As someone who works in gamedev, I’m sure that some of the people there are passionate about it and it is gutwrenching to see your work fail so hard. I’m sad for every project that launches after years of work and fails to get any attention or sales, and I’m definitely sure there’s someone losing sleep due to that.

I never worked in super-large projects, but I did work for a AAA studio and even there, you got people invested into the project.

From how I’ve seen it, you wouldn’t work in gamedev unless you are passionate about it, because you can get drastically better pay for the same job in other, more business focused, industries. So, if all you cared about is money, you have better options.

• OrangePi with HomeAssistant and PiHole.
• Old gaming PC turned 24/7 server with Jellyfin, V-Rising server
• Hetzner cloud with Matrix server for Messenger and Discord bridging.
• Synology NAS for SMB and sharing stuff with others through Synology Drive, which also serves as a seedbox for Redacted.ch, with Headphones and Transmission.

I wouldn’t call Crowdstrike a corporate spyware garbage. I work as a Red Teamer in cybersecurity, and EDRs are bane of my existence - they are useful, and pretty good at what they do. In the last few years, I’m struggling more and more to with engagements we do, because EDRs just get in the way and catch a lot of what would pass undetected a month ago. Staying on top of them with our tooling is getting more and more difficult, and I would call that a good thing.

I’ve recently tested a company without EDR, and boy was it a treat. Not defending Crowdstrike, to call that a major fuckup is great understatement, but calling it “corporate spyware garbage” feels a little bit unfair - EDRs do make a difference, and this wasn’t an issue with their product in itself, but with irresponsibility of their patch management.

I self-hosted it few months ago, and it’s actually surprisingly easy! Someone has made an Ansible script for Matrix with Element and some bridges, that (at least a month ago, IaaC tends to be pretty fragile) worked out of the box on a first try. I just set up some config values (mostly about enabling bridges I want) based on their amazing documentation, and then ran it once and everything is working so far. I even updated it several times already, and every time it was smooth, and it was basically just running a single ansible command. Their documentation is pretty well written, and with my basic cloud, IT and Linux knowledge I had no issues with following it. All you need to know is how to set up cloud VM, get a domain and set DNS, and set up SSH keys to access the server.

In total it took me about two hours in total, from when I decided “I’m setting up Matrix tonight” without any prior knowledge, looking up my options and finding the ansible script, setting up cloud and getting Matrix up and running.

I’m renting a VM on Hetzner for like 6$ per month, and it worked without issues so far. I use it for Discord and Messenger, although the Meta bridge does have some problems, for example I didn’t figure out how to message someone with whom I haven’t had a conversation since I set up the bridge, since only then it creates the room for it. But that can be solved by keeping the Messenger app or usign the browser to send a first message, and it immediately shows in your Matrix bridge (and stays there forever).

This has to be illegal, right? It’s blatant manipulation.

Serious EVE players are something else. The mention about IT security isn’t a hyperbole, some EVE players take the espionage meta-game very seriously, and even though it’s not only against the rules but also illegal, that’s not gonna stop them. I mean, once they literally got someone to turn off electricity for a whole town just so they can win a fight (I tried to find a link to the article, because I’m 90% sure I did read about it somewhere, but I can’t manage to find it anywhere, if anyone has a link. Maybe it was just a rummor, or an unexecuted plan?)

I used TS for the first time in like 15 years litterally two days ago, funny timing.

Yeah, I lost EVE. Again.

It helps a lot. Because then, a Linux support won’t be such an afterthought, and you wouldn’t have to deal with stuff like popular games adding anti-cheat that bans Linux users.

Right now, some game developers aren’t even willing to enable EAC Linux support, which is like a one checkbox they need to enable for it to work.

I don’t think surface would make for a good work laptop, but I have amazing experience so far with using it for the ocassional traveling, or just as a carry-on.

I just Parsec into my desktop at home, and can comfortably work without having to deal with performance, and Surface is amazing for that.

I also really like the pen support, so I can make notes or draw bascially anywhere.

And I also use it for DJing, where it works pretty well and is compact enough to not be a bother carrying it around.

