, Bitwig works...
In any case, it's really great to see Linux overcoming its final major hurdle for a lot of technical people to dump Windows: Gaming compatibility.
I tried Bazzite, but I'm just not a fan of how everything is installed as a flatpak. It might be more secure and allow for easy rollbacks and stuff, but it limits what apps are allowed to do by default. The main issue that caused for me is that the 1Password Firefox extension was not able to communicate with the main 1Password process. Maybe I could have tinkered with it using Flatseal, but that feels like such a hack.
Bazzite, being an atomic distro, is kind of hard to compare to. For basic use-cases like running just software available in Flathub, it is incredibly solid and easy to use. If I were choosing a Linux distro for a non-technical family member, I would go with an atomic Fedora distro and be completely confident they could get things done without breaking anything. However, if your needs are more advanced, you're going to need to be ready to relearn a lot (e.g. using containers for development), since atomic distros are a big paradigm shift from standard ones. This isn't a bad thing, just something to be ready for.
win10 was a great restart somehow but 11 transition was (and is) alienating many people
I tried various Linux flavours. Starting with Ubuntu. From memory, I tried Mint, Fedora, Slackware, Manjaro, etc. I cannot remember when I last tried a Distro. It likely ended by 2010. Since I have just stuck with Debain.. for both client and server installs.
I said goodbye to Windows a few weeks ago.. fully. While Windows has served my purpose in certain ways, I have always been critical of Microsoft and their practices. I would agree that Windows 11 is a solid OS.. its the "features" added on top that slows it down.
This time, I have the latest version of Debian. No dual-boots.. nothing else! Despite being aware of Steam's Linux support for some time, now.. I actually gave it a shot and suprised how easy it was. I then tried Heoric (Epic) Launcher and just as easy!
It probably helped that my laptop is an AMD. I normally hear effort and difficulty with nVidia but I did not have much trouble 10 odd years ago. Not sure what its like to properly work today.
So far I have tried 4 games. 2 modern games, and two 90's games. All of the worked! Whiles the 90's games had their issues at times.. this mostly refers to using a gamepad.
The 2 new games (sure this is not a good experiment for all games) have worked flawlessly!
Honestly.. in my opinion.. installing Debian appears exactly the same as it was back in 2010.. maybe more. I rarely had issues. It's just this time I am able to play Steam and Epic games and installing dotnet is easy on Linux.
Let's not forget the work Steam are doing. We have a new Steam Machine. While being marketed as a new games console it's still a PC... and new users will try it out. For the younger generation, it might increase the Linux skills and spread wider adoption.
The only thing Linux has against it is time. Time is something humans lack... we lack patience! I knew that one day Linux would get better games support. It was possible even back in 2008. I managed to get GTA3:ViceCity working through Wine.
Mark my words. Linux will gain marketshare. The only part I am concerned about is infiltration of corporations jumping all in. It's not the kernel I am concerned about as it's protected by the GPL.. it's the larger corporations selling their products which the average user adopts and eventually becomes "required" software in most distributions.
The best way to understand this is, in an alternate universe, Microsoft drops Windows and encourages everyone to use Linux. How do you think they would get involved. Just think about that.
Just you're kind of SOL if you want to play anything that isn't based on some flavour of Quake or Unreal engine.
Well, that's different now. See? Told you. Faster, smoother, less crashy.
Oh, you want Microsoft Office? Yeah well you're probably using Office 365 these days anyway. Everything's in a browser. No, it looks just the same. Edge? It's less crashy in Linux, weirdly.
AutoCAD? Nah. Still SOL.
Sadly, they won’t (not can’t…) ship the flag in EOS (née EAC) that enables anti-cheat support on Linux. It would work, but they just don’t have the resources to support a whole other family of OSes.
So, between that and the abject murder of WMR for my Reverb G2, I’m stuck on Win10 for the foreseeable.
Honestly, I'm just surprised it took this long, and this much end-user abuse, to get things to where even casual enthusiasts are realizing that Microsoft (any proprietary vendor really) is NOT their friend, and looking long and hard at giving Linux a go. But I'm glad y'all are here.
I suspect the combination of modern Linux + + Steam + LLM to troubleshoot and learn may see more conversions like myself
Many of the Arch or Fedora derivatives fit this paradigm well.
Since I am a software person I have become the person that my parents call for IT help, and increasingly I have grown pretty frustrated with Windows. I have been trying to convince them to move to Zorin or Mint or something or to buy a Mac, and they will not yield.
In a bit of fairness to them, the biggest issue is MS Office; they did recently try LibreOffice and the MS Office online, and they had shortcomings with both. Since I have been wholly unsuccessful at getting any modern Office to work on Linux (without virtualization), so now I don’t have a case for them to move.
Which is annoying, because I really hate having to deal with it.
