Also if they want malware infections through notepad.exe - I can probably accomplish that on Linux with Wine, but it would take more effort.

Edit: I might give up and just send the Malware author a few bucks, out of pity.

Yes. Great point. I do try to give each game a test run before I schedule a group of friends to play it together. I guess I did that on Windows, as well.

When I was a big windows gamer the result tended to just be it works or it doesn’t, on my current hardware. But maybe that’s just gaming today. I think we have better optimization options, in general, now.

I’m not sure when things changed, as my journey was Windows PC Gamer to console gamer to SteamDeck to Linux PC gamer.

I think PC gaming, in general, got much nicer while I was only playing consoles.

I wish they would invest in making safe delicious slushies out of (the sad goo that is left of) the past billionaires who froze themselves hoping for immortality. That’s a product that could take off.

AI is great for plausible deniability.

We are footing the bill already. The average 401k is paying the CEOs salary while they gut each company.

But yes, they will leverage the government to squeeze a bit more, in the end.

It is so many quarters. Line go up! Shareholders left holding the bag of shit.

I have a sneaking suspicion that these PCs will have some sort of protection so that nothing other than Win365 can run. Maybe a locked bootloader/secureboot?

Yes. Very probably.

Of course, no security mechanism lasts indefinitely in the hands of a persistent hacker with physical access.

I was gonna partition my gaming PC’s main drive and try Linux Mint on it.

Nice!

If you can afford it, I lately recommend getting a separate harddrive, and physically taking the Windows drive out, and putting a blank drive in, to run Linux on.

Windows has never liked to share, and has gotten worse (more aggressive preventing other operating systems from booting) with various integrations into BIOS for secure boot.

Also, either way, be sure to back everything up while Windows is still installed. It is much easier to lose data today, due to secure boot and full disk encryption being the default.

(Putting the Windows drive back in and resetting any BIOS settings should be enough, but it is possible that Windows will decide it wants the full disk encryption (FDE) password. I believe I have found my FDE password on the web through Microsoft account, but there’s just more that can go wrong, today. So I prefer to just have my files backed up so I can relax.)

(And be aware that it may not be possible to backup files directly from a removed Windows drive, if full disk encryption was enabled. There’s probably a utility for it, as long as you have the FDE password. But again, it’s much less effort to just make backups before pulling the Windows drive out.)

I’ve had the best experience booting to a fresh blank harddrive and installing Linux Mint on it, and throwing the Windows drive into a drawer until I find I want the extra drive space more than I want a retreat path to Windows.

Yes.

And alternately, nothing interesting at all happens, and the AI just has one of it’s frequent hallucinations, and I’m fired.

There’s a special level of sociopathy happening to put today’s AI in charge of anyone’s livelihood.

My oldish Nvidia 4xxx GPU worked immediately and automatically on Linux Mint.

Your mileage may vary.

Edit: To be clear, I didn’t do any command line, or even change a setting. Mint just automatically detected my Nvidia GPU and got it working during the install while I looked at pretty pictures and new user tips.

(Disclaimer: Folks here have warned me this may have been some combination of luck and my Nvidia GPU being a few years old.)

When my Mint install finished, I searched for “Steam” in the Mint software center and clicked “Install”.

A few minutes later I was playing a game from my Steam library without any issues, without any config changes, and without any command line use.

Edit 2: On Linux, there’s a little Penguin icon in the Steam library filters. Click that, and it’ll only show your games that Valve is pretty confident will run without any issue.

It took me a few clicks to realize it did anything, at all. Very few of my games were filtered out. None of my games that were filtered out happened to fit in the first page of search results.

So at first it looked like penguin filter button did nothing.

90-99% of the solutions originally for Ubuntu worked for me in Pop.

Yes. When I’m running Debian, Mint, or various other Debian variants, the vast majority of “Ubuntu” recipes just work.

Sometimes on Debian, itself, an Ubuntu recipe doesn’t work because some feature hasn’t made it into “Debian stable” yet. But usually it’s fine if the Ubuntu article is at least a year old.

Want to test if a game runs on Linux? Great, set aside a couple of hours beforehand: first to install steam and set it up, then to figure out Proton, then to troubleshoot the game not even booting up, then to fix any glitches or whatnot, then to get your controller working.

Alternately, install Linux Mint. Search the software store for Steam. Click Install. Let Steam do it’s first run install stuff. Sign into Steam. Click the little Penguin icon to see which games should run fine on Linux. Install some by clicking on them. Enjoy games.

Why do anime villains so often have buttholes for faces?

Edit: Oh. Those are AI logos.

I heard there was an invisible hand that I should trust.

And has fewer worthless emails in her inbox.

Might be time to revive “drunk or a child?”

The variance is high in this one.

Absolutely.

Yes. And let’s not forget bringing back the classic “forgot to even put a password on the sensitive files”.

Why don’t universities just offer courses where you graduate as senior dev?

This exists, but it isn’t easy to gather expert levels of programming experience willing to work for a teacher’s salary. So your mileage may vary.

I would buy that.