Ooh, you are right, I can actually file bug reports or try to fix it myself now that I switched to FOSS from Windows. Tbh that didn’t really occur to me, since I was switching only like a month ago. I’ll look into it, so far I suspect that it’s actually covered by one of those troubleshooting cases mentioned in their FAQ, and I’m not really confident enough to start recompiling libraries with additional flags. Especially since I’m on Nobara and don’t want to break anything, AFAIK that OS is pretty customised from the start and figuring out what I can safely touch isn’t something I have the guts for yet.

Unfortunately, NVIDIA. I was buying a new PC half a year ago, and only started even considering to make the switch to Linux few months after that, so I am at a pretty unlucky point where I just had recently spent a lot of money for new-gen PC, but without knowing that I should really go for AMD.

I will make the switch to AMD as soon as it’s justifiable, but I’m too lazy to deal with second-hand resale and it’s hard to justify a new GPU when I still have the current gen, but from wrong manufacturer.

I’ve just had to switch back to X11 from Wayland on Nobara, because I couldn’t get Sunshine to work no matter what I tried, my windows were occasionally flickering black, and my taskbar kept freezing. So I guess I’ll wait a little bit more.

I’m actually glad for it. It made me switch to Linux, discover Mullvad Browser and their VPN combo, get a GrapheneOS phone, find an amazing Freetube YT desktop client, and dabble with Home Assistant and PIHole. Plus I migrated to Protonmail and Kagi as my search, and Lemmy instead of reddit is also an amazing change, the discussions I’ve seen so far feel better and more in depth, and I’m enjoying my time here so far. The lack of endless content is also great, to help with implementing Digital Minimalism.

So, while I hate any large corporation and their greed with more and more passion, it has lead me to a nice privacy journey, for which I’m glad.

I’ve recently switched to Nobara, and has been unsure whether to go with Wayland or X11. Mostly because I’ve read that Wayland has issues on NVIDIA GPUs and will perform slower, so I went with X11 (On KDE). Is that still the case nowadays, or can I just use Wayland?

I’ve just blocked YT in my browser, and use https://freetubeapp.io/ instead. It’s a desktop app, so I don’t have to deal with cookies and storage being deleted after every session, just as i can do subscriptions to channels without requiring an account.

So far, it has been an amazing experience, I totally recommend it. And I second the point about Nano AdBlcoker, since I’ve also been one of the victims, since at the time Nano Defender was one of the alternatives pretty well recommended on Reddit, that was better at avoiding anti-adblock scripts. Plus, any extension you have only makes you easier to fingerprint, thus defeating the point of VPN or privacy focused browser. Especially with Mullvad browser + VPN, which is especially build on the idea of sharing the exact same fingerprint with every other Mullvad VPN user.

I went with Fedora when switching almost a month ago now, and I’ve been having issues with some games not working as expected, and also had trouble getting NVIDIA drivers to work correctly (which I’ve already solved, I hope). (And some applications weren’t working at all, such as Unity)

What would you consider as major advantages of Fedora, in addition to what you mentioned? So far, I usually couldn’t find a Fedora-specific version of the applications I wanted, unlike for other more well-known distributions. I do work as a programmer, which was also why I choose Fedora - I really like their Fedora Toolbox, but I would like to game regurarly on my PC and so far, it seems that Fedora doesn’t really handle it too well. Will I have similar issues on other distros, or will switching to something like Pop!OS be worth the time?

EDIT: Just found out about Nobara, I guess I’ll give that one a try.

How does Mint compares to Fedora? I decided to finally switch almost a month ago, and went with Fedora because it seemed like the best solution for general development, and I really like their Toolbox. However, I’ve been running into some issues mostly regarding gaming and NVIDIA drivers, and in general getting some applications to work on Fedora was more painful than apparently in most of the other systems.

So, should I switch, or will the Wine/Steam/Lutris experience be mostly the same on Mint as it is on Fedora?

True, but iirc there are several alternatives, from different repositories, and i was unlucky enough that j choose the wrong one for the first time.

I solved that by social engineering our IT to join my “Windows” computer into the domain, which was actually just a Windows VM. They didn’t notice, and I’m free to Linux away.

I’m also running NVIDIA (RTX 4070), and while I did have to try drivers from a few different sources, I eventually got it working pretty quickly.

But my mistake was choosing an OS that doesn’t bundle non-free drivers (Fedora), from what I’ve heard some distros like Ubuntu come with NVIDIA support by default, so I guess that’s also an option.