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Comment by xzjis | Hacker News Reader

Mmh, I've always wanted my gaming PC to run a useless background agent to eat up CPU cycles that could have been used for my game. Oh well, if I didn't want that, I could just consider using a Steam Machine, which Valve just announced.

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> run a useless background agent to eat up CPU cycles

Hey, that's not fair, won't this eat up GPU cycles? ;)

Not if it uploads all your data to the cloud and analyzes it there!

Both!

> Mmh, I've always wanted my gaming PC to run a useless background agent to eat up CPU cycles that could have been used for my game.

Wasn't that the whole point of Windows Update? To accustom us to have something burning 100% CPU all the time instead of the task you actually want to do?

Honestly you don't need Valve hardware or SteamOS to make Proton work really well

You don't, but oh boy, the experience is worth it. Bazzite[1] has it quirks but it mostly works fine in desktops.

[1] https://bazzite.gg/

Imo if you just have a regular desktop PC, use Ubuntu/Fedora, not a dedicated 'gaming' distro. Bazzite's good as a stand in for steam os on non Valve handhelds, but Steam and Proton work just fine on a regular boring Linux distro.

I mostly agree, with the caveat the Bazzite is also a good option for PCs that spend their life permanently connected to a TV as a gaming box. It makes for a great big screen sofa experience too vs using typical Linux distro desktop UIs or Windows. Roll your own Steam Machine, essentially.

Bazzite is a lot less messing around though. Stock standard fedora doesn't have the drivers needed for modern xbox controllers. Doesn't have a controller usable interface, etc.

If your PC is connected to a TV than Bazzite is a much better experience.

Debian / Fedora are riddled with features gamers will never need.

So is windows. The point being that you can have your cake and eat it too with a stable distribution, proper drivers, proton and Steam.

I'm making an assumption that most HN commenters aren't using their PC only for games.

Bazzite is just Fedora Kinoite with some tweaks for gaming, like automatically including Nvidia drivers.

I've joined the Kinoite kult since it's much easier to deal with an atomic system.

Isn't this opt-in? How does this hurt you?

Because at some point it won't be opt in

Everything about modern Windows is coercive, or ends up being coercive. You can't even shut down your PC without it forcing you to update Windows. It lets you skip for a while, then after some time, the only options are to Update and Reboot or Update and Shutdown. Totally disrespectful of who the actual owner of the computer is. You have to yank the power plug out to shut down your computer safely.

Run it in a VM and just roll the update back.

>Update and Shutdown

and if you pick that, there's a high chance that it will reboot and leave your pc running anyway.

I think they just finally fixed that one :)

> Isn't this opt-in? How does this hurt you?

Thanks. Added to canonical list of "Famous last words". /s

for real

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