431–440 of 645 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Battery throttling doesn’t fit the rest of these. Preventing a device reboot is pro consumer.
Shipping a device that will overheat and reboot when the device is a couple years old and fixing it by silently throttling the device isn't pro consumer either Those devices really should have been recalled or offered a generous trade-in value to account for the fundamental design flaw
Windows is just full of hostile, anti-user patterns these days. I've considered building a windows box just to have a gaming rig multiple times over the last few years, but every time an article like this or their crusade against Chrome reminds me that Bill Gates is still the same anti-trust monster he was in the 90s.
Not to defend in any way his past stances against Open Source, but Bill Gates has nothing to do with today's Microsoft choices. About the Windows gaming machine, you can surely build one just for gaming; just never put any personal data on it, never use it for surfing or doing anything that is not gaming, never give it any unfiltered access to your LAN, assume it contains malicious software then put it on dedicated E…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need Windows for gaming any more. Ubuntu 22.04 comes with graphics drivers. Steam has Steam Play and Lutris has a huge library of install scripts, so everything is handled for you. The one thing you will need to do occasionally is experiment with different Wine distributions. This means you will need to right click on your game and select the distribution from a drop-down box. Exhausting, I know.
If by "gaming" you mean "be able to play a selection of games you might or might not be interested in, in varying states of support and performance", then yes - absolutely true. None of the games I've played recently even are on Steam, so no, your answer is misleading at best. And no, I've not tried it recently on my main machine but I've tried it often enough that my summary is still: Feel free to try it, but many (…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are you supposed to discover and use WSL? I got fed up with trying to run Fusion360 on Linux, no longer had a Mac, and reignited my long disused Windows installation recently. Updated and restarted. Looked around for WSL, nothing. Searched online, loads of blog spam of mixed helpfulness, no way of telling (for me, new to it) if they were v1 or v2, no basic information like they're talking about Ubuntu but is that…
Everything is easier on Windows 11. If you have 10 it's all harder and less built in, and some features don't work at all
I really can't fathom how any technically-minded professional gets anything done with Windows - nevermind SEs - it just feels constantly in the way. And I'm not a die-hard Linux (nor Apple) fanatic, I grew up with Windows, it got me into 'computers'. It just seems like an uncontrollable (as in literally, operator not in control) mess compared even to macOS to me now.
(I also really wanted to like it coming back to it - I thought with WSL surely that was going to take the Unixy strength of macOS and far supersede it as a when-I-can't-use-Linux device. But so far, egh, nevermind that I think the hardware's great, I think I'd pay the Apple tax just for the OS.)
Maybe I'll try again to upgrade if the integrated graphics support it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They deliberately reduced the contrast. Compare iOS 5 when iMessage came out: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/09-27... and now: https://images.macworld.co.uk/cmsdata/features/3468389/how_t... This underscores GP's point: Apple is expert at making anti-consumer decisions that fall just inside the Overton window.
It's worth pointing out that Apple has some of the best accessibility options out there. There's an "Increase Contrast" setting that increases the contrast for SMS messages. Yes, one could argue that the default should provide high contrast for everyone, but once this setting is enabled, it effectively becomes just that going forward for those that need it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> maybe if nvidia optimus is at play? In this case Windows is the only sane choice (at least based on my experience from 2 years ago). After a lot of reading random docs, I got to a point where I could stop the GPU from eating the battery doing nothing, but I could only disable/enable it by logging out then in. It was either no GPU at all or a GPU drawing maximum power, no in-between. Maybe Nvidia's latest code relea…
I've only had an Nvidia GPU laptop for 2 years so no experience of using older series of drivers, but Nvidia's 5xx series of drivers work great on my T460s running the latest Mint, drivers installed using the Ubuntu driver tool. Secure boot works out of the box, prime render offload works without a hitch (and no need to log in/out to switch GPUs), battery life is ballpark similar to Windows.
Windows is just full of hostile, anti-user patterns these days. I've considered building a windows box just to have a gaming rig multiple times over the last few years, but every time an article like this or their crusade against Chrome reminds me that Bill Gates is still the same anti-trust monster he was in the 90s.
I wonder why in these threads nobody ever says to just pirate Windows. It's not hard to do. Sometimes people will float security concerns but it's a safe process if you just load an official ISO and then crack it, and even if it were questionable on the security front it's not like you're doing anything that really needs that sort of security if you're just playing video games. If Windows is going to make itself mand…
What makes you think the crack you apply to your official ISO isn't compromising your OS?
> even if it were questionable on the security front it's not like you're doing anything that really needs that sort of security
If you're going to install steam on your PC, then you'd be giving an attacker access to your steam account and if you ever install or use a platform that doesn't already have your credit card info stored then the attacker gets your credit card data.
> And yes there are also ways to stop data collection if you're concerned about giving that to them.
This isn't true. There is no way to stop windows from collecting data. No version of windows is capable of disabling all data collection, and there's no setting you can configure that can't be undone by MS at any time, and without any notice at all to you.
At best, you can install a copy of windows on a machine that is left offline 100% of the time, but i think most gamers would find that unacceptable since even if you don't care about MMOs or multiplayer, steam is still pretty popular.
I don't object to the idea of pirating software you don't like, don't want, but feel "forced" to use, but the idea that there are no real risks to your security or your privacy by doing it is just plain wrong.
Just use linux. It can play plenty of games.