Posted by throwaway270925 11/19/2025
* 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.
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.
It's like a flatpack, stabilized libraries based on Debian.
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).
Not while they continue to have the Xbox division and aspire to be the world's biggest publisher.
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.
https://www.protondb.com/app/337000 for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
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.
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.
Have you tried running sfc /scannow?
...
Restart in Safe Mode?
...
Backup and Reinstall Windows. You can use OneDrive to backup if you have not already purchased a subscription."
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".
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.
Yikes. This is the main issue of Discord, it's not publicly searchable.
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.
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.
I'm sorry, but 98% of video games are not competitive multiplayer IAP fests.
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.
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.
* Exfiltrate personal data from allowed Flatpak directories
* Steal data you intentionally open via portals (e.g., documents, password files, wallet backups)
* Store malware or persistence files inside the Flatpak sandbox
* Use network access to phone home data or join botnets
* Abuse CPU/GPU for crypto mining
* Delete or modify files in your home directory if granted --filesystem=home
* Read browser cookies, auth tokens, SSH keys, cloud credentials if home is exposed
* Install persistence via ~/.config/systemd/user/ services
* Global keystroke logging on X11
* Screenshot entire desktop on X11
* Inject fake input events to the system (mouse/keyboard) on X11
* Record screen via portals if user once granted permission
* Gain full FS access if granted --filesystem=host
* Abuse DBus to change system settings or trigger polkit actions
* Install software outside the sandbox (e.g., ~/.local/bin or autostart scripts)
* Interact with hardware via /dev if granted --device=all
* Trigger kernel or driver privilege-escalation vulnerabilities
* Load or execute unsafe third-party mods, DLLs, or anti-cheat binaries
* Malicious patchers or mod loaders downloading external payloads
* Replace shell history or alter aliases to hide malicious activity
* Encrypt local or network-mounted files (ransomware)
* Spread laterally via stolen SSH keys to other machines
* Manipulate GPU/driver calls for rootkit-like persistence
* Abuse Wine/Proton compatibility layers to escape sandbox using native loaders
* Modify dotfiles (.bashrc, .profile) for stealth persistence
* Abuse LAN trust to attack other devices on the network
* Disrupt system performance via thermal abuse (extreme sustained loads)
* Exfiltrate browser sessions or wallet seeds stored in plaintext
* Execute background processes whenever game is launched without user awareness
This is The Way.
Bonus: No game files junking up my home directory.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
Software is "broken" even before it gets updated.
If what you said were true, there would be no such thing as a zero-day.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can look up gamescope-session for more info.
Its something that I generally wouldn't expect on traditional mainstream distros.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Think Gemini 3 can one-shot a Chrome extension?
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.
Second, Linux needs a standardised *and enforced* application installation method like .exe. One should never, ever, for any reason, ever, need to use the CLI to install an application. Yet there are so many applications out there which require the use of guides/manuals and the CLI to install, configure, or use. This is partly a dev preference, partly to save time, and partly because it's difficult to build and maintain distinct UI for different distros which each have their own quirks. People often ask, "why don't they release this on Linux?" But that's not actually what they're asking. They're really asking, "why don't they release this software on 20 distinct operating systems?" Each distro might have 0.1% of their total addressable market. Unfortunately, even if SteamOS enforces some kind of package manager like flatpak, that's not going to force devs to use it. It would need to be Linux-wide, and that will never happen. So we're left with fragmented install methods across multiple package managers, and a huge headache for people who just want their OS to get out of the way.