Plastic cases, discs, etc are expensive and degrade over time. Consoles will break down. 50 years from now there’ll be too much history to keep making copies of everything worth saving. If we do want a video game preservation law, make it digital.
Emulation and piracy should be legal for games older than ~20 years, or if the parent company goes under. Online games should be required to make an offline mode patch before shutting down.
As a related example, my parents have a bunch of bookshelves packed with everything they bought over the years. And as a kid I never touched any of it because the books had become all gross and yellowed. Physical game archives will last a couple decades longer but in the end it’ll be the same result.
didnt even think about that… but how do university libraries for example then keep up their valuable - or even more interesting - their non valuable old inventory? Never thought that degration was THAT potent
CDs and DVDs are digital media. There is no degradation of the content when you convert a fragile physical disk into a dumped ISO, and the dumped ISO can be stored on an arbitrarily large number of devices. Stuff like physical books or analog media (vinyl records, for example) are worth caring about physical degradation for, but a “physical copy” of a PC software disc is just a more fragile way to store the exact same ones and zeroes that can be stored on actually resilient media.
Only one small mistake I see here. Assuming Nintendo will say please. The same amount of time it takes them to say please, you’ll blink and be in a courtroom facing piracy charges.
Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but Hunt: Showdown is a pvpve experience set in a fictionalized horror-themed 1900s old west.
The guns have few shots and are very slow to reload. Often your best strategy is to move very slowly and deliberately, looking closely for any movement from other players, taking care not to make any errant noises. Every single sound you make, including right clicking to aim down sights, is audible to your opponent if they’re close enough. One good shot is enough to down someone.
The result is a unique experience that can hit both extremes: agonizingly slow build up of anticipation, or a fast paced chase through the woods to cut off an escape.
Also the sound in that game is absolutely top tier. It’s very easy to pinpoint a location of a sound, making noise a high priority while moving around.
I’ve bought singleplayer games with loot boxes and no anticheat and just used cheat engine to get the ingame currency for them. I think I’m doing my part.
Does that really count? As far as I know, the golden keys mechanic was just a way to get some good gear. It wasn’t exclusive gear, and you could get it just by playing the game.
Right, but the fifa series afaik makes most of its money by selling packs of cards with players in them. Packs and players that you can get by just playing. But they still sell those packs for $$, so why wouldn’t it count? Afaik, that’s one of the main culprits besides counter strike that are named when talking about loot boxes
Borderlands the same, you can buy random gear with cash. I guess it’s less fomo and less abusive, but they’re still literal loot boxes that they sell for money
You’re not though, you are still buying those games. Go the extra mile and pirate them if you really feel the need to play games containing loot box mechanics while trying to “stick it to them”
The Gatcha system is why I never finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The first game was phenomenal… But the second game required a gatcha system to unlock new party members. There were even quests that were locked behind certain ultra-rare party members. It’s an entirely single player game.
I won’t be doing pretty much anything about it. I have 10 pro, I don’t really give a shit about what Microsoft thinks I should do. My computer is behind a firewall, and bluntly, it’ll be a while before the security issues become such a problem that I need to go and upgrade.
However. I already did the legwork. I went out and upgraded the hardware TPM 1.2 in my system to TPM 2.0, and I picked up some (relatively cheap) Windows 11 pro product keys. I can upgrade if I want.
I also have access to W10 LTSC, so I can always pivot to that if I need to.
I get the security and other concerns with Windows 10. I do, but the windows 11 changes, to me seem like they’re changes for the sake of things being changed. Windows 10’s user experience was already quite good, apart from the fact that every feature release seemed to have the settings moved to a different location (see above about making changes for the sake of making changes). IMO, as a professional sysadmin and IT support, the interface and UX changes have made Windows, as a product, worse; it is by far the worst part of the upgrade process and I don’t know why they thought any of it was a good idea. I also hate what M$ has done with printers, but I won’t get started on that right now.
