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Comment by globalnode | Hacker News Reader

Windows is basically ad/spyware, personally I only use it under sufferance for games and while doing so I remind myself constantly that I'm being watched/recorded and my computer is out of my control. So I play games, then log to Linux if I want to do anything real. Even then, do we know some rogue process isnt vacuuming up your keystrokes? Can still get a lot done without an internet connection I guess if you plan ahead.

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Even with games nowadays you'd be surprised with the quality of gaming on Linux. I've got a laptop with a nvidia graphics card running linux, historically a problematic to say the least setup. I've only had one game I needed to tweak the startup settings for (other than forcing the use of proton), everything just kind of works now.

I will put a big disclaimer here that I don't play online games really and some are just fecked due to certain anti cheats.

Online games with ring 0 anticheats not working on Linux is a feature actually

Yeah Rust is non-functional for that reason sadly, but otherwise I'm loving my Linux life; most eveything else works great. Valve have done us a great service with Proton.

Wanted to play Helldivers with my boys from back home. They're on Xbox, I'm on Linux, guess who could play it?

I love that Arch is a better gaming platform than Xbox these days.

Used to be that any two of those three things (Laptop, NVIDIA, Linux) together was enough to ensure endless hassle dinkin' with various things to get it all running somewhat halfway right. Nowadays it seems like most everything on Linux is pretty much real deal "plug-n-play" except the odd occasional AAA game publisher goin' all purposely anti-Linux with their DRM or anticheat.

Praise be to Valve / Steam for their massive (and ongoing) push to make gaming viable on Linux for a wider audience outside the "nerd" crowd runnin' WINE from commandline, and various "retro" / classic console emulators (and of course "indie" games). Love bein' able to click "Play" and most games these days just run (despite my bein' one of those "nerds" who ran games in WINE long before Valve ever did). :)

You don't need Steam; you can just use Lutris, where you even have a Flatpak.

Maybe you know this, but steam does more than get games playing on Linux. They (Valve?) have a group that develops drivers for AMD gpus on Linux. Their contributions still may not ve limited to just that primarily, but if there wasn’t Valve it would seem we’d have a lot less to play on Linux at the very least.

A lot of their work on proton also gets upstreamed back into wine, so even for those not using proton, they're still benefiting quite a bit in recent years from all of the work Valve has done on that front.

If drivers are libre, you have them back. Ditto with Proton, Lutris makes installing a gane a non-issue. Flatpak downloads MESA too.

Even installing Gentoo today feels like cheating compared to what it was like in the early 2000s. It really does mostly just work these days.

I remember the days of running WINE, tweaking settings, searching forums, hacking around in kernel modules, yelling at nvidia drivers…kind of miss it lol

> do we know some rogue process isnt vacuuming up your keystrokes?

The standard for holding a belief isn't "can you prove it is not so?", but "on the balance of evidence, is it likely to be so?".

If you believe everything you can't disprove, you'll hold an awful lot of bizarre and contradictory beliefs.

In the past I have spent some time believing some things simply because I couldn't disprove them, it is not good for the soul.

I think that was also the common approach to paranoia about your privacy pre-Snowden. But he kind of ended that discussion for many, although denial or ignorance is probably better for your soul indeed.

He didn't end the discussion, he presented evidence. When you receive updated evidence you should update your beliefs.

He presented good evidence that big corporations are co-operating with the NSA, or something, but he didn't present any evidence at all that regular Linux distros are monitoring all your keystrokes. As far as I know.

To just wildly speculate about mass surveillance without evidence is just baseless conspiracy theories, you really have nothing to worry about. Hope that helps.

The fact that our currently popular operating systems don't enable users to trivially 'disprove' such possibilities really shows how shitty they all are

What is a way in which you could disprove this?

How could you disprove that the Ubuntu ISO doesn’t do the same thing?

Well apart from monitoring network traffic, with Ubuntu you can examine the source code for anything that you don't trust or dive into what system calls an application makes by using "strace".

How is this different for Windows? Can’t you monitor Windows network traffic as well?

Does Ubuntu provide reproducible builds? How do you disprove that the source code isn’t for the thing that you’re downloading?

