funny article but I love that this is their example
I just want to play Steam games, but that shit is impossible now. Fuck you, Donnie.
Valve has put a lot of R&D into making this literally the easiest thing to do on Linux. With most games it's literally plug and play.
edit:
Ubuntu, Kali Linux, Centox, Arch Linux, Debian. What’s the difference between all these? Nothing really. There’s just so many of them to confuse and divide the nerds who download them. And they love it. Look at them.
:data-laughing:
Valve has put a lot of R&D into making this literally the easiest thing to do on Linux. With most games it’s literally plug and play.
I like to believe it's because everyone at Valve are Linux weirdos that just really really wanted games to actually work on their OS.
Of course the real answer is the steam deck. Which, incidentally, is my best purchase in the last 12 months.
I legitimately would have bought a Steam machine instead of my current computer if they hadn't stopped making them. I loved the concept but the timing was just all wrong, since they came out when the PC I had was fine and I didn't want to spend on a new one until I had to.
Speaking of differences, for some reason a bunch of my games that work on Manjaro don't work on Arch, with or without proton :cat-confused:
Steam made a compatibility layer that makes Windows games work better on Linux. Lots of games that aren't made for Linux run great with it.
they forked the existing project wine and submit patches back to it. they didn't build it from scratch. the wine project is a herculean feat of engineering and the more I learn about it, the more shocked I am that it exists. Microsoft implemented the inverse translation layer in WSL2, which allows linux programs to run in windows - with a major caveat: wine executes native windows binaries whereas WSL still requires recompiling executables into a compatible format (last I checked anyways).
I think so far most of it has gotten upstreamed. at least, I can play most I try (not very many, granted... rarely in the mood) with plain wine. but my understanding from the project is that Valve tries to upstream fixes once they're deemed reliable enough and as long as they don't pose problems for other applications.
Admittedly for their specific use case proton goes way beyond wine
Actually no; proton is almost entirely wine. It's really like 90% the community (wine contributors over a span of three decades), 8% a german developer on his free time (the one that implemented dxvk, which is 99% of the magic in proton), and like 2% valve (and mostly because they started to pay said german dev).
This is the culmination of 30 years of community contributions, almost entirely by volunteers, without profit motive. Valve did very little beyond adding a bubblewrap-based sandbox to improve reliability a bit - though they did speed up things those past few years, admittedly.
Never heard of it before so I guess not. I'll tinker around a bit and see if it changes anything. Thanks.
Still weird that a bunch of games that should work natively on linux won't run on Arch but do on Manjaro. I've had different problems with Xcom 2, Shadowrun and Tales of Maj'eyal.
Edit: wow, Shadowrun works now. All I did was follow some instructions by GE. The game isn't even run through Wine, so I have no idea what I did.
Lmao the part about Linus actually wanting things to be obtuse and difficult is almost true I remember reading it somewhere else one time. He made an argument against handholding and forcing people to learn for themselves because it's good for the community to have skills.
I half agree with him when looking at how bad zoomers are with tech.
His argument is wrong because learning should be done within a social context, not individually. "The user should be able to figure it out by themselves" is how we got stuck with smartphone GUI hamburger bullshit instead of CLI.
CLI is extremely frustrating to figure out on your own and is a complete turnoff for the vast majority of people. CLI is also a lot easier to teach to and be taught by other people. Anyone who has ever tried supporting people on the phone would recognize this truth. Getting people to type the right commands in cmd is a huge pain in the ass and extremely tedious, but it can be done. Worse case scenario, you just spell out the command: "i as in ivan, p as peter, c as in charlie, o as in open, n as in nancy, f as in fred, i as in ivan, g as in gary." Tedious as fuck, but still doable.
Meanwhile, I've easily had times where I wasted 30+ minutes because the boomer behind the phone clicked the wrong shit and the complete clusterfuck of us not being on the same page.
"Click on the blue button."
"Okay." clicks on the red button
"Now, the window should have X and Y. Click on X."
"Uh, I don't see X."
"What do you mean you don't see X? X should be there. You did click on the blue button, right?"
Lies: "Yeah."
"Okay, then click on X."
"Okay." clicks on some random shit to get to another window
"Now, you should be a window with A, B, and C. Do you see them?"
