391–400 of 1001 posts
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Can't make a custom gaming rig with Mac. Linux gaming isn't quite there yet too.
Serious question: why not just use a stand-alone gaming system (e.g. PlayStation, xBox)? Don't really game much, but I did buy a PS4 just for the therapy of offline GTA5 beatdowns. ---- The only Microsoft in my house is a twenty year old Windows 7 Pro machine — it always just works .
Can you use a Macintosh without an Apple account? Sort of, but with similar limitations: The App Store, iCloud syncing, iMessage, FaceTime, and other Apple online services are unavailable unless an Apple ID is used. What's the difference here?
The best thing to happen to Linux Desktop is Windows 11, with perfect timing too as modern Linux has been a joy to use as a daily driver. Normally I'd be unhappy when a sleazy corp forces me to give up on 25 years of muscle memory of using my preferred OS, but I'm thankful they gave me the push I needed to rip off the ad/spyware laced Windows Band-Aid that I only need to do once in my life. It's been over a year sinc…
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I use Emacs. It does need some fine tuning, tree-sitter installation, etc. but after that, I cannot understand colleges using VS. I have seen no feature in VS not available in Emacs. Some colleges have switched from years VS to Emacs and after a week won’t look back.
> I have seen no feature in VS not available in Emacs. Guys, please. I am all for FOSS, but such delusions can only be harmful, for they prevent from actually improving stuff. Did you sir ever use debugger in your life?
Of course HN is a bubble, like every other place like this, but sadly, I would argue that this is the mindset that pretty common among Linux users and holds Linux-native alternatives back. For those saying that Linux is already better than Windows in everything, there is no incentive to work towards actually making it better. When emacs is equally good for those people as VS, when Linux gaming still depending on Windows APIs is considered a great success, when FreeCAD or OpenSCAD in their eyes do not lack anything when compared with professional CAD software etc, then you know you are seeing a bubble that will burst, sooner or later.
I suspect in 2025 even project like FreeCAD would not happen, because today people for some reason believe it is fine to go away from OS that do not respect user agency and their privacy, and use web-based apps that do... exactly the same, but they are not from MS so that's fine I guess. For some reason Windows requiring internet connection is a bad thing, but driving Linux and relying on bunch of web apps that also require internet connection is good.
Celebrating WINE, Proton and Steam OS as victories still baffles me, because the fact that FOSS and Linux world couldn't create real alternatives and had to become good at pretending to be Windows instead is simply a failure.
But hey, I know I am crying in the wilderness.
If customers keep trying to do something … let them do it? Charge them to do it? It’s crazy to me: folks quite clearly want to run Windows 11 without an account. What is it worth to Microsoft let someone do that? $12? $144? $1,728?
That's a bit like asking to get a "smart" TV without the spyware / adware. Sure, you could pay more! But they can also just take both your money and that other money. What are you gonna do, buy a non-"smart" TV? :)
These exist and are called "digital signage" - usually these things got far brighter and more durable panels, downside is they usually hover around 2x the price of an ad delivery device.
Plug in your old Chromecast 4k or Apple TV, that's it.
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> and gaming on linux is rapidly becoming usable. I hate Microsoft and Windows just as much as the next self-respecting nerd, but this is no less a lol right now than it was 20 years ago. It’s like Linux users all play the same 15 titles that have Linux support and think those 15 games reflect broad ecosystem support.
Except for games with anti cheats, can you quote from your head three games the last 10-15 years that aren’t running perfectly on Linux ? Because from my ~1 500 titles steam library, I can think of one game that I had issues with. And even this particular game (which is Tomb Raider 2013, btw) worked perfectly fine after a little hack. And ironically the "hack" was checking a checkbox in Steam to force using the Windo…
???
Oh right. ‘Except for games with anti cheats’ - so like, at least half the market lol, and more than 90% of games by game time.
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Linux is the better OS. Windows 11 just forces people to evaluate other OS's to experience the latest Linux for themselves. I didn't have the time as a working Adult for distro hopping and Gentoo compiles, but the thought of having to live with Windows 11 made me try out modern linux again, glad I did.
Linux is now the better OS, after the other one got significantly worse than it used to be, and even that is close call depending on what you need Linux to do.
I remember after learning Linux, how much of a toy Windows felt, with my needing to grab windows by the bar to move them around (instead of grabbing from anywhere), and trying to resize them by the thin corner (instead of resizing from anywhere), having no concept of workspaces, having no choice of window manager while Linux could engulf windows in flames and render them in a cube, only being able to backspace single characters at a time, no choice of file manager, files having weird limitations on their names, having nothing like bash (pre-powershell) while Linux had multiple shells, no block devices (this could be expanded into a lot of points), no simple way to work the partition tables, not being able to mount things wherever, not being able to treat a regular file like a disk, no real choices of filesystems, poor network utilities, ping only pings an arbitrary 3 times by default instead of just going on indefinitely, no package managers and repos, etc. I could go on a lot more probably, but this is enough. Windows XP was a toy compared to Linux.
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The reason they don't meaningfully enforce their copyright on consumer PCs is precisely because they do care about their market share. If you buy a computer with Windows (or get it installed) in what I suspect is the overwhelming majority of the world, it's an 'illegitimate' copy and it works 100% fine, including operating with Microsoft's servers. As you mentioned, they could trivially stop this if they wanted to, b…
Also note this strategy is in its fourth (or fifth?) decade and is also very successfully deployed by adobe et al. It’s also why Linux won on the headless server, though why FreeBSD didn’t I’m not sure; GPL marketing at the right time, perhaps.
The same reason why Ubuntu won the server market (for a while): by capturing the home-desktop/laptop market first, and then worming its way to employer environments by way of familiarity. Linux had broader driver coverage for consumer hardware; there was a time when running *BSD on fragmented consumer hardware was a crapshot.
But Apple is the one that normalized this.
...Like the developer account for mobile
...Like "sideloading"
And this is why this things should have been fought much harder from the beginning.
These companies are merely copying what the other is getting away with.