JasSmith

There are no ad blocking YouTube apps on iOS so I suspect Apple blocks them. The DMA will soon let us in the EU install whatever we like, but fuck Apple.

100%. We learned this lesson centuries ago during the Enlightenment. Censorship is harmful to society. Sure, if there were some magical and neutral arbiter of information, maybe it could work if democratically controlled. By there isn’t, and these tools are not democratically controlled. Every time people or groups get too powerful, they abuse the system for their own advantage. We should always presume companies like Google do the same using the age old premise of “protecting the children.” How many violations has this adage defended over the years.

While I don’t agree with his conspiracy theories, search engines should give us the information we are looking for. He asked for information, and some of the search engines effectively told him, “no.” That’s valuable information because it’s not just conspiracy theories they’re removing. For example, some years ago I heard a news report about some American political group called the “Proud Boys.” I wanted to look into them to find out what they’re about, so I Google them. Turns out Google has scrubbed their site from search. Accusations of this kind of political censorship are mounting, too. Another politically contentious site, KiwiFarms, is also delisted. I can only imagine how many other sites have been delisted over the years which we just don’t know about.

I’m an adult. I can make up my own mind. If I ask for information, I expect a search engine to provide it. Kagi passes this test.

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Or do as I do.

1. Buy game.

2. Never play it.

I have a problem.

You should write for Retro Gamer. This would be right at home there.

Only 13% of my Steam library is verified. That’s still plenty of games, but it’s a lot more limited than “all games on Steam.” More than half of the top 20 games on Twitch are unplayable or run terribly on Linux.

It opens some doors if you’re willing to accept “playable” games. That’s another 14% of my library. The vast majority are a crapshoot for me on the Deck. Most of the issues revolve around text illegibility and clunky controls.

I don’t expect magic, so I don’t expect Linux to be a Windows competitor in the consumer space for many years to come.

Surely you can see the material differences between the Steam Deck and someone trying to install a flavour of Linux for themselves on their Windows PC. Valve has done everything. No tinkering with drivers. The hardware works out of the box. No complicated workarounds. No CLI. Every game is clearly labelled for compatibility in the UI. It even has functionality which Windows doesn’t have like sleep and wake for games in progress. They’ve even gone with an immutable OS, so developers know their games will operate if tested on the one distribution.

You incorrectly infer blame. This isn’t anyone’s fault. I am simply acknowledging the reality of the situation: Linux still lacks compatibility with a lot of hardware, software, and games. That fact is contributing to its low consumer adoption. In just one year, Steam Deck’s exceptional adoption thanks to seamless compatibility and user experience should prove this.

It’s not Linux’s job to run software designed for another OS.

It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. This isn’t about assigning blame. It’s about acknowledging reality. The bottom line is that Linux is still lacking a lot of software and hardware compatibility which Windows offers.

It’s immutable, so you probably consider it unusable, but I think it’s necessary for mass adoption. Developers know exactly how the OS is built and can ensure their applications and games operate well on Steam OS. I think it will become a de facto standard, if it’s not already.

Valve made games “just work” on the Steam Deck. No tweaks, CLI, hacks, or major performance issues. They took away the friction. I hope that in time all games will just work on Linux. When that happens and I can use my gaming peripherals like wheels and pedals I’ll be giving up Windows on my gaming PC.

You have a very loose definition of “achieved.” There are countless hardware devices lacking support. Microsoft Office, the most widely used business productivity tool in the world by far, still has either limited or no support on Linux. Most of the top 20 games on Twitch are either completely unsupported, or require onerous workarounds with poor performance.

It’s great that you have achieved what you desire, but you’re not representative of everyone.

Linus Torvalds had a great rant about this situation. He believes that it might require Valve to fix this by becoming the de facto standard.

Cheating estimates are hard. I think my Fortnite games are plagued by cheaters, but maybe I just suck and everyone else is competitive level. This study found that 32% of gamers had admitted to cheating, and 12% claim to cheat regularly. This study found astonishingly high levels of people searching for cheats for their games, with Sweden topping the ranks of cheaters.

Bottom line: if it’s not a problem for you, that’s great. It’s a big problem for me and others, and I’m grateful to give up a little privacy in exchange for a cheat-free experience, which Valorant does.

Last time I investigated this, Overwatch used a very poorly-designed client-side solution called Warden. It’s a signature-based detection system, similar to antivirus. It looks for process IDs of known cheats. There is also some server-side heuristic detection which looks for impossible player stats that reveal rage-mode cheating. Again, this is easily defeated to the point that it doesn’t work at all because cheaters know about it and spend the first few minutes of the match firing into walls and floors to dilute their stats. Detecting process IDs is useless when you can just make some minor changes and recompile every few days, which is exactly what the subscription-based hacks do. It is a naive and amateur solution, and because of its flawed architecture it can never be effective.

The only serious anti-cheat in any game is in Valorant. It’s a kernel module that can detect low-level hacks. Overwatch’s anti-cheat runs in user mode, and all the serious hacks use HID drivers that are recompiled periodically to prevent signature detection.

I’m not sure. I think any effective anti-cheat is invasive. I hate them but I hate cheaters even more.

Yes, I think it’s mostly anti-cheat causing the issues. Still, these are some of the most popular games in the world like Fortnite and Destiny 2 and Valorant.

If the games you want to play work well on Proton then it’s fine. You’ll receive a minimal performance hit, or on very rare occasions, none at all. Unfortunately something like half the top 10-20 games on Twitch either don’t run on Linux at all, or run really poorly and require a lot of workarounds.