"Uh, no."
"Okay, read what's in the window."
reads a bunch of shit that doesn't match what they're supposed to be in
"Okay, let's start over."
"How do I do that?"
"Just hit cancel."
"Okay" clicks on next instead of cancel
And it goes on and on and on and on and on and on. Damn, this is already starting to piss me off lmao
I'm in the middle. I hate mobile phone design and also hate fucking with command lines
If I wanted my PC experience to be staring at a blinking cursor on a black screen and typing obscure commands I would hop into my time machine and go to 1987
me, with my terminal customized to show Eileen Gu in the background :cool-bean:
I think the broader issue is that tech bros have co-opted the phrase "user friendly" to mean "immediately approachable". This is good for selling a product but it sucks when it comes to something where the initial investment of learning a language or metaphor for how a program "behaves" is far outweighed by the way it allows you use it many times more proficiently than you would be able to if it was just big shiny buttons as have been normalized as "modern design".
Example: It would have been easier for you to sit down at the computer for the first time and hunt-and-peck on the keyboard with one single finger, and maybe you can get kind of fast at that over time, but it will never be comparable to sitting down with the express intention of learning to touch type, and once you've learned to touch type a little bit all future typing is reinforcement of a better way, rather than wasted time on a dead end like hunt-and-peck would be.
Sort of off topic, but people have found that the touch-type method isn't really any faster, and that two-finger typing is not actually synonymous with "hunting" and "pecking". Referring to 10-finger typing as "touch" typing is also a misnomer.
As a kid I HATED touch typing for a few reasons including that it was a harder barrier to learn as I was still memorizing the positions of keys. But also because two-finger typing is significantly more flexible for when you're switching between one-handed and two-handed control of the keyboard, it's better for accuracy when you have to hit non-letters a lot, and it's better for holding Shift or Control for multiple letters. Basically home-row typing makes no sense for PC games.
Back when I got decent-ish at Starcraft Brood War, a game with no remappable hotkeys, I was able to consistently hit P, L, O, N, and 8,9,0 with my left index finger without looking at the keyboard at all, and then return my ring finger to A.
The standardized WPM is CPM divided by 5 including spaces. The best RTS players are exceeding 750 CPM/150 WPM even into 1000CPM/200WPM mostly with one hand, and that's mostly with the left index finger. That's apparently faster than 99% of typists.
Personally I don't practice speed typing really at all but I still hit like 80-90WPM with two fingers.
I think perhaps the benefit of 10-finger typing is that a lot of energy has been put into teaching it effectively. I can agree that my style of typing is not inherently better than my 2-finger typing friend, and my version of 10-finger is certainly in some ways heterodox from what I was "taught" to do, but that doesn't change that I was forced to learn 10-finger typing and it taught me to actually type well, and my friend can't type for shit, to a degree that it genuinely prevents him from thinking through a keyboard as effectively.
I'm largely a self taught typist and I hover around 90wpm. I used to always get a F in form when I took typing in school.
There's certainly a difference between "this is intentionally hard, on purpose fuck you" and "don't worry your little head enjoy the walled garden"
I don't think this is true at all. Linus has repeatedly talked trash about distribution making things complicated. Like most people he doesnt like wasting his time fiddling around with bullshit. The renaissance man mentality is a problem among FOSSbros, but Linus isn't really a great example.
He will lay in to people who submit low quality patches, but the expectations of a kernel developer are very different than an end user.
the problem is that making things inaccessible turns out to be a poor substitute for good design and better pedagogy
stealing posts from hard drive's comment section
Yeah, this article was pretty accurate, but then Valve had to go and ruin it. Seriously, pretty much any distro you can imagine, you can install Steam in like three clicks, then you'd entire Steam game library just runs perfectly under Proton with zero tweaks.
Nvidia used to be good at least for some good challenge--I still have nightmares about nvidia-xserver-settings--but even they've dropped the ball as long as you're not using some militantly FOSS distro with only three downloads.
And don't even get me started on SteamOS.
I'm sorry, but modern day Linux is for n00bs. Real chads use TempleOS
:angery:
I was about to write a rant about how gaming isn’t difficult anymore, then I remembered that for some fucking reason, updating my OS version completely fucked my Nvidia driver which I now can’t get to work again, short of probably reinstalling the entire OS.