For all the nitpicking I could do, Windows was, for all intents and purposes, exactly what it needed to be, between Windows 7 and 10. There hasn’t been any meaningful progress in the OS that’s mattered since x86-64 support was added. Windows 10 32 bit was extremely rare, I don’t think I ever saw it (where W7 was a mixed bag of 32/64 bit). Having almost everyone standardized on 64 bit, and Windows 10, gave a predictability that is needed in most businesses. The professional products should not follow the same trends as the home products. If they want to put AI shovelware and ads into the home products, fine. Revamp the vast majority of the control panel into the settings menu, sure. But leave the business products as-is. By far the most problems that people have with Windows 11 that I hear about, relate to how everything changes/looks different, and/or having problems navigating the “new look” or whatever the fuck.
Microsoft: you had a good thing with Windows 10, and you pissed it all away when you put out the crap that is Windows 11.
Stop moving shit around, making controls less useful, and stop making it look like the UX was designed by a 10 year old. Fuck off.
If it only was just moving things around. The control panel has been further castrated while the settings app is just bad. Something about their CPU scheduler changes straight up broke VMware, and obviously MS is in no hurry to fix it resp. cooperate with VMware, being a competitor.
Rounded corners? I couldn’t care less. It’s a functional downgrade, though.
Install size has gone up, its sluggish on my surface pro 7, its constantly wanting to grab my attention to put towards their other products, windows 10 was bad as it seemed to be ms’s first iteration of their now billboard, but at least I could offline install, make a local account and mostly be left alone. And windows 11 is aweful for its kiddy gloves.
While I get why they want to do all online accounts, no. Just no.
Ironically, for business users, online accounts are basically the way the industry is moving. Some integration with Azure active directory (now known as “Entra ID” - a useless rebranding of the exact same product), you can connect systems using someone’s email, and it can tightly integrate with your work email account on Microsoft 365, and everything just kind of fits together.
This prevents admins from having to go and do prep/setup on each system and/or maintain a library of system images with all the standard settings for the organization, since connecting with AAD/Entra can also enroll the device into Intune and those policies are just as powerful, if not more powerful than what you can do with images and prep; just now is entirely automatic.
For home users, it’s less about the convenience of system management and more data harvesting of their clients. The irony is that a lot of the business versions still have an option to bypass the online account (usually by selecting an option that you will be joining a classic domain).
So business has the option and largely, business is moving away from it, and home users don’t, but that’s something that a large number of home users want.
The only thought I have on it is that: bitlocker is enabled by default on many newer versions of Windows, by signing in with your M$ account to the PC, those bitlocker keys are backed up. If you don’t use an online account, it’s up to you to back then up, and users either don’t do that, or do it in such a way that it’s ineffective, like saving the recovery key to the very drive that needs that key to unlock it in the event of a problem.
I’ve seen more than one person fall victim to their own lack of knowledge and understanding when bitlocker is enabled, and Windows update screws their boot sequence to the point where they need to do a recovery, which requires the recovery key, which they do not have. It basically makes all of their data inaccessible, and gigabytes of data, just from the people I’ve known affected by this, has already been lost as a result.
I hear what you’re saying, but, there have been some pretty significant improvements to Windows, generation after generation.
Windows 10 finally seemed like they were on the right (and hopefully final) track with the direction of the operating system. Probably the last big improvement was to bring basically everyone to 64 bit.
XP moved us from the 9x kernel to the NT kernel that’s used in Windows today. Vista introduced security features and driver updates that help to keep systems free from many common root kits. 7 brought in a very standard UI, that would be the basis for things going forward, 8/8.1 existed… Then 10 basically uplifted everyone to 64 bit as a default.
Of course this is far from a complete list.
What did W11 add that we didn’t have before? A TPM requirement? Ads? AI slop/shovelware/spyware?
You’re not wrong, and I agree in that it feels like W10 is where MS finally got it right.
However, hindsight is 20/20, and those sentiments were definitely not felt in the first few years after W10 was released. Once all the big issues were worked out and people figured out how to remove the bloat/spyware shit though, it was a solid OS. I still run it on my gaming PC (for now - tested some crucial programs last night on my laptop running LMDE6, great success)
What did W11 add that we didn’t have before? A TPM requirement? Ads? AI slop/shovelware/spyware?
