This is a wierd article. It was originally Googles fault, then it was AI and google is now sponsering the project?

Not really - if a woman came in with a gunshot wound, she’d be asked if she was pregnant. Why? Because she’d need a CT scan or an X-ray, which are ionizing radiation and have a risk for a foetus. She’d need a scan or x-ray to ensure there was no shrapnel in the would before closure even if superficial, and to assess for damage to vessels or bone etc if deep wound.

It’s a standard question that any women would recognise from trips to the emergency room. It’s pretty ineffective as a punchline if the cartoonist is trying to make the point you say they’re making.

Instead it just makes the woman in the cartoon appear dumb/ignorant which totally undermines the message it’s purportedly trying to put across. She is giving a fed up or even patronising look over something that would be essential question in any hospital.

Out of interest, which aspect don’t you believe? The article is clear the broken update effects a specific subset of enterprise users, on a specific mix of base versions and cumulative updates.

This seems like a classic windows update issue. In fairness to Microsoft it is difficult to prevent bugs when there is a huge install base, with a huge range of hardware, with a huge range of users on different mixes of updates and updating at their own. I personally think that’s totally believable.

What’s not clear is perhaps the implied overarching story that W11 is worse for this than other versions of Windows. I can’t answer that about windows updates themselves, but I certainly believe W11 is the worst version of Windows I’ve ever used (and I’ve used every version back to 3.11 as a kid). I have to use W11 at work: the UI is absolutely terrible and unfriendly but far worse it constantly and inexplicably slows down, programs become unresponsive repeatedly and I come across errors constantly.

I work in a big organisation and I don’t even bother to report most errors now - we hop between PCs because of the nature of my Job, and I’ve come up across so many I just can’t be bothered opening more tickets. I’d describe it as a mostly large volume of minor issues and inconveniences that cumulatively, on top of the bad design, that make it a shit experience. But I’ve also had numerous major errors since we moved from W10 to W11 on different PCs - they all have the same hardware and software yet the problems are different on each. I’ve given up reporting the problems and just avoid the PCs, and I think a lot of my colleagues are the same.

My organisation (I work in a large Hospital), is already stretched due to high work volume and low staffing and we now have a constantly little drag from Windows 11 on everything we do. It’s like Microsoft sprinkle a little bit of shit onto every computer, every day, all day. The cumulative effect in just my organisation must be massive - I shudder to think how bad it is across the whole economy.

The publicity will have little impact; only the AI bubble popping will make them change course. But the damage is already done - they’ve pivoted their company to AI, forced it into all there products and force their employees to use it. Once the bubble pops that’s going to take time to undo and fix.

AI of course will still be a thing, but at the moment they’re wasting billions on it as everyone wants to be to AI as Google is to search.

So bizarrely the best experience is to self host and pirate. That’s what you get when the entire entertainment industry is hostile to consumers.

When Netflix first became big, it was popular because it was a one-stop shop for almost all your content. It was like a big library of content in one place, you pay a reasonable monthly fee and it’s all there. Piracy dipped as a result.

Now all the content is fragmented into numerous walled gardens you have to pay separate fees to access. People can only consume the same amount but now they have to pay 4 or 5 fees as the content is spread out.

Unsurprisingly piracy is booming again.

Scarcity manufactured by the AI “boom”. When the AI bubble pops, expect a huge slump in hardware prices as companies try to offload huge stockpiles of worthless RAM, CPUs and GPUs.

Would just add, while you can change the permissions on NTFS drives in Linux, I’d generally recommend using a Linux dedicated partition (Ext4 for example) for games. It’s faster and also much less likely to cause unexpected issues.

The headline doesn’t quite reflect the situation, but it is difficult to capture in a headline.

Essentially add “for now”. Many of the issues are fixable but not necessarily by one laptop maker. As the article said by the time the issues were likely resolved the laptop would be obsolete as the version 2 of the chip would release.

Having said that, it’s not clear how fast the issues will resolve as without any devices there won’t be impetus to put fixes in to different parts of the ecosystem to get the full potential of the chipset.

The GPU sounds like the most serious problem and without manufacturer engagement may be the longest to get fixed.

Yes it’s fairly simple to do, essentially the user needs to download an image of a Linux install disc, flash it onto a USB stick (or a Dvd I guess), and then reboot their PC. They may need to press a key at boot to open the boot menu and select the USB (or the bios to change the boot order).

After that, most distros offer a very easy to follow installer which will install the new OS.

Most Linux installs can be done alongside windows (on the same hard drive or it’s own drive) but windows tends to break the boot loader with updates. It’s gernallt better to only dual boot if you’re good at fixing things - otherwise a full Linux install is better.

The most inportant thing is back up all your important data, and only do this if you genuinely want to leave windows. I’d make sure your windows license is digital before doing this too as that allows using windows again if you want to go back.

I’d say anyone can use Linux, it’s user friendly and robust. In terms of installing Linux, I’d only do it if you are sure you know what you’re doing - installing any OS - including windows - can involved trouble shooting problems.

I think the new device is good news. I can see what you’re saying - the benefit is if Steam Machines expand the PC games market with former console only players. But otherwise the threshold for PC development is already much lower than consoles; there are no dev kit fees, a wide choice of engines to target, relatively greater independence etc.

