Worst of all, root access is often granted to humans — a species known to be vulnerable to the most idiotic phishing scams you could imagine.

Debian is still the best at being Debian. I rate it the least likely to give me any unpleasant surprises.

It’s nice to have ntsync, I’ve been using it for a few weeks. Knowing that the thread sync api is solid means one less thing to worry about when debugging modded skyrim.

I don’t know, there’s just something about it.

For a long time we had VGA for video cables. There was no VGA version 2.1.9, now supporting 1024x768 mode with 16-bit colour. Cables did not cost $29. There were no rent-seeking patent holders charging license fees, or at least they weren’t obnoxious enough that we knew about them. It didn’t have five different types of connectors. There was no VGA consortium constantly keeping itself in the news with periodic press releases. Companies didn’t need to sign away their soul to write drivers for it. There was no VGA copy protection trying to keep us from decoding our own video streams. Cables didn’t include enough microelectronics to power a space shuttle.

Somehow I think we could do better.

I hate HDMI with a passion that can not be explained.

Mostly I just install Skyrim mods manually because I’m insane I guess, but for some games I like to run Mod Organizer 2 under proton. Your whole linux filesystem can be made accessible to windows programs, not sure if it is by default. But anyway since we’re talking steam games here the game itself normally will be in the same place as usual, as far as windows programs know.

Your other doubts and concerns seem slightly biased, e.g. wondering what settings could be tweaked on only one of the systems being tested and then reminding us all that there do still exist some things that won’t run on SteamOS. It’s only that one that is outright ridiculous.

Did the author run the benchmarks few times to rule out shader compilation

Really grasping at straws there, eh? I’m no big fan of Ars but I hope we can assume they’re not quite that incompetent.

If they go through with this I’ll switch to Hannah Montana Linux.

You’re not really living with as much free software as possible until you’ve installed all of the 103818 packages in debian.

In the early 2000s I actually thought made sense to buy a console, since not many games would run on linux.

continued innovations from major players like Microsoft

MS using its massive reserves of innovation to acquire many of the major game studios.

#!/bin/bash # Recursively rename everything in the current directory as necessary # to make it match the case of filenames in Skyrim’s “Data” directory,

from=`pwd -P`
to="${HOME}/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/common/Skyrim_1.5.97/Data"
tmp="/tmp/skydata_index"
filez="/tmp/skydata_from"

IFS='
'

match_case() {
    cd "$2"
    find . | grep -v '^[.]$' > "$tmp"
    cd "$1"
    find . -maxdepth 1 | grep -v '^[.]$' > "$filez"
    for j in `cat $filez`; do
        if ( grep -i "^${j}$" $tmp ); then
            name=`grep -i "^${j}$" $tmp | head -1`
            if [ "${name}xx" != "${j}xx" ] ; then
                mv "$j" "$name"
            fi
        fi
    done

    # going recursiv
    find . -maxdepth 1 -type d | grep -v '^[.]$' > "$filez"
    for j in `cat $filez`; do
        if ( test -d "${2}/${j}" ) ; then
            match_case "${1}/${j}" "${2}/${j}"
        fi
    done
}
match_case $from $to
rm $tmp $filez

Hm, someone claiming to be Vaxry says it’s real, it’s not April fool’s day, the link is to the domain that’s on their github page, it’s still up however many hours later… well that was unexpected.

(Apparently it’s Dave Cutler, who wikipedia reminds me is the crazy VMS guy “known for his disdain for Unix.” Apologies to both of them.)

Is that Donald Knuth? If so, “three guys taking a photo with Donald Knuth” might be a better title.

True enough — but for those few who enjoy such things I must point out that debian makes kernel builds very easy to do. When mesa gets too old there will usually be a backport.

Come on debian, maybe we can make it back into the top 5 when trixie gets an official release.

Paid and freeware but either way non-free, unfortunately.

I mean it’s better than nothing I guess but that is not what I’d call “freely available.” In addition to requiring that you use their shitty online viewer, it appears to require users to sign in to an account even to do that. It’s directly admitted on the website that they make it unusable in this way specifically because they rely on the revenue from selling real access to people who need it.