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Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by Zurrrrr on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @03:18PM (#34714328)
Windows 10 is going to be my last windows with how MS is acting.

10 was annoying enough to configure to disable so much cruft, get back a decent startbar, disable all the telemetry etc, and much of it still sucks like not being able to have control over updates.

11 with forcing an account, forcing updates, stupid shit like nerfing the taskbar etc...there is just no need for it anymore.

Games run fine on Linux via proton, or the ones I want to play at least. The rest of my toolchain and app library is all opensource stuff that runs on *nix.

NetBSD or Void Linux with a custom configured AwesomeWM setup here I come.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by barbariangrunge on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @03:34PM (#34714611)
As a game developer, I’m stuck with windows for the foreseeable future. The major game engines technically work on Linux but the experience isn’t smooth and the companies don’t want to invest in improving it

If they did, I’d switch back to Linux so fast—

I actually really like gnome and miss the interface. It’s a dream for people who never want to touch their mice

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by Zardoz84 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @03:42PM (#34714745)
Godot
Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by isthiseasymode on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @04:10PM (#34715218)
I believe they mean that the user base is mostly on windows. All of the major game engines already work with Linux and even MacOS.

If they want to make money, they need to develop and test on windows.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by dontlaugh on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @04:57PM (#34715940)
The tooling doesn’t work on anything other than Windows, for both Unreal and Unity.
Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by clnq on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @06:33PM (#34717299)
What do you mean?
Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by isthiseasymode on Thursday February 09, 2023 @11:08PM (#34735498)
I write Unity games on my Mac. What do you mean?
Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by Zurrrrr on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @03:48PM (#34714855)
As a game developer I can see how you would be tied. I'm pretty lucky in that my gaming sticks to a few specific games for multiplayer (GTA online, counter-strike, sometimes red alert 2, nrs games) an a few specific AAA titles I want to play for campaigns.

Gnome is pretty nice...I never understood why KDE was so popular with their childish naming scheme and some of the bloat that came in 4. Awesome was a gamechanger for me though, when I realized how easy it was to have a perfect gui, every little details perfectly to my specificaions.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by shrimp_emoji on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @04:08PM (#34715190)
I like having a desktop, not a tablet, GUI, which is why I like KDE. ;p

KDE and Qt apps (since Qt is so superior to GTK in almost every way) are superior to anything you find in Windows. Compare Windows's Explorer, the file manager, to Dolphin. The next best FM is PCManFM, which switched from GTK to Qt. Nautilus (now GNOME Files), which is still GTK, is a comical toy by comparison.

The GNOME desktop looks very nice and has high polish but is very feature limited. Here's a feature that might interest gamers: KDE lets you disable desktop composition, which makes your desktop (including games) much smoother, but you lose DE animations and transparency effects. Try it and then drag some windows around on a high-refresh screen, on and then off, to sense the difference. In fact, the smoothness you'll feel is how smooth the Windows 10 DE is by default (it pains me to note). This difference is also felt in games. Fullscreen games are supposed to disable composition on most DEs, but whether they actually do this is unknown and I don't think they do at all if you keep your games windowed (which I do since some Proton games, like Fallout 4, work way better in windowed mode, and it's easier to access stuff on neighboring monitors without Alt-tabbing). I don't think you have any control over composition in GNOME, and conversations with GNOME devs on this topic made it seem like they see no reason at all to not have composition in current year and that a DE without composition is broken in their eyes.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by wkat4242 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @08:36PM (#34718559)
I love KDE too, and the Qt apps.

I'm not even sure if the toolkit is better but the whole philosophy of giving as many options and choices as needed is a breath of fresh air in this day where opinionated design is so popular due to people copying Apple.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by alexklarjr on Thursday February 09, 2023 @07:28PM (#34733850)
If you happen to have AMD gpu on Windows you not only face buggy and unstable drivers, but also their Adrenalin control panel made with Qt. It takes up to 20% of gpu just to render text and do it so slow you have to wait it to appear. Moving mouse over consuming up to full core of 4+ ghz core i7.
Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @04:02PM (#34715092)
> I never understood why KDE was so popular with their childish naming scheme and some of the bloat that came in 4

And I could never understand why GNOME is so popular with its desire to be a tablet interface and complete disdain for the very concept of user customization.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by p1necone on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @04:30PM (#34715487)
Gnome 3 is kind of awesome as a keyboard driven system too. It's only really when you try to navigate with the mouse rather than keyboard shortcuts that it feels worse than more traditional DEs. Laptop trackpads with multi finger gestures feel right at home as well.

