Clap when the light turns green.

Don’t even get me started on fucking Gigabyte. With all my heart,

FUCK GIGABYTE.

It is the single worst manufacturer I’ve ever had to deal with in both a personal and professional capacity. We’ve had to RMA half a classroom over the last two years because of busted motherboards. In separate incidents, two power supplies violently self-destructed and took the motherboards and CPUs with them. My own Gigabyte 2060 Super’s fans had to be replaced within two years because the bearings were crap.

Worse, even the motherboards that didn’t mercifully explode are a fucking chore because Gigabyte’s UEFI implementation is the worst on the fucking planet. No two versions work alike. Some options are in completely different menus. Sometimes CSM or SecureBoot are busted out of the box. If PXE is enabled (which we have to use frequently), it will ALWAYS put PXE at the start of the boot order. And if it can’t connect to a PXE server, it doesn’t fall back to the next boot option. It gracefully shits itself and sits on an error message until someone manually restarts it and interrupts the process.

Fuck Gigabyte.

The ESA won’t thank you for spreading their rhetoric, you know.

Steam has promised they will never do that

Can you give us a credible source? I want it to be true, but I don’t want my only source to be hearsay.

All of the alternatives eventually run into the same “Will my banking app work on it?” problem. The absence of a healthy app economy is the one thing that can’t be fixed by throwing software engineers at it, and it is what caused the death of Windows Phone.

just a spare nvme drive thrown in an external enclosure

A spare NVME? In this economy?

There are interfaces that allow a sufficiently privileged process to change EFI settings from the OS. Those settings are stored in the UEFI chipset, independent from the bootloader.

If you want to dual-boot Windows and Linux, I strongly recommend that you install them on separate devices, and physically disconnect your Linux device. It’s a pain in the ass, but Windows Update has a particular appetite for bootloaders and will eventually eat whatever you have on your EFI partition (including the Linux kernel and ramdisk) and replace it with its own.

Otherwise, you can use Chris Titus’ winutil script to delay or completely disable updates, and also to debloat the system and disable anti-features like telemetry and the start menu search.

Not sure if this applies to LTSC, but if you can, install a European edition of Windows (-N suffix) and set an EU location and timezone, it will allow you to more easily uninstall components because of EU regulations.

Also don’t Bethesda handle Doom, now?

No, id Software is the developer company, which is owned by the publisher and published by Bethesda Softworks, both of which are owned by ZeniMax. The “Bethesda” that does actual game development is called Bethesda Game Studios; they handle franchises like Fallout and TES.

Pray tell, how do you think “they” should optimize game assets? People who have zero experience in game development love to talk about “optimization” like it’s a slider in the options or some challenge that can be solved by throwing resources at it. Modern compression algorithms like Oodle are about as performant and artifact-free as mathematically possible. Everything beyond that is a trade-off between quality, size, and performance.

But are you thinking about it in abstract? Would you prefer a game to have occasional pop-in, stutter issues, and CPU spikes in exchange for a smaller size?

(edit) Before you say it, I know there are relatively low-fidelity games that run like ass. Those are usually caused by poorly written game logic or shader codes, which can be refactored, but won’t have an effect on file sizes.

As others have said, Tailscale is the most pragmatic solution. It’s a mesh VPN based on Wireguard. It’s implemented in such a way that you don’t need a static IP and don’t need to open any ports on your firewall. The caveat is that you either need to register an account on tailscale.com (it’s free for small-scale use) or set up a self-hosted alternative like Headscale on a VPS. Then you have to install the Tailscale client on each of the hosts you want to access and log into your account.

Tailscale nodes will be accessible using an internal, private address in the 100.64.0.0/10 address space. You can also set up a split DNS that allows you to access your hosts using a DNS name like hostname.your-tailnet-name.ts.net.

Oh man, that reminds me of this meme I saw the other day:

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation. For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us. For protecting them by a mock trial from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states. For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world. For imposing taxes on us without our consent. For depriving us in many cases of the benefit of trial by jury. For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses.

Whoever wrote it must fucking hate America.

Steam doesn’t ship flatpak-packaged games themselves, but games launched from Steam’s flatpak version inherit the runtime environment. This is why you need, for example, to install separate flatpak releases for Mangohud, Gamescope, or various Vulkan things.

Running Steam-flatpak can sometimes resolve compatibility issues, since it has greater control over which package versions to use compared to native, system-level packages. Arch and Debian-based systems can have wildly different package versions, but if a flatpak app pins a particular version of a dependency, it will always install and load that regardless of the OS packages.

It’s also important to note that Steam Linux Runtime also uses technologies that were originally developed for Flatpak, particularly container/sandboxing wrappers like Bubblewrap.

People who downvote because “hurr durr linux best” but have never had to support a cross-platform application should read Raiguard’s experience of maintaining Factorio’s Linux-native build: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-408

“Why don’t most games support macOS and Linux?” is a sentiment I often see echoed across the internet. Supporting a new platform is a lot more than just changing some flags and hitting compile. Windows, macOS, Linux, and the Nintendo Switch all use different compilers, different implementations of the C++ standard library, and have different implementation quirks, bugs, and features. You need to set up CI for the new platform, expand your build system to support the new compiler(s) and architecture(s), and have at least one person on the team that cares enough about the platform to actively maintain it. If you are a video game, you will likely need to add support for another graphics backend (Vulkan or OpenGL) as well, since DirectX is Windows-exclusive.

I support every solo and small-team developer who prioritizes making the game over maintaining a completely different platform build.

Nah, I don’t want that. He is actually hilarious… but in the same way as a drunk methhead redneck who keeps slipping on shit while trying to wrestle a pig. A cheap laugh at an obviously futile crusade against an imaginary enemy, but also a little pathetic and tragic; a terminally online Don Quixote.

Basically all of Pathologic. The best one is when the player calls someone an “onion”.

Everyone criticizing the community has the opportunity

That’s a lie. The community and every post on it was locked for several months.

I’ve fallen into this trap many times. Whenever a game’s final chapter looks to be close, I start doing a lot of side content. Then I get bored of the game altogether and end up never finishing it.

My experience is not representative of the game as a whole. Like I said, I got filtered extremely early by the tutorial. The rest of the game is said to be much less linear, similar to Bioshock.

Most: Warframe, and by far. I have ~5000 hours on it, and it looks like DE will keep releasing banger updates. I’ve spent at least $200 (probably more) on various bundles because they deserve it. They also dodged a massive bullet when Sony tried to buy the company.

Excluding free-to-play titles, it’s either autistic crack cocaine Factorio, Kerbal Space Program (the good one), or Derail Valley.

Least: probably Atomic Heart. I bought it at full price because of the Soviet Bioshock aesthetic and Mick Gordon’s involvement, but the tutorial was so fucking long and boring that I bounced off.