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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

You know at the time I never realized I was living in a golden era between the time anti-malware and anti-adware became very good and the time the ads were built right into the damn operating system and first-party software.

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Maybe you should take this as a sign that it's time to switch operating systems? There are many out there. Most of them treat you better than Microsoft does.

If you want to do any sort of pc gaming, then you don't really have a choice unfortunately.

If you can get video drivers to work, Linux has been "good enough" for a while now. SteamOS will further push the ecosystem into it (hopefully).

Just use mainstream hardware and not low budget laptops and this is pretty easy these days.

Thankfully for all but one desktop GPU vendor the drivers are built right into the kernel and come out of the box with any distribution.

I'll grant you that most people will likely prefer PC gaming on Wimdows, but the claim of any sort of gaming is excessive. There is a large selection of native games from many publishers and in many genres for Linux. You won't have to go without if you're simply looking for a good time. That's before considering emulation, Proton, and the likes. Of course, a desire to play particular titles is going to be hit-or-miss.

I do all of my gaming on a Linux laptop via Proton. Even got it to switch between my iGPU and dGPU. We're _lightyears_ ahead of where we used to be.

Not really, nowadays. Windows has better GPU drivers, and it allows for more intrusive DRM/anticheat. So, if you are playing brand new AAA games with really fancy graphics, Windows might be helpful. Or if you are really into competitive online gaming.

Those are niches, though, not "any sort of pc gaming."

To go completely off topic, whatever happened to free online games? It almost looks like one generation just stopped playing them and the other somehow decided to go with expensive / adware smartphone games. Surely there must have been some people in between who wondered what the fuck was happening? Is this a flash generation gap?

What kind?

I remember free flash games. I wonder if flash dying, and then nothing quite replaced it, in terms of being 1) easy for the user to 'install' and 2) easy for the creator to make something.

There was also stuff like Urban Dead and Nexus War, almost like MUDs for 2007 or so. Urban Dead is shambling along appropriately enough...

I miss games like Tribal War, that ancient Greece themed game, eRepublik, and of course Urban Dead.

From what I gather all the growth, audience, and money moved into "social gaming" (fb farmville / Mafia wars) and mobile.

There was also a game -- "Battlemaster," essentially you played some noble lord in a low-ish-fantasy universe. Vaguely game-of-thronesy feeling (before the show, though). I didn't get very far (although someone was nice enough to give me a province, and I dutifully... paid taxes and tried to avoid screwing up whatever plans I thought they had going).

Some players from Urban Dead (the spark more or less came from the ridleyband resistance front, I think) eventually made Nexus War, which had a similar feel to it, but better design (skill trees, etc) and a more interesting theme (angels vs humans vs demons). Eventually that shut down, and somebody from the community made a similar game called Nexus Clash. That's still running, although I guess the population is probably ever-dwindling.

This sort of asynchronous mostly HTML based game seemed to be really good at fostering a community. Play the game a bit, find a faction of some sort, and then join their phpbb forum...

Pretty sure all that flash-level content is in Roblox these days, but I’m not sure because I’m from the wrong generation and can afford to pay for my games.

Kids stopped using PCs.

Yes you do. Use a minimal separate Windows install only for gaming when necessary. That's what I do.

I also got single GPU kvm passthrough working the other day so I don't even need to dual boot.

You could even take a principled stand and just not play those games.

Same. I have a gaming windows machine. I have a kvm switch that switches to my main Ubuntu OS.

Yes, this requires having two PCs, but I don't need a GPU for Ubuntu anyway (the integrated one suffices).

I also like my hardware isolation between Microsoft/NSA spyware/adware my actual computer.

Same here. I have a separate PC for gaming.

What makes a good PC for daily work is also very different from what makes a good having PC. My daily driver is a quiet and energy efficient NUC. My gaming PC is quite noisy with its 3080Ti..

I'm sure I can bring noise levels down with expensive fans but consumption will remain higher. This way I don't have to as I always game with a headset on anyway.

I mean in that case you're still paying Microsoft for a Windows install. I'm not sure that is really "choosing a different OS" in a way that matters much. You chose Windows and a different OS, from Microsoft's point of view they still got theirs

Linux gaming works very well. Perfect without any issues ever? Probably not but neither is Windows. The main remaining difference seems to be due to anti-cheat, but that's only mainstream multiplayer gaming, not "any sort of pc gamings".

I go weeks at a time forgetting that MS makes an operating system. For "business" document exchange and collaboration, Office is still best though. They definitely still have a monopoly in the Office Suite space

The only difference between proprietary software and malware is whether they're exploiting users with or without the corporation's permission. Adware, data exfiltration and remote access are all bad but when they do the exact same thing it's "totally legitimate business interests". Just like when it's "national security" when the governments do worse than what black hats do.

Nations must maintain monopolies on certain powers like war and monetary policy to maintain order, so it’s not that hypocritical.

Terrorism is to war as cryptocurrency is to economics?

It's a little facetious, but it did put a smile on my face. It has a certain ring of truishness

Crypto is a coup

Linux has gotten really nice lately.

This doesn't deserve to be downvoted. I just switched back to Linux this week after giving Windows more than a fair shake for the past decade (initially because I couldn't be bothered to muck around with UEFI to dual-boot into my gaming partition every time). But I'm so tired of the ads and the scummy app defaults that I got a dedicated Linux machine and the Windows one is now relegated to playing whatever games don't run on Proton or Switch.

It seems a bit of a Microsoft thing. I haven't seen it on Mac/Linux. In general I don't really see ads on my electronic gadgets though London public transport is a bit plastered with the things.

I used MSN Hotmail (the precursor to Outlook.com) back in the day. It had banner ads back then.

(In fairness, it was then and is now otherwise free of charge, isn’t it?)

ios has had built in ads for a very long time. news+, music being the two biggest pushes. even in the settings app.

buy airpods? start getting more ads for music

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