what if you could create a super virtual server of sorts. imagine a new cloud provider like vercel but called something else. what this provider does is when you create a server on their service, they create 3 services, one on aws, one on gcp and one on azure. behind the scenes they are 3 separate servers but to the end user they are a single server. the end user gets to control how many cloud providers are involved. when aws goes down, no worries, it switches to the part with gcp on
Imagine a new version of Windows being released called "Windows Optimal" In addition to Home, Professional and Pro you get to buy Optimal. The catch is that it is priced 4x the home version. You wonder why? Optimal is exactly what you think it is. A ground up 0 bloatware, 0 telemetry, 100% easily tweakable privacy and performance settings from a single screen with 0 AI features, 0 Edge and 0 games. Imagine getting your hands on this OS and then running your favorite programs on it. It is so minimal that you literally have to install notepad on it if you want to or you can always install notepad++. Dear employees and managers of Microsoft reading this comment, can you greenlight something of this caliber? like for once?
I'm replying to you from Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC courtesy of massgravel (or massgrave... not sure wth it's actually called now!) and it's activated until 2038.
The only thing it didn't have out of the box that I wanted was Microsoft Store (so that I could install Winget and Terminal) but you install it from an elevated powershell command with "wsreset -i" and that's it done.
It also has the original version of Notepad, not that abomination with the tabs and Copilot!
Oh, no Copilot whatsoever in fact.
All the instructions for IoT (including where to get it... legitimately) are on the massgrave github page and website.
And before I am accused of sailing the high seas... I'm not! The activation script just activates complicated processes built-in to Windows: it doesn't "hack" it or anything!
I moved all my home LAN Windows machines to LTSC IoT in February; cost me about 90 euros for each license. You can buy individual licenses from online stores that will connect to MS and validate correctly. You'll have to install the MS app store from GitHub (!), and there are some other issues, but at least you're years away from what hit everyone else this October.
You can find some licenses sold online; it costs about 3x the price of Home. But I am not sure if it's legal; I have already bought some and then realized it's just keygenerated.
Normal, reputable websites never sell single LTSC licenses. So go figure
It shows nothing. Normal users dont even get the option. They probably dont give a fuck, based on a ton of other things, but there is no option to even choose the no bloat option.
I'm sorry but linux gaming absolutely does not support "support everything from 90s to cutting edge modern games without hiccups"
I'm sure for some users it's acceptable, solid even, but I know several people, including myself, that keep hitting edge cases and invisible walls when on Windows these games "just work". And no, it's not about kernel anti-cheats or any other DRM.
Agreed and it's frustrating that people don't admit this.
I recently started dual booting Linux again and tried both Arch and CachyOS. Former with Hyprland, the latter with Gnome just to see how well the games run. I knew going in that tiling window managers don't behave well with games and that was indeed the case. With Gnome, even some native games made by Valve had terrible performance issues where I have none on Windows. There are also cases, and I wouldn't even describe them as edge cases, that you have to tinker to get things to work properly.
I have a very basic dual monitor setup, but yesterday I spent an hour trying to fix a problem where my cursor would escape the game's window into the second monitor. The obvious solutions (gamescope) didn't work for some reason. Did I end up fixing it? Yes. But that's only because I know my way around Linux. That's an hour I'm never getting back.
I'm not making an argument for Windows, I very much dislike using it but Linux folks need to accept reality. A reality which isn't fair, but reality nonetheless. That's when you start to make progress. (Which, to be fair, they have. Tremendously so. But there's still a long road ahead!)
I use i3wm and I have this issue with escaping mouse in CS2. I thought about using gamescope but never did. You mention you found a solution so would you be kind enough to share it?
That would definitely save me part of that hour you lost :)
But honestly, I'd trade that hour on linux a thousand times to not have to close another notification from Windows about this amazing new game they have for me to install. And I don't even have Windows 11.
Linux has quirks, of course, but every OS has them. People like to dismiss quirks on Windows because they're used to it, but a lot of the time they're worse than Linux's quirks.
I use crossover and/or Lutris on Linux in order to run most of my 90s Windows games as it's a complete pain in the ass to get them working under Windows 11.
I've had a pretty opposite experience. I was able to get an old adventure game (Titanic: Adventure out of Time) working just fine on Wine and it refuses to run on modern Windows.
> I'm sorry but linux gaming absolutely does not support "support everything from 90s to cutting edge modern games without hiccups"
Neither does Windows. W11 (or was it W10) famously broke a bunch of old games. Running Windows games from the 90s is easier on linux than on Windows at this point.