The steam machine may help somewhat in having a specific hardware profile to target, but the games are still on steam’s store so still have to be able to run widely on Windows or Linux. That’s always been the complexity of PC development - the steam machine doesn’t change that much. Although admittedly the Steam Verified benchmarks are useful for users to simplify understanding what their kit can actually run which will benefit indie devs.

For me it seems to be when you go through to download the windows binary, you get an iframe on the page containing another site. That has ads and serves up the download. So I’m guessing the ads are on the website that provides videolan with hosting for its binaries?

They are old fashioned intrusive ads pretending you need to click then to start your download. But the download starts already.

I think Nextcloud with the libreoffice plugins is the main Google docs self hosting alternative at this point.

• OS - - > Linux OpenSuSE with KDE

• YouTube - - > Freetube - opensource, private YouTube client for Linux, MacOS and Windows

• Downloading music/videos --> yt-dlp

• Downloading videos/images --> gallery-dl

• Email - - > Thunderbird (really moved forward in last few years)

• Notes - - > Joplin

Selfhosting (mine is on raspberry pi) :

• Streaming library - Jellyfin

• Photo library - imich

• Downloads - qbittorrent, prowlaar, radaar, sonaar, lazy librarian in a docker stack with VPN

• smart home - Homeassistant

• filesync - - > Syncthing (I don’t have problems with long file names - maybe a Windows issue or Linux FS? I use EXT4 on all my devices and don’t use Windows anymore)

Yeah, they did. Probably because OpenSuSE is better known than SuSE at this point. Yet it’ll stay the base for SuSE. It makes some sense I guess - Fedora is the base for RedHat for example. It is a bit confusing and complicated for an open source project to share branding with a commercial project; probably quite restricting for OpenSuSE. But a rebrand is also messy itself.

Yes there are, but haven’t heard when they plan to make the change.

The article names the game in the headline, not clear why your post needed to try to be click bait?

It’s about OpenMW, the open source game engine to play Morrowind on.

Any points and click adventure game, there are loads including old classics and modern good games.

Monkey Island remasters are fun and can be played with mouse. Broken Sword games are also good.

Rusty Lake games are great if you prefer more puzzle games than narrative ones. Still has a great somewhat surreal plot just not like a point and click narrative game.

Also If you havent played dwarf fortress now is the time to learn, the siege update came out this week. Mouse or keyboard, or both, but definitely can be done one handed.

Vampire Survivor that others have suggested is a good shout, one hand on the keyboard is enough and its very addictive.

Also separate from my long response, thanks for sharing that link. Very interesting read and the GNOME window decoration issue is rediculous.

For me, I’m sorry to say, GNOME is the epitome of asshole design. This one of many examples of its rigid design philosophy having negative consequences for users and devs. And devs are protecting GNOME from its own users bad experiences because the user blames the game for not conforming, not the DE for being rediculous.

Worth saying the 3% market share is very new, and previously the share has been way way below this. At 3% that is millions of users but even that is hard to justify a linux release; many games dont even get MacOS versions even now and it has higher desktop share.

The other problem for linux is version control - libraries are different across distros of different ages, and also constantly update. If you build software on a dependency and it changes in a few years, your game may break. As bad as windows is, when games are distributed a lot of the dependencies are distributed with the game as DLLs and installers for Microsoft tools. But for linux you previously could not guarentee the same version of the same dependency will be available on two distros still actively supported.

It can be surprisingly hard to get old Linux software to run on new Linux distros. People are not generally aware of this as generally its old windows and dos games that people try to get working (so wine or dosbox are used), not old Linux software like Open Office from 2005 or an old version of Firefox. Most linux software continually evolves or its niche and just stops working (unless youre willing to go back and compile from source, and that can get nightmarish if it doesnt compile)

Proton is part of the solution but developing “for” proton is not efficient long term. It is great for enabling windows games to work on linux, but linux native games would be more optimal. We’re just lucky we’re now in a time where there is a lot of CPU and GPU resource available to support the overhead and windows is also so bloated making linux + proton comparatively better.

I suspect Flatpak may be another part of the solution - Flatpak can essentially be a way of ensuring a game can have a fixed set of dependencies which install on any Linux and should just work. Its not that far off the windows model of packaging DLLs, but is much cleaner and contained.

Nix is another potential approach to this.

But developing for Linux wouldn’t take off until the market share is substantially higher. The SteamDeck and tge rumours Steam console may help with that, but for now I think devs relying on Proton makes sense.

In terms of KDE dependencies, you’re talking basically about QT. The amount of packages you download shouldnt be too much and likely used for other QT programs which are common.

However there is also GSconnect which is a Gnome extension and uses the KDE connect protocol.

I would say that your concerns regarding the KDE Connect dependencies should be balanced against the good Android and iOS support, and the wide use of KDE connect means it is well maintained, supported and responsive to security updates. These considerations may outweigh the installation of packages that you otherwise won’t be using? It may be better to go mainstream and accept the dependencies than hunt down a lesser supported alternative and deal woth the associated shortcomings.