The (not so) revealing thing here is that this isn’t a technical problem, but that Microsoft has just completely lost the trust of people.

Well you can try monitoring Windows network connections, but Microsoft do seem to love obfuscating it with connections to multiple different domains that they own.

You can't even look at the Windows source code, so your question about reproducible builds seems to be moving the goalposts somewhat.

Also, is there something like "strace" on Windows?

Edit: just looked it up and Ubuntu doesn't enforce reproducible builds, although with their new "Monthly Snapshots", Canonical is moving towards reproducible build pipelines.

What is Ubuntu's source code worth for when you download precompiled binaries without checking if they were built with that source code?

That's your choice to do that and depending on your threat model, you may have some level of trust in Canonical to not screw over their customers.

I asked my original question very deliberately.

At the end of the day, it’s just about trust and reputation. I see no technical difference here for the ability to disprove random claims.

The necessary technical and UI/UX difference would be capability-based (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security) microkernels like Sel4 or Genode combined with high level user interfaces that allow one to monitor and control the rights and actual resource access and usage of programs

However, it is possible to audit the Ubuntu software against the source code which is something that you cannot do with Windows. That is a technical difference even if you don't acknowledge it.

Also, Linux does make it much easier to determine your level of trust as the different components can be analysed/verified independently (although systemd is a bit of a monolith) whereas it's a lot trickier to isolate Windows components.

even without reproducible builds, you (or someone you hire or someone who's motivated) can get the source and create a drop-in replacement.

This is even more true on some other distros, eg Gentoo.

Without source and rights, Windows fails completely here.

> The standard for holding a belief isn't "can you prove it is not so?", but "on the balance of evidence, is it likely to be so?".

IANAP, but I don't think everyone agrees with that framing. Epistemology is a big topic.

On a related note, not believing some things because you cannot prove them is a road to naivety.

For me personally, based on the plethora of evidence given by other online platforms and applications, I think it's perfectly sane to assume that yes, your data is being slurped and logged. Maybe that's not a bad thing, maybe it is, but at this point I think that ship has sailed.

Can I prove it? No, mostly because the manufacturers have specifically designed it in such a way to be unprovable.

> based on the plethora of evidence

Yep, this is fine.

I'm not saying "don't believe anything you can't prove". I'm saying "don't believe everything you can't disprove".

Believe based on evidence, as you appear to be doing.

Windows is spying on your use of System Settings? Good evidence.

Linux process is spying on your keystrokes? No evidence.

Playing games on Linux nowadays works like a charm. I had no issues with any Steam or Epic sore games whatsoever.

Many games I would like to play are Windows-only, so that kind of sucks, but then again, I installed Windows 11 just for this purpose. So not complaining, until my programs and games will stop working when Windows 13 (or whatever) comes out. I had to upgrade from Windows 9 to 11 because it became obsolete and unsupported.

> Many games I would like to play are Windows-only

Mine too, but I'll let you in on a secret:

https://www.protondb.com/

> Proton is a new tool released by Valve Software that has been integrated with Steam to make playing Windows games on Linux as simple as hitting the Play button within Steam.

I was super pissed when epic announced dropping Linux support for Rocket League. Once it was done, I fell in love with Proton, it ran better than both the native Linux version, and the Windows version on Windows.

But it does not offer me a clickable "Play" button for exclusively Windows games, unfortunately. Or is this something else? Or perhaps I have to do some configuration of some sort? I am really not sure. It works for games that have Windows + Proton (icon / logo), but the games I want have only windows.

Right click on the game in your library and choose Properties.

Then click Compatibility and tick "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool". Choose a recent version of Proton.

You only need to do this once and then try the game as normal. It's not guaranteed to work with everything but it's worth a shot.

Thanks, I will try that!

It does, you'll probably have to enable proton in Steam settings. Also, in the store pages, you can see Steam Deck compatibility rating (and details about that) which means linux in practice. Some warnings regarding small text in some games don't apply to bigger displays, of course.

It works out of the box here? Steam supports running most "Windows-only" games on Linux without trouble; you may just have to select the Proton version once.

I don't remember when I last encountered a game that didn't run. I'm sure those exist, mind. Perhaps I've just been lucky.

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