Nouveau fucking sucks.
nvidia drivers suck both ways. the proprietary ones "work" but suffer from random issues and instability, and nouveau's performance is unworkable for games (fair enough, it's a reverse-engineered driver). amd cards are the way to go, work perfectly out-of-the-box on linux's built-in FOSS driver
gotta give the coders at Valve credit though, proton has come so far it's incredible how well games run through it
Good joke that Linux users some day may be able to take
I've loved my switch over to Linux because fedora Linux is more stable and pleasant to use than Windows. No bugs, no annoying "you cannot do this because fuck you" messages, no unclear processes, no corporate bloat. But my mother could never install it or set it up.
It isn't always "friendly" but a least Linux is never user-hostile like Windows.
As someone who regularly reinstalls Windows on my machine, the idea that Linux is the less convenient of the 2 to install is laughable. You wanna install this OS? Oh yeah, you’re gonna need a live.com email address in the year of our lord 2023. Or you need to remember the increasingly obscure set of steps required to use a local account, which seems to change several times per year.
Most Linux distros were already more convenient to install than Windows 7 if only because Windows 7 took fucking hours to fully update itself and Microsoft had done nothing but tacked on additional bullshit since then.
I remember installing Mint, launching Civ5 from steam with Proton and it running at 3 fps while my computers fans were screaming in pain.
At least I got rid of Windows 11 in the end :windows-cool:
Just built a new pc and accidentally grabbed the wrong iso and now have win11 pro. It felt like a slight return to skeuomorphic designs. It’s such a weird hodgepodge of android-esque menus and app drawer but then you get the classic Control Panel which has been the same since like win98. Lots of the telemetry and ads can be removed but getting away from Edge has been annoying.
I used mostly GPU-less intel latops and civ5 ran pretty well 15-40 fps on ubuntu mate :shrug-outta-hecks:
I installed the FTL Multiverse mod recently, and it was literally harder than switching a computer to Linux.
shit i've never attempted: running Linux
shit i've attempted and made me realise installing linux probably isn't that bad: modding New Vegas to the point it actually looks good
The most common distros have a Live USB mode where you can run Linux without actually installing it, if you're curious to see what it's like.
Generally the real thing is faster and has better hardware support, but it's close enough.
oh yeah, i guess i did dabble with Tails for totally legal reasons and that was entirely boot from USB
if you're trying to hide your completely-legal-and-mundane stuff from somebody, isn't this still kinda bad
like, the ojos cincos can backdoor your computer right? Even if you're running linux off a USB, all that stuff is still going through your ISP and your storage drives which are attached to your mobo which has had windows on it at one point
Much easier to track the crypto payment
It's wild how insecure crypto is. Once people know your wallet's ID it's fucking game over
shit i’ve attempted and made me realise installing linux probably isn’t that bad: modding New Vegas to the point it actually looks good
Modding KSP back in 2016-18 was far worse because the game takes 15 minutes to load on a HDD.
Rimworld used to take like 15-20 minutes to load, I would usually go make lunch while I waited.
this reminds me of the horrors that were modding minecraft (or any other game) before modding guis for popular games became ubiquitous. my walking to school uphill both ways was having to learn YAML to modify minecraft server mod configs.
I've spent a lot of time setting up mods for games and getting everything to play nice with the other 200 carefully curated and deliberated on mods.
Ah, an Arch user.
This one is just like... install game, downgrade game, install binary mod, get mod loader, install primary mod into mod loader.
(For the scared lurkers, Linux is generally: download distro and flash drive flasher, apply distro to flash drive, reboot, follow installer)
I just figured it would be funny and make all of the :penguin-dance: people come crawling out of the woodwork.
I took up woodworking because it was better for my soul than compiling Gentoo all the time. Do you have any idea what you’ve done?!!?!
Just gonna drop the fact that literally every single dev/company that can afford it will have all the code written on Macbooks unless you HAVE to use Windows/Linux
Even when all the code will be deployed onto a Linux server
I will not be satisfied until every last one of you flashes my latest PC backup image onto your hard drives