That's really nice but that still doesn't make Linux the better option, or even "easier" when PCGW has everything covered for Win. And most Windows issues is just slapping dgVoodoo or nGlide in and it's done anyway when solving a linux problem might be anything from picking a specific (arcanely divined) proton version to elaborate hacks and batches.
Well, guess you're married to Windows if those are your requirements. Proton runs most games these days[1] (but not all). Apparently older Windows app/games run better on Proton/Wine than Windows (better citation needed) [2].
It doesn't. Case in point is my spare late 00's laptop running mint and early 00's / late 90's games. Some (Age of Wonders 1) don't work at all under wine/proton. Others (Age of Wonders SM, dosbox games, Majesty) technically work but keep hitting snags like midi just flat out not working, display resolution being read and set incorrectly, visual artifacts. Everything tested worked perfectly fine under Win7 and Win10.
Aight so when using Wine, AoW1 just instantly fails silently upon launch, no error message to see. When using proton it technically works - clicking randomly I launched the tutorial, judging by the sounds - but the screen is black all the time and shutting down alt-f4 it throws an error:
Exception EWin32Error in module VCL30.dpl at 00010E4F
Well you can get closer with custom build tools and tools to gut features. Ms is acutely aware of these third party efforts and they are working diligently to stop them from working in each release. They are not interested in making a prosumer release, but harvesting the customer. One of you is the matrix and the other is the human battery. I leave it to the reader to determine where they fall in those categories.
I've been running Affinity Photo on Fedora for a while by running this installation script[1]. Works flawlessly and they recently upgraded the script to install Affinity 3.0. I haven't encountered/solved your second use-case, but I'm /sure/ someone has.
what about splinter cell conviction, 15 yrs and nobody has figured out its map file format .unr that uses custom unreal engine 2.x. It even has a tool that lets you unpack its UMD files https://github.com/wcolding/UMDModTemplate The library on github requires this tool unumd https://www.gildor.org/smf/index.php/topic,458.msg15196.html... The same tool also works for blacklist. I would like to change the type of enemy spawned in the map but I cannot find any assistance on it. UEExplorer doesnt work because it is some kinda custom map file
AWS really needs to focus on simplifying their offerings for the next generation that is not very "computer savvy" for starters. You can host a website on ec2, you can also host it on elastic beanstalk, you can also host it on lightsail? See the problem? Instead of making us focus on how to adapt to your services, why not focus on how you can adapt to the customer needs. Introduce something called AWS WebServer or something and deprecate everything else except EC2. let people run their docker and lightsail and static hosting from this Amazon WebServer service. Do the same for databases. Why offer a separate Amazon Aurora postgres and an amazon RDS. Offer a service called Amazong DB and let the user decide if it is posgres, server oriented, serverless from there. Let it also handle dynamoDB
AWS makes money being the Hoster of Fortune 500 companies. They want lots of complicated shit. AWS has no problem that hobbyists or small business choose simpler solutions elsewhere
with respect to food i wanted to ask HN here, what if a bunch of people came together. Let us say 10000 americans who are poor decide to pool in money and import groceries from a country with much cheaper prices (say India) would this cost less after shipping? What if there was a startup that groups people like this in a bunch and does weekly shipping of groceries from a low cost country? Would that help?
since you love reverse engineering a lot from your blog posts it seems, if it isn't too much to ask, can you look into this .unr file which is basically an unreal map that was made with an internal tool at Ubi HQ for a 15 yr old game (splinter cell conviction) . It won't load inside UEExplorer or any of the openly available UE tools. Perhaps it could be a topic of your next post in addition to being tremendous help for the gaming community as only basic mods can be made for this game currently unless someone can figure out how to load its maps somehow
while steam os slowly eats their lunch. Honestly Microsoft should consider getting rid of their immense bloatware on Windows 11 instead of adding more bloatware to it. I have a machine with Windows 7 and another with Windows 11 on it. You wouldn't even have to guess which one works faster. I am amazed that 10 yrs of hardware improvements got completely undone by software bloat. I really expect Windows 11 to be even more performant than Windows 7 given the hardware advances but guess what? We literally went back 5 steps. The least they could do is announce a version of Windows called "Windows Optimal" In addition to home, professional, pro, you also get Windows Optimal for 4x the price. 0 telemetry, 0 bloatware, 0 lag, truly performant to every thread.
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