I got stupidly lucky that one of my hobbies as an avid indoorsman was not only valued by the private sector but also happened to pay well. This career was literally the only thing that saved me from a life of poverty.
And mods. Yes there are work arounds to get various mod managers working on linux, but they're honestly jank. Also any mods that are windows executables (version downgraders, engine optimizers, etc) don't work, even trying to run them through wine / proton.
So now my annoyance at windows does battle with my love of mods. I know the nexus folks are working on a new cross platform mod manager, but they have yet to support bethesda games (I suspect for some of the same reasons I had issues).
The only games I have modded significantly are Minecraft and Lethal Company, neither of which gave me much issue on Linux. Haven’t tried modding any Bethesda games though.
I installed linux mint xfce edition on a laptop with only 8 gb of ram, and while there were a few hiccups where I had to adjust, it's a breath of fresh air. Super low memory usage, no wayland nonsense, it. just. works.
I still have fond memory of my brother upgrading his windows XP desktop to 1 GB RAM to play BF2142 and I was like "school hasn't even taught me that number yet".
What the hell happened to software development when "only 8 gb of ram" is used sincerely?
Oh man, don't even get me started. My first computer had a whopping 24 mb of memory. That computer browsed the web, with javascript. Now just my browser winds up eating ~ 3 gb of ram on a regular basis, with just youtube easily eating 600 mb of ram. That's more ram than I put in my first gaming pc back in 2003!
I built a AI / ML / gaming desktop last year, and I just said 'to heck with it, 64gb of ram!' Hopefully that'll hold me for a while
> My first computer had a whopping 24 mb of memory. That computer browsed the web, with javascript. Now just my browser winds up eating ~ 3 gb of ram on a regular basis, with just youtube easily eating 600 mb of ram.
Eh, that’s a massively disingenuous take when you consider capabilities. Web browsers back then could not do even 1% of what we can do now with modern browsers, where we can run damn near full fledged desktop level apps in a browser or with frameworks like electron. With that vastly increased power comes increased requirements, which is a complete non issue given memory is dirt cheap nowadays.
I gotta be honest man, I do not understand someone who pirates executable code. I (and I assume most of the hn audience) am not some starving student with nothing to lose. I would much rather run linux than pirate windows.
The OS installation images come from Microsoft. They're the same amount of malware as the OS that comes preinstalled on your laptop. Probably a tad less, depending on the brand.
So instead of downloading the OS, you're downloading a patching executable? How do you trust this? Is it open source and auditable? Otherwise you're opening yourself up to the same concerns.
Probably that one of the original comments on this thread suggested using another free and open source thing instead of using this free and open source thing? Why is linux exempt from "it comes with free malware" and not this other widely trusted and used tool?
Linux is more trusted because there are legions of cybersecurity experts who made their bones combing through the linux codebase to find security exploits. Even if this is open source, how can I be sure someone has audited it?
Alternatively I could pay what is, for me, a pittance, and know that my OS is not compromised.
I assume you haven’t checked on this since the Windows 7 days, but Massgrave is open source, and the activation logic boils down to about five lines of PowerShell, using only native Windows utilities. I think they even have a tutorial on their website that explains how to perform the activation manually if you want to avoid running their scripts.
Most of those 19861 lines allow it to be an all in one script for multiple activation methods and products. And, if you're still skeptical, then you are free to audit all 19861 lines yourself.
Maybe at the very least educate yourself before acting so smug.
Why would I look at the tutorial for a no script activation when I was, you know, commenting on a point about a script? Did to you forget to educate yourself to notice the difference?
> And, if you're still skeptical, then you are free to audit all 19861 lines yourself.
That's nonsense, of course, how would it help other users? Also, do you expect every single user of the crack to have the capabilities and time to do that?
If you are worried about malware from your pirated content you are going to the wrong websites. The good ones are hard to get on and have severe consequences for the uploader and whoever invited them.
However severe those consequences are, I'm sure it's not 'cryptolocker hard drive' or worse 'lose hundreds of thousands from my brokerage account' severe. I am happy to pay for my bits. It's wild to me this is somehow a controversial opinion on a board supposedly populated with well paid software engineers.
I’m thankfully no crypto nut and use windows only for gaming, so I’m prepared for any and all consequences of me pirating it.
Btw it’s just downloading the official image and unlocking it with open source software, so I would argue there is no risk at all.
Btw did you audit all the Linux source code to check for malware?
Agree with you but not every answer is move to Linux. A lot of us help family member with IT stuff. People I help use excel, quicken, and one drive to run their businesses and finances. I could see myself running into GPs license issue with my father in law.
I tried to get a few of them to use chromebooks but the need for quicken or another app they used for decade(s) keeps them windows based.
I agree. Some people don't really think about licences, they buy a PC with Windows and only buy another when that one stops being usable. Even this forced upgrade to 11 is still the path of least resistance.
>Now they fuel the Bitcoin and "AI" bubbles, which are nonessential and non-tangibles.
The current boom has basically had nothing to do with any government efforts. It is booming in spite of the current administration. This is all private industry.
For the Nvidia bubble, it has recently lifted export regulations to China.
It facilitates meetings of "Open" "AI" with world leaders and almost certainly exerts pressure with tariffs etc. behind the scenes to force these deals.
That 40% investment used to be sitting in giant cash slushfunds on company balance sheets. This isn't government investment. It would have never been spent on 'infrastructure'.
On the upside, even if AI is a bubble and implodes spectacularly we're going to have metric tons of compute available for climate models, drug discovery and anything else that requires a super computer to model.
Will we? The hardware you want for AI and the hardware you want for super computing seem to have different priorities, e.g. concerning floating point precision.
compute is compute, yes. Maybe some older models might have to be rewritten to take advantage of a gpu farm's parallel processing capabilities, but humanity will ultimately benefit if the current AI boom fizzles
In all honesty, I don't think cpu has ever been a huge limitation for me outside of gaming. The biggest bottlenecks for me have always been disk speed and memory. My soon-to-be decade old xps 13 gets on well enough, except it only has 8gb of soldered on ram. That absolutely is a bottle neck for me.
Bear in mind, my personal laptop rarely compiles massive projects. I think the last large thing I compiled by hand was wine, and it's been a while since I've done that. Most of the coding done on that laptop are small toy applications to test a language feature. It also helps that golang is lightning fast when it comes to compile times.
Eh, I think we'd probably have a lot more indie games if we did not live in a society with few safety nets where one really needs a good paying job to survive.
I'm sure the game will be well received, but the beta was enough to put me off from buying it, and you're talking to someone who bought bf5 and 2042 despite misgivings, so I have a pretty low bar.
The maps I've played are pretty much all close quarters maps with the exception of liberation peak. It's pretty clear they're courting the COD playerbase. The maps that do have vehicles are so small it makes no sense to have anything but humvees. They've once again given assault pretty much everything it needs to be a god class. No thanks. Not my battlefield, and I say this as someone who's got like 4k hours in bf3/4.
BF4 was a massive redemption story. It started rough, yes, but it went on to become probably the best sandbox shooter ever released. Sorry if you didn't have the patience to make it through the initial 6 months. You missed out.
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