JS is a cancer infecting the programming world. It never should have escaped the browser. If null is the worst programming mistake ever made, JS is a strong contender for the second worst mistake.

The opt outs don’t work. Even if you opted out of the telemetry that only disabled some of it, not all of it, and MS constantly re-enables it with updates. I can’t count how many times I’ve had to uninstall OneDrive, But. It. Keeps. Coming. Back. Windows 10 you could previously disable most of the worst crapware that MS shoveled in. Windows 11 you can’t disable it, they just don’t give you the opt outs anymore. It’s all mandatory. Even worse, they started backporting that stuff into Windows 10 as well. Did you notice when MS silently installed copilot on your Windows 10 system?

Ultimately though, I just don’t want to keep fighting a losing battle against a company I despise. I’m done giving my money to them. It would be one thing if they provided a good service that I enjoyed like Valve does with Steam, but the last time I actually liked a version of Windows was when XP was released. It’s basically been downhill since then. If there was a decent alternative to Android I’d switch that as well, but unfortunately Linux phone just isn’t ready for prime time yet. But thanks to the amazing work by Valve, for gaming systems, Linux is finally a viable alternative.

If you don’t see the point, then Microsoft has successfully boiled the frog.

One thing you’ll have to do (which is kind of annoying that it isn’t enabled by default) is go into the steam options and toggle “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”. That enables proton/wine for everything in your library. In the early days of Steam on Linux Valve setup a white list of games that ran under Wine that mostly contains their own titles in it, and for some reason they just never removed that behavior even though that list is unmaintained these days.

Not every game that uses anti-cheat, there’s plenty that do run fine in Linux, but the major ones it’s unsupported. Technically the games run, and run really well, it’s just you’ll get banned for running under Linux. The big ones I’m aware of that don’t work are Valorant, GTA5, Destiny 2, LoL, and Apex Legends.

Steam is available and runs great. Valve has really put an insane amount of work into making Linux gaming smooth and painless. They have their own flatpak equivalent called pressure-vessel that steam uses by default, and everything that steam supports in Windows is 100% supported in Linux as well. If you check out protondb.com you can put in your steam account name and it will scan it and tell you any games in your library that will have issues in Linux, but outside of a few of the competitive shooters that have super aggressive anti-cheat generally everything either works out of the box, or after some minor tweaks (typically adding a few launch parameters).

Additionally, there’s an excellent unified launcher called Heroic that lets you connect with and use the GOG, Epic, and Amazon Gaming stores, and provides a convenient wrapper around Wine/Proton for actually running the games.

Finally there’s another launcher called Lutris that a lot of people swear by and supports some of the less used stores like Itch.io, although when I tried it recently I ran into some problems getting it to work.

The EOL of Win 10 and MS silently installing copilot on my desktop was the final straw for me. I’ve been running 100% Linux now for a couple months with no real issues so far. I expected a few games to give me issues but so far if anything I’ve had fewer issues with games than I did even in Windows. Had a couple hardware problems, although those I’ve mostly been able to solve.

I’ve got it setup to dual boot “just in case”, but haven’t actually needed to which is great. If I still haven’t needed that partition a year from now I’ll probably just reformat it as extra storage and keep a Win10 VM around if I really get stuck on something.

You’re not wrong, but this rant isn’t really going to accomplish anything useful I don’t think.

It’s also not a warning, it’s a security update. The title made it sound like Chrome was going to open some kind of warning dialog, or that Google had issued a threatening press release.

Yes, but now the cheque cleared. Or he’s just trying to suck up to Xi, you know one or the other.

So I was spitballing some ideas around this a while back, although I was more focused on income inequality at the time. I think the best idea I came up with was something like a progressive taxation system where a company’s taxes were determined by the highest paid employee (including the value of benefits and things like stock grants) minus the lowest paid employee, divided by the company head count. If executives want to keep bringing in eye watering salaries they either need to pay all their employees significantly more, or hire a hell of a lot more of them at current rates. There’s probably some flaws and things that could be tweaked there, but I think it’s a start.

We also need competition and for decades now the offices that were supposed to safe guard us from monopolies have been green lighting again and again mergers and acquisitions that result in only one or two dominant players in every market. There should be a blanket rule that if there are less than 10 companies (of somewhat similar scale) operating in some market none of them are allowed to merge or acquire each other.