https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

Ignoring unauthorized copying

… Bill Gates said “And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

The practice allowed Microsoft to gain some dominance over the Chinese market and only then taking measures against unauthorized copies. In 2008, by means of the Windows update mechanism, a verification program called “Windows Genuine Advantage” (WGA) was downloaded and installed. When WGA detects that the copy of Windows is not genuine, it periodically turns the user’s screen black. This behavior angered users and generated complaints in China with a lawyer stating that “Microsoft uses its monopoly to bundle its updates with the validation programs and forces its users to verify the genuineness of their software”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

… the documents identified open-source software, and in particular the Linux operating system, as a major threat to Microsoft’s domination of the software industry, and suggested tactics Microsoft could use to disrupt the progress of open-source software.

I would recommend Arch and derivatives (supposedly EndeavourOS is Arch but better for beginners, I’ve never used it though) or NixOS, they’re highly configurable & have good package managers.

I would not recommend debian or it’s derivatives because apt package manager is way worse than pacman.

Also while Arch is a rolling release OS, it’s not really unstable, it’s not like it constantly breaks with updates.

I’ve used Linux Mint a bit at a relative’s house so they can have an easier & more “stable” GUI experience, but there weren’t all the packages I needed on the GUI software manager, and even some packages that existed didn’t want to install until I used the terminal anyway.

And as I mentioned earlier apt is just a worse package manager than pacman so it’s a pain to use.

Especially since I was using plain Bash without good tab completion unlike Fish or Zsh, which makes the much longer apt commands that much more annoying to type in compared to just -Syu -S -Ss -Qs -Rns.

And it’s not just that the commands and package names are better and shorter on pacman compared to apt, but there’s more packages (and I’m not even counting AUR).

For example, on Linux Mint I were going to install wine-mono and wine-gecko, which you’re going to want if you plan to play windows games outside steam proton, but they didn’t exist and I had to follow the https://wiki.winehq.org/Mono and https://wiki.winehq.org/Gecko installation guides instead of just downloading 2 binaries through pacman.

And tbh I eventually gave up on wine-mono and just got the .net runtimes I needed through winetricks.

If you’re really supper worried and paranoid then instead of Arch you can use NixOS, it’s whole shtick is that you can have multiple versions and always roll back to before anything broke.

no one needs to play any game

it’s just a matter of how willing someone is to compromise on their principles for entertainment

I love fish.

Sometimes I wonder why people think using the terminal is so hard, then every once in a while when I’m not on my home PC and have to use Bash I get reminded of why

I’ve been meaning to try zsh since it can supposedly do everything fish can while still being posix compliant, but I’ve never felt the need to not be using fish so I just never got around to it

NEXON…

Well just look at the youtube sub on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1792um0/let_that_sink_in_before_you_defend_a_billion/

99% of comments are youtube apologists

Hopefully most of those are bot comments & the mods are probably youtube employees

I was thinking ME trilogy as well, but while ME1 is a great game it doesn’t really hold up in terms of graphics today. ME2 and ME3 still look fine though.

I don’t like any DEs, tbh both KDE Plasma and Cinnamon felt worse than Win7 DE. And I’ll never ever even try Gnome

But I absolutely love WMs, I use i3wm

Yeah. I switched from world to lemm.ee because world just seems to be too willing to use censorship.

From what I can tell lemm.ee is one of the instances that does the least de-federating and censorship so that’s why I switched to there, but I’ve seen talks about it becoming an invite only instance in the future so if someone is not sure then imo you should join now.

I wasn’t saying it can be done, thing is the time and effort to make it work is way too much…

If you think it’s too much time and effort for you, that’s fair enough.

I obviously don’t think it is or I wouldn’t do it. Also something to note is it gets easier and faster with time as you have more things already installed and thus more games run out of the box, as well as just having the experience and know-how of what to do.

and the end result tends to be poor.

I’m not having poor end results compared to when I were using Windows, so that’s just a you thing.

Only real notable fault for linux gaming is online multiplayer games with anti-cheat, and luckily for me I don’t play those anyway.

Well one thing that hasn’t been working that comes to mind is Frosty Tool Suite, a mod manager for Frostbite engine games, so I was unable to replay Dragon Age Inquisition with new mods on Linux.

That however isn’t a game itself but a 3rd party mod manager, and technically I could get it too work by either using a NTFS formatted hard drive or some other tricks, but it seemed too much of a pain to deal with so I’ve left that on the back-burner.

assuming that you’re running WINE through the terminal you’ll see if there’s any error and usually it’s pretty simple to find what you need to make the game run (if it doesn’t already)

for starters get all the gst/gstreamer packages including the plugin ones (libav, good/bad/ugly, etc.) and make sure to have both 64 and 32bit versions.

get wine-mono (or directly install .net runtimes in your wineprefix, easily done with winetricks) and wine-gecko.

after that you basically just get whatever .dll or vcrun stuff as needed (following error messages), most easily done through winetricks

I will admit though, while using Linux Mint (instead of Arch Linux which I use on my home PC) at a relative’s house I had some trouble at first because a) apt package manager sucks, b) the names of the packages were different, and c) wine-mono and wine-gecko packages didn’t exist so I had to follow these instructions https://wiki.winehq.org/Mono & https://wiki.winehq.org/Gecko

also just like how protondb is a really good resource to look up how well games will run on steam proton and tips on how to run them, there’s https://appdb.winehq.org/

just mount the .iso (if there is one) and run the installer (e.g. setup.exe) with WINE

Neovim

Neat, we need more games like AW and Wargroove

Advance Wars By Web

Advance Wars is an old turn based strategy game, for the GBA (Game Boy Advance), and AWBW is a fan site to play AW online.

I’ve gotten pretty into it ever since Advance Wars Reboot was announced, and being able to play it in the web browser means I frequently find time to play…

Ironically I don’t play the actual AW Remake because in classic nintendo style the multiplayer is extremely lacking, only being able to play with players added to friends list, not being able to upload/download maps except to friends, and extremely limited map sizes for online maps

The vast majority of people are neither lawyers nor judges.

I think the people the laws apply to should be able to make sense of those laws or the laws are no good.

Have you seen the video? The shooter getting “pranked” had both hands occupied carrying a paper bag and was being followed and harassed for over 10 seconds while repeatedly telling the prankster to stop.

It does seem like an overreaction to shoot immediately instead of trying to threaten first but I’m not sure.

I would’ve fully sided with the shooter if they’re weren’t in a mall with other people around and probably security right around the corner, because then he would’ve been much more at risk if he doesn’t shoot and the prankster tries to rob him or w/e.

Skyrim but it’s an MMORPG (and I don’t mean some shitty WoW clone with an Elder Scrolls skin draped over it like ESO)

I never figured out how to disable DXVK so eventually I just made a 2nd wine prefix without DXVK for games I run in OpenGL.

However if your GPU doesn’t even support Vulkan then you shouldn’t be using DXVK at all so why would you not want to disable dxvk?

While fandom sucks (although I think it used to be fine before the redesign many years ago) and game companies/publishers are cheap, I still think 3rd party wikis is going to better, even shitty ones like fandom, because guess what?

Just like every other ‘live service’ (or even just old games!?! if you’re Ubisoft) everything will be fine and dandy until one day some suit decides to shut down the wiki to cut down on costs and all that information and community work gets flushed down the toilet.

With that said, instead of them making some wiki website, it’s nice when games lets you look up information in the game itself, without having to open the web browser and going to some wiki.