• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I just did my install of Linux Mint. I have a number of complaints that are really the fault of Microsoft, other things tripping me up that are just about me learning differences; BUT I still find there’s some things Linux could take as lessons.

    One of them is keyboard shortcuts. I learned Windows shortcuts because they followed intuitive logic, like what role the “Tab” key has and what the Shift key is doing to adjust its action. Linux apps often make up their own logic around this, which even if it made sense internally, doesn’t work with apps like Firefox which are still using Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs, possibly to keep Windows parity. Then, since Linux is supposed to be built to customize, if I try changing the terminal to switch tabs using Ctrl+Tab…it just doesn’t let you; pretends you didn’t press anything. Stock boot of Linux Mint 22.

    You’re right that they shouldn’t be changing just for aping the dominating competitor; that’s how we unfortunately got Chromium supremacy. I still think there’s gentle UX considerations they could handle more often though. Basically the type of thing decided in board rooms that engineers would lose interest in.


  • Oh yeah, I definitely plan to install Heroic and Lutris, which simplified a lot of things. I’m trying to figure out which will be fastest if I happen to have a lot of indie, DRM-free games that follow the format of:

    • Download zip file
    • Unzip to folder
    • Run exe in folder

    Ideally a launcher could handle some of that relatively quickly for me without too much manual configuration. On Windows, it’s just unzip and then double-click, which of course will now change a little bit.

    A VM is an interesting option - I vaguely recall interacting with very slow VMs a while back but supposedly they’ve gotten better. I don’t know if they’ve ever reached suitable gaming performance, or video editing performance though.




  • Is there any organization out there that could actually promote an “Acceptable ad standard”? Like, maybe even something within web specs?

    A long time ago, ads were slightly irritating, rarely useful, and considered a necessary evil for gently monetizing the web. We’ve had this slow evolution to draconian tracking nightmares that are genuinely dangerous and often written by malicious untraceable actors. I almost feel like we could pressure back towards decent ads if there was some standard by which they only received basic info about the user, showed basic info about a product, didn’t pollute the experience or ruin accessibility, and were registered to businesses by physical address with legal accountability for things like false advertising.

    That is…perhaps a vain hope though. It’s just hard to picture futures where all websites run off of donations or subscriptions, because advertising is fucking hell now.



  • Am I misremembering to think Genshin Impact was a cause of one of these major security disasters?

    It wasn’t even people who installed Genshin that were victims - it was like, Microsoft signed a driver made by Mihoyo to scan for cheat apps. But mihoyo, being a game company with a rapid release cycle and imperfect security, had a vulnerability in the driver. So, malware authors could include that driver in their packages to elevate access on Windows installs even when no one had any idea what a Genshin is.

    Not quite the same thing as Crowdstrike I guess though.



  • Sounds like a use case for a good product or program, but it’s a hard problem to figure out game performance without installing and running. Soooo many videos online where people install 8 different games to manuallytest framerate, and none where they look up a ready value.

    You could first look up the laptop’s GPU, and try putting it into a GPU compare site, score it against a GPU you’ve known and try games you’re familiar with.

    If it’s just an Intel GPU, you pretty much know you’d only play basic 2D/lowpoly indie games, if which there are many.





  • My biggest worry for this is, there’s probably dozens of black hats out there that have found some very large exploit for Windows 10, and are holding off on abusing it until the day Microsoft ends support.

    Currently, my plan is to make a partition for Linux Mint, set up dual boot, see how much of my daily computer obsession I can execute through there, and then try to slowly transition while slowly moving stuff from Windows. (I am vaguely worried I’ll run into that Windows issue where files accessed from outside the OS login are security-restricted. That has even screwed up my Windows reformat fixes)