W11 right now is essentially a shitty skin on top of W10, with all that extra shit. The kernel is still version 10.x.whatever FFS 😅. But SHINY INTERFACE and ONEDRIVE
I already switched to Bazzite Desktop and it’s been so good. I had some pains configuring somethings to my liking, but that was more due to me not being familiar with Linux. I’m never going back.
Well, I cannot comment about PopOS because I simply don’t know how it is, but Bazzite on desktop has been great. I didn’t need to install anything related to gaming because it already comes with everything on it.
Pretty much anything I needed is on the discovery store and it’s handled like the app store on Android, so no headache of messing it up with installations or worrying about updates. Although, Bazzite is an immutable OS so anything that you need to install that’s not on the store can be a headache.
Also, my computer is an old laptop, so I got a performance boost as the system feels way smoother now than with Windows.
About games, I played some indie games on Steam and Lutris and it worked flawlessly. But do note that for more recent systems, it appears to be some headaches, especially with NVIDIA graphics cards. I only play new games on streaming services, so I don’t have those problems. But I do have some problems with the streaming service using my 8BitDo controller, but it’s not related to the system, it’s related to the service’s bad drivers. When I stream the game using Steam, it’s smooth sailing.
I have used both Bazzite and PopOs for more then a year. They are both great distros. The reason I stuck with Bazzite is ease of updates since its immutable (I am lazy and updated PopOS only when I absolutely needed, and updating bunch of system packadges after a long time always causes something else to screw up). PopOS on the other hand gives you complete control over how to install things, and system configuration.
TLDR, if you are a power user, then decide based on if you want an immutable system or not. If you are not, you can just flip a coin and choose, Bazzite has better ease of use compored to PopOS on theory, but if you encounter issues PopOS will be easier to troubleshoot because it has more users / information online.
Already prepared everything for the jump. Switched MS Office for LibreOffice, and Outlook for Betterbird. Tested install, configuration and access to backups in a VM. Next vacation I take I’ll go for it. Mint is my choice of Distro, because of Steam/Gaming reasons. With the US being antagonistic, if not outright hostile, right now, and Microsoft having their disgusting Copilot AI Analysis Fingers in everything, it’s the rational choice I think.
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Thanks, that was some great insight. Especially the drawbacks regarding cinnamon. Those are 100% things no normal user should ever have to think or worry about.
Unfortunately not. Even as an IT person I can say I just wanna come home and boot up my games without hassle. Sure alot of things have been done with proton etc but still a massive amount of games don’t work without Soo much dang tweaking. I don’t have time for that especially with a job/being a single parent. I am highly interested in steamos though.
that’s also my excuse, but then again, i don’t even game that much. and i’m on rtx 3070 which will be getting too old soon for new games and new GPUs are just too expensive.
And god i hate w11. i mean it’s not that different than w10 but things just don’t work!
my logitech mouse stutters for no fucking reason, 10 year old games lag for no fucking reason. the whole windows lags after being waken up from sleep after a few days, i could go on and on. none of these problems existed on w10.
Why not dual-boot with steamos in that case? Sure, some things may not work out-of-the-box now, but work is constantly being done and at least won’t regress like the step from W10 to W11.
honestly, i’m just lazy. I would need to clear out one of my drives, i have three of them, 256gb, 512gb and 2tb. I keep windows on the smallest one. I would need to clear out the 512gb one and just get it done.
might get it done when w11 pisses me off a few more times :D
I had the same outlook before switching to Arch Linux, but honestly gaming on Linux is actually the lesser of my hassle. I can genuinely just grab msi files or exe files for games and feed them to Steam to get them playing via Proton. There’s only one (1!) game that I can’t play, and I’m 99% certain it’s a problem with my hardware, not my OS (Monster Hunter Wilds seems to hate my GPU and crash all the time). But even that was fixed with a mod (up until the latest update).
With that said, I’ve had a lot of hassle handling other things that are upstream of gaming so it’s not like you’re unreasonable in wanting an OS that is mostly stable. Then again, I made the decision to use Arch Linux, there’s distros that are simpler afaik.
