I still have a laptop with a tiny shrunken Windows partition on it in case I need it for some reason, but I’ve not actually booted it since installing debian. I can’t be bothered to figure out how to clean up the bloat, disarm the telemetry, avoid the online MS services, block the ads, dodge the bugs, wait for the updates, get used to all the various stupid ways the UI has changed since the win XP I was familiar with, et cetera.

Using Windows these days is just way too much work, I don’t know how anyone even does it.

Oh, I didn’t know nix was a package manager that’s available in debian. I might try it some day. Fortunately it’s not necessary to install it with sh < (curl) as recommended there.

Do people actually type out :split? I didn’t even know that existed, just it’s just ^Ws to me.

A strong warning against distrohopping.

1,759 mods published in the last 28 days on nexus.

I am taking a break from working on my Skyrim mod list to try getting into Baldur’s Gate 3 for a third time.

My first attempt, I picked “tactician” difficulty, didn’t make optimal choices for character build and party composition, and then quit at the end of act 2 when the fights got too hard. Then I tried honour mode, minmaxed everything, was getting by okay but quit in the middle of act two because playing that way was boring.

So now I’m playing at the default difficulty level, just relaxing and having fun like a normal person.

Using exclusively Linux on the desktop has been possible since 1997, when I switched to being mostly a linux user — what people mean by “getting closer” is that it’s much closer than it used to be to being completely automatic, requiring no effort or thought whatsoever. Obviously it will never quite get there; that is not a destination that exists in the real world.

There are many possible approaches, depending on the specifics of the game and the level of effort one’s willing to put into it. Plenty of techniques to choose from. Messing with the client-side OS kernel is one that will soon be looked back on as a ridiculous dead-end approach that wasted a lot of people’s time until we all realized it was futile, sort of like the way they used to use deliberate sector misalignments to produce disk i/o errors to prevent people copying floppy disks.

It’s a big complicated topic. Here’s one link to help you get started if you actually want to learn about it: https://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~cslui/PUBLICATION/detect_cheat.pdf

Running around in the sky at hyperspeed is a fine example of the kind of cheating that can easily be prevented server side and would be impossible if your game was designed correctly.

Personally I have no interest in keeping a Windows system around at all, so anything that relies on its kernel internals is never going to be useful for people like me. But that’s not the only problem with “kernel level” anticheat. Many people who are willing to run actual Windows do so because they find it useful for more than playing just one game, and do not want its security and integrity compromised in order to temporarily slow down the cheaters for one lazy game dev who can’t be bothered to find better ways.

Games have no business messing around with the OS kernel. For people who know things about computers, it just feels wrong — in much the same way as forcibly locking everyone inside at night in order to prevent nocturnal burglaries would be wrong, even if it was completely effective.

Do you lock your door at night?

No, I rely on a bro from Riot Games to come round and lock me in, so they can be sure I won’t go out at night and commit crimes.

Gaben would come to your house and arrest you.

Worst of all, root access is often granted to humans — a species known to be vulnerable to the most idiotic phishing scams you could imagine.

Debian is still the best at being Debian. I rate it the least likely to give me any unpleasant surprises.

I don’t know, there’s just something about it.

For a long time we had VGA for video cables. There was no VGA version 2.1.9, now supporting 1024x768 mode with 16-bit colour. Cables did not cost $29. There were no rent-seeking patent holders charging license fees, or at least they weren’t obnoxious enough that we knew about them. It didn’t have five different types of connectors. There was no VGA consortium constantly keeping itself in the news with periodic press releases. Companies didn’t need to sign away their soul to write drivers for it. There was no VGA copy protection trying to keep us from decoding our own video streams. Cables didn’t include enough microelectronics to power a space shuttle.

Somehow I think we could do better.

I hate HDMI with a passion that can not be explained.

Mostly I just install Skyrim mods manually because I’m insane I guess, but for some games I like to run Mod Organizer 2 under proton. Your whole linux filesystem can be made accessible to windows programs, not sure if it is by default. But anyway since we’re talking steam games here the game itself normally will be in the same place as usual, as far as windows programs know.

If they go through with this I’ll switch to Hannah Montana Linux.

You’re not really living with as much free software as possible until you’ve installed all of the 103818 packages in debian.

#!/bin/bash # Recursively rename everything in the current directory as necessary # to make it match the case of filenames in Skyrim’s “Data” directory,

from=`pwd -P`
to="${HOME}/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/common/Skyrim_1.5.97/Data"
tmp="/tmp/skydata_index"
filez="/tmp/skydata_from"

IFS='
'

match_case() {
    cd "$2"
    find . | grep -v '^[.]$' > "$tmp"
    cd "$1"
    find . -maxdepth 1 | grep -v '^[.]$' > "$filez"
    for j in `cat $filez`; do
        if ( grep -i "^${j}$" $tmp ); then
            name=`grep -i "^${j}$" $tmp | head -1`
            if [ "${name}xx" != "${j}xx" ] ; then
                mv "$j" "$name"
            fi
        fi
    done

    # going recursiv
    find . -maxdepth 1 -type d | grep -v '^[.]$' > "$filez"
    for j in `cat $filez`; do
        if ( test -d "${2}/${j}" ) ; then
            match_case "${1}/${j}" "${2}/${j}"
        fi
    done
}
match_case $from $to
rm $tmp $filez