I am drawing a blank over what my mom was complaining about but I do recall that it was valid. Something to do with Word.
It's tough for me to give full rebuttals to any of this, because I don't really use any WYSIWYG stuff for documents anymore and just use Typst or LaTeX/Pandoc for everything now. That works fine on Linux but of course that's understandably a non-starter for most people.
At this point I think the only thing I could realistically do to get them to switch, and I doubt it would be successful, would be to convince them that Winboat would be fine.
I recently vibe coded a voice typing software (using Parakeet — your best bet is probably Handy though).
It works in my terminal. (I just changed my paste shortcut to Ctrl+V
I can now literally speak software into existence!
I made a thin wrapper around my llm() function I can pipe text into from Bash.
This allows me to make many other thin LLM wrappers, such as one that summarizes then contents of entire directories.
I have a thing called Jarvis inspired by a Twitter post, where I ask it to do anything in bash, and it just does that.
I wouldn't exactly say it's useful (I am unemployed) but I am kind of having my mind blown a little bit.
The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
Thing is, we can talk faster then most of us can type.
Voice + Programming is slow because of all the special symbols. But voice + vibe coding? The ability to tell your LLM to do tasks, while you focus on other parts of the code, without the need to switch tabs/windows.
What about "change the color green on this element (html page), where my mouse is pointing"... Annoying with keyboard if you need to switch windows, very possible with voice.
And LLMs are very forgiving for mistakes, unlike if you want to voice program where every symbol needs to be accurate.
People do not realize that programming as we know it, is going to change.
I saw yesterday that I had been approaching software incorrectly. It feels futuristic because it's so fast, but it's still linear. One guy making one thing at a time (with some help from the computer).
But software can now be made so rapidly, that the bottleneck is actually curation. You can now generate a hundred ideas for software and a prototype for each one in the time it takes to make some coffee.
Going through all of it is the part that doesn't scale, it's bottlenecked by the individual. That's the reward function, right? Taste, discernment.
At this point software can grow itself, it can mutate, and it can combine with other software. I think building is entirely the wrong metaphor now.
I think a better metaphor would be a genetic algorithm. You try a bunch of stuff and see what works. Then you combine the best parts.
Yep ... thinking the old way to make software is going to end.
In the past, we made a framework, then sold that framework for clients. But we always had the issue where client X wanted Y features, client Z want X features ... And over time the framework bloats, you get issues with features that may conflict between clients. Then you start to split the framework maybe for client Z because its too much different. Now your have issues when features or bug need to be fixed...
In todays LLM world, i see it more like custom software per client, with "instruction files"...
You make a custom framework for a client, with the AI writing it based upon a instruction file, that is supplemented by custom requirements for the client. Its written for that client and only that client.
The next client, same ... the next same. If a client sees a feature that they want, you instruct the LLM to update the framework for that client using again, a addendum instruction file.
If you instruction file was written correctly, bugs are going to be on the low end, and most clients do not need constant updates to their software.
A client wants to go to a different company and can not get the source files? That company needs the database files + the original design / analysts and the new company rebuild it again into a new version.
So ironically, we are going to, to a world where custom software is very normal, and cheap.
> I think a better metaphor would be a genetic algorithm. You try a bunch of stuff and see what works. Then you combine the best parts.
Yep, put that in practice last week.
I wrote a database in barely a week and half time, and was "slow" because i made like 5 different versions playing around with clustering, different parsers, more advanced each time (regex, token, lexer-ast) and tons of other features.
When i did not like a version, o LLM, rebuild it using my new updated instructions. O, i do not like the parser as it had issues, lets make a more advance one.
We are not talking toy DB ... full insert/update/delete, joins, CTE, Window function, SubQueries, Index's, alias, ... you name it, all working correctly. If i used my instruction file today, i can make you a custom DB in a day. Two if you need something custom. If somebody told me this 6 months ago, i call you crazy lol
Normally, when you build something, you spend days, weeks into it, especially if its advanced. Your reluctant to just tear it down and restart from zero. Or pull a important component out to rebuild from zero. Because sunk cost ... Now its just a half a day work, a day at worst, and you redid what will have taken you weeks or months. It really allows for a lot more experimenting, finding what fits better as time becomes different vs you on your little keyboard typing for ages, rebuilding, making tests, again and again. When a LLM does it 10, to 100 times faster.
For somebody who is a senior programmers, your actually the most easy to adapt and get the most out of LLMs (and ironically often the most resistant to change to using LLMs). Programmers that do not adapt to the new, are going to be left behind.
AI chat windows is the COBOL joke on mankind.
The general rule here is that you use it for what it's good for it's actually really good.
The "typing into my terminal" is mostly for interacting with Claude Code. I wish that part worked on my phone.
Although I do use the voice typing tons for text chat, ironically.