Is Windows actually stable though? I used to have to use it for work, it’s a disgusting OS. Now I use Ubuntu for work, also disgusting, but it’s much better than Windows
“Mostly stable”. I’ve had my fair share of issues with Windows.
But one of the big benefit is that it is much easier to diagnose an issue on Windows, just by sheer volume of mainstream usage (IE users complaining about issues and seeking help online). Also, tech support won’t turn you around because you are on Linux, an OS they straight up refuse to support.
I thought the same, especially since I had tried Linux on my main several times since the 90s (my first dual boot was with Slackware).
Then maybe 8 months ago I did the transition, and installed Pop!OS since I’m a gamer plus I have a NVidia graphics card and didn’t want to go through the whole hassle related to that (Pop!OS has a version which already comes with those drivers).
Mind you, I did got a separate SSD for Linux and meanwhile added a new one, which is where my games directory is mounted and upgraded the root one to something a bit bigger,
So, this time around, what did I find out in about 8 months of use:
Once, I did had to boot into CLI mode and have apt do some failed upgrades, which included doing some kind of rebuild thing (you get instructions of what command to run when apt fails). This was due to a upgrade of the apt itself, I believe. All the other times it just boots to graphics mode (I’m using X rather than Wayland) or if it fails to start it (happened only a handful of time) you just reboot it.
In general even though I’ve done things like add and change hardware components, I have done little tweaking via CLI and some of it I did it because I’m just more comfortable with it or wanted so obscure options (for example, I wanted to mount the drive shared with Windows with a specific user and group, so I had to edit fstab). Except for the more obscure stuff there are UI tools for all management tasks and one doesn’t have to actually do much management and things almost always just work (for example, I changed graphics card - whilst staying with NVidia - and it just booted and worked, no tweaks necessary)
As for games, I use Steam for Steam Games and Lutris for all other game versions including GOG. Both have install scripts specific for each game, that configure Wine appropriately, so you seldom have to do anything but install, launch and play. That said in average I have had to tweak maybe 1 in 10 games. Further, about 1 in 20 I couldn’t get them to work. If you do install pirated games, then there is no install script and you do have to do yourself the whole process of figuring out which DLLs are missing and configure them in Wine using Winetricks (curiously, I ended up having to install a pirated game because the Steam version did not at all work, and the pirated version works fine). Note, however, that since I don’t do multiplayer games anymore, I haven’t had problems with kernel-level anti-cheat not working with Linux.
Interestingly, for gaming you have safety possibilities in Linux which you don’t in Windows: all my games launched via Lutris are wrapped in a firejail sandbox with a number of enhanced security restrictions and networking limited to only localhost, so there is no “phone home” for the games running via that launcher (Steam, on the other hand, is a different situation).
I still have the old Windows install in that machine, but I haven’t booted into it for many months now.
Compared to the old days (even as recently as a decade ago), nowadays there is way less need for tweaking in Linux in general and for gaming, even Windows games generally just install and run as long as you use some kind launcher which has game-specific install scripts (such as Steam and Lutries), but if you go out of the mainstream (obscure old games, pirated stuff) then you have to learn all about tweaking Wine to run the games.
If you have a desktop and the space to install the hardware, just get a 256GB SSD (which are pretty cheap) and install a gaming-oriented Linux distro (such as Pop!OS or Bazzite) there, separate from Windows and you can dual boot them using your BIOS as boot manager: since the advent of EFI, booting doesn’t go through a boot sector shared by multiple OSs anymore, so if you install each in their own drive then they don’t even see each other (you can still explicitly mount the Windows partitions in Linux from the Files app to access them, but otherwise they have no impact whatsever on booting and running Linux) and only the BIOS is aware of the multiple bootable OSs and you can get it to pop up a menu on boot (generally by pressing F8) to change which one you want to boot.
For the 20 or 30 bucks of a 256GB SSD it’s worth the try and if you’re comfortable with it you can later do as I did and add another bigger one just for the directory with you games (or your home directory, though granted to migrate your home like this you do have to use the CLI ;))
It’s the other way around. In general, you should choose Linux over Windows, and only if you really need it, use Windows. Also, if you need Windows just temporarily for some things, consider running it in a VM inside Linux just for those occasions.
