I put up with so much Windows crap over the years, and Windows 11 was the final straw. It’s not even the gaming OS anymore as Linux feels snappier and more stable for running games.
I work in e-waste recycling, and it's my first Windows-free job. A family friend called me for advice on her old decrepit laptop. I told her about my work "laptop": a Surface Pro tablet with Linux. I just sold one to her, partially on the security and privacy advantages of Linux.
How does one get into this, preferably without having to be a yardie for a few years (I'm an electrician with a degree in chemistry)?
Fellow Win7Pro retro machiner.
I work in the refurb division. I walk though the receiving and demanufacturing areas looking for things that would be worth our time to resell.
Though if you have a chemistry degree, you'd probably be more helpful to the people we sell scrap to. From what the boss told me, they're the ones who shred PCBs, drives, etc. and dissolve them in acid to extract metals and other materials, like one would with mined ore.
And our certifications require us to use buyers who don't turn around and ship things off to the third world for "processing": https://sustainableelectronics.org/welcome-to-r2v3/
>I had a friend working there
Also how I got my first tech job, working in a laptop repair facility (on-site for a large engineering team).
>you'd probably be more helpful to the people we sell scrap to
Thanks for the certification links (which has a map with hundreds of locations — none near me, but have been looking for a smaller community and this is helpful information).
And until Linux implements similar abstractions in the Kernel akin to Filter Drivers in Windows, Linux will never have a proper anticheat.
Oh and rootkit level EAC? Expect that to go away on Windows too when MS finally gets sick of Crowdstrike and that ilk causing self inflicted Denial of Service attacks on whole economic sectors.
It’s one of the bigger failures of antitrust enforcement I can think of
(I can think of much larger screw ups involving lack of antitrust enforcement, to be clear.)
Some Valve guy gave a great talk about their cheating detection a while back; I found it incredibly impressive: https://youtu.be/ObhK8lUfIlc (can't comment on their effectiveness these days, haven't played CS in a long time)
For example, I've seen other programs refuse to run if you had Sysinternals Procmon running, or various standalone debuggers. Would you be deemed a "risky" user if you used tools like that?
EDIT: sorry, I completely misread your comment. You're right about the latency issue, but that's also an issue with client-side prediction implementations, which provide a small window in which all client packets are trusted, rather than just the latest ones (eg to be able to rewind when computing collision detection in a fast paced shooter)
The real challenge to solve is botting, which includes things like aimbots, macros the negate recoil, etc. It's basically impossible to solve this, regardless of operating system or hardware (eg external cheat peripherals)
I see it as a moderation issue, which is unavoidable. Just focus on building tools to help users report cheaters rather than try to automate the whole thing via flawed anticheat spyware, and missing out on potentially the next big PC gaming platform in the process.
It's not. But it is much more expensive on the server-side, i.e. paid by the company, so the real solution of mainframe + thin clients is not one that companies want to implement. Instead, they rely on computing on the client model, which is what opens up the door to cheats.
E.g. Aimbots and Recoil suppressors are non existent if it's the server calculating trajectories and telling the clients "your bullet hit exactly here (X, Y, Z), go draw an impact texture in there". But as said, that means a lot of computing done on the server. Not cheap, but given the $millions invested so far in anticheat tech over the years, one has to wonder if it wouldn't really be cheaper, after all...
I think the success of the Steam Deck has really helped the situation, and the titles that are broken because of anticheat are not important enough to me to keep a Windows system around.
But I know what you mean. Another niche that really doesn't go well on Linux is VR.
I'm glad none of the games that require this really appeal to me these days
Name one thing that needs it.
Not sure how much gamers with a modicum of awareness (already a minority) will care, but the risk is there. We could paraphrase that famous line to say that "The 'S' in 'Kernel anticheat' stands for Security".
I don't mind Windows being relegated to a niche of the stuff that runs CS while Linux based OS works for every other purpose.
It doesn't just check if a cheat process is running, because obviously cheats know not to let themselves be discoverable that way. Heck, there are hardware cheats now that simulate various PCIe devices but with extra sneaky DMA operations. (I bought one because it's a cheap way to have an FPGA in my computer)
It's a political problem, though. They don't pass Linux because few people don't buy their games just because they refuse to run on Linux. If people did do that, they'd have to change the anticheat, no matter the consequences. Probably higher cheating, since there is no true official blessed unmodified Linux system to compare against.
Personally I have been playing it on Arch Linux since release and it has always worked just fine, besides it being a deeply janky game regardless of OS.
Happy diving.
With Arch Linux + the nvidia-open package, the Linux desktop experience is miles better than when I last tried in 2017 with Ubuntu