Why - well, to keep it short, Linux’ main weaknesses for common users (difficulty, compatibility) are gradually fading away (they are already almost non-existent these days if you have mainstream hardware and a mainstream desktop distro like Mint, Fedora, Ubuntu) while Windows’ main disadvantages (forced stuff like cloud/AI integrations/ads, complete disregard of user’s privacy, increasing security issues due to outdated stuff being kept in the OS for backwards compatibility reasons, and many more things) keep on increasing at a rapid rate. Microsoft has a big business interest in getting all users locked into their cloud ecosystem, locked into a subscription with ever-increasing monthly fees, and give up control over their own computer and their digital privacy. They want users to pay them with their data AND monthly subscription fees. MS Office, for example, will probably not have a pure locally runnable version after 2029 (or around that year) anymore. This Microsoft train is heading towards that wall. And the speed is increasing. And tons of users are still inside that train. And Windows itself likely won’t be spared either. They want you to pay monthly for M365 and they will get their customers there, eventually.
Furthermore, by supporting Microsoft you’re supporting a very unethical company. They partner with big surveillance companies like Palantir and they are an active participant in the despicable ad-tech-industry (the industry that’s spying on literally everyone and buying/selling/storing tons of intimate user data even though it’s illegal in most countries), they partner with the military, law enforcement and other things. Also, they are a US company, and we all know how US politics is like these days, and this can have a big influence on how “trustworthy” US-based proprietary software will become in the near future. Since 2020, arguably no US-based proprietary software or online service is trustworthy anymore anyway, because of the CLOUD act, which is current law in the US - it means that the US government has access to any customer data stored by a US-based company, regardless of where on Earth they are storing it. This means the often-used claim “my data stored by that US company is safe because it’s in a European-based datacenter!!!11” is false since at least 2020, because MS is forced by US law to grant technical access to customer data to their government. Also, all previous “data transfer privacy agreements” between EU and US like Privacy Shield were all a joke and were dismantled in courts already. So there’s currently zero legal data protection - any data you send to a US company is theirs to do with as they please, essentially. And even if there were any meaningful legal data protections left, those big tech companies might still simply ignore that data protection law and only face minor or no fines at all.
So this is not a baseless claim. Just because I might keep some statements short doesn’t mean that there are no backing arguments. It’s a very good idea to reduce your dependency on Microsoft’s (or in general, US-based) proprietary software and services. For multiple reasons. Digital sovereignty has never been more important than these days. It has always been important but it was maybe too abstract in the past for many common users to realize. They are slowly starting to realize now that dependencies on proprietary software from any rogue regime (and the current US regime also falls into that category now) are not great to have. Plus, there is Microsoft on its own already putting ever-increasing user- and customer-hostile features into their products. It’s like being in an abusive relationship (as the one being abused). It’s just not good for you long-term.
So as a user, you should instead choose software which allows you to retain your digital sovereignty and control over your own computing, and simply not take all that abuse. Linux- or *BSD-based OSes with their open/transparent development models, fork-able/modifiable code bases, permissive licensing and essentially zero unwanted crap like adware, spyware, bloatware etc. offer exactly that. And because mainstream Linux distros have already become so easy to use these days, there are almost no reasons not to start using them.
All your arguments are logically sound and completely miss the main point.
The issue with Linux is not that “it’s getting there” in terms of user friendliness. It’s that it’s not there YET.
On top of that you have the community - just the other day I was searching to solve an issue, found a very similar thread, and the only reply the guy got was “here’s a link to the ArchWiki, welcome to the Linux world, you need to figure this out yourself”.
My 80 year old mother is not figuring out shit, she’s terrified when she has to copy a photo from a USB stick to here Photos folder.
Saying “Linux is fine for the massestoday” is just showing how detached many Linux users are from reality.
Took some time to settle, for various reasons, but I’m currently on Fedora Silverblue.
I tried some of its derivatives (Aurora, Bazzite), as well as OpenSuse, but came back to Fedora and Gnome because of various issue with KDE and OpenSuse asking for root password everywhere.
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