The massive and uncustomizable window titlebars suck though.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by vetinari on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @04:28PM (#34715460)
I don't get why people think GNOME has a desire to be a tablet interface. It has not. It is just repeated ad nauseam by people, who never used it.

Sure, it sucks at 14" 1376x768 displays, but 14" 1600x900 or fullhd -- you know, what you could find a poweruser using? It's perfect, without having 125% scale or whatever.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by thaumasiotes on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @05:44PM (#34716646)
> I don't get why people think GNOME has a desire to be a tablet interface.

That seems obvious. Because GNOME threw away GNOME 2, which people liked, and decided GNOME 3 would be a copy of Unity, which was supposed to be a tablet interface, and which distinguished itself only in being terrible?

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by vetinari on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @05:59PM (#34716839)
It's incorrect then, on several fronts.

Unity was supposed to be netbook interface, not a tablet one. Tablets (as we know them today, not tablet pc, which sucked) were not yet a thing then.

Gnome 3 decided not to be a clone of Unity, but not to be a clone of Windows 95. If you want a Windows 95 clone, you have a wide range of offers. If you do not want that, the choice was much worse. Gnome 3 improved that for those, who didn't want Windows 95 clone.

Incidentally, the only people who think Gnome 3 is terrible are those, who cannot let Windows 95 concepts go. Everything that is different, is going to be terrible, simply by the virtue of being different.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by p1necone on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @06:01PM (#34716869)
Wasn't Unity built on top of Gnome 3 because the Ubuntu maintainers didn't like stock Gnome 3? Or have I got my timeline wrong?
Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by thaumasiotes on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @06:36PM (#34717333)
Well, going by wikipedia:

> Unity is a graphical shell for the GNOME desktop environment originally developed by Canonical Ltd. for its Ubuntu operating system. It debuted in 2010 in the netbook edition of Ubuntu 10.10.

> GNOME 3 was released in 2011.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by wkat4242 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @08:33PM (#34718533)
No unity was built as a standalone product.

Then later they stopped development and skinned gnome 3 to mimic the look.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by fomine3 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @08:02PM (#34718252)
This is really weird. Almost no one push GNOME tablet or 2 in 1 style laptop like Surface. Red hat is a big sponsor for GNOME but they also not seems to pushing tablets. Windows 8 and successor was somewhat reasonable shift because MS has been pushed tablets.
Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by Karunamon on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @11:02PM (#34719602)
Hi, long time GNOME user by force here. I find it very difficult to believe an interface with a full-screen app switcher, slide to unlock, and massive title bars and buttons compared to every other desktop UI is intended to be anything other than designed for tablets first.

All of these are touch-centric concepts and have no reason to exist where keyboard and mouse is the primary input method.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by vetinari on Thursday February 09, 2023 @06:37AM (#34722475)
> very difficult to believe an interface with a full-screen app switcher, slide to unlock, and massive title bars and buttons compared to every other desktop UI is intended to be anything other than designed for tablets first.

If you take a note, Gnome development trails hardware development, it does not lead it. There is a lot of hardware features it still cannot use and which have much higher staying potential, ergo are much lower risk to implement than a tablet interface: HDR, fractional hidpi scaling, VRR comes to mind.

At the time when Gnome development was conceived, there were no tablets, no mass market for them, with the exception of tablet pcs, which were clunky and expensive and definitely not popular. What Gnome does with massive title bars and buttons is optimizing for a hardware that did exist then: higher-resolution, but not hidpi yet, displays.

Most software at the time was written for 96 dpi, but these displays were slightly higher (14" full hd is 157 dpi; 14" HD+ [1600x900] is 131 dpi, 14" WSXGA [1440x900] is 121 dpi). The kind of sizing Gnome uses optimizes for this kind of hardware, without having to support "proper" fractional hidpi scaling. So yes; it was cheap, minimal way to support popular hardware (and in a way contributed to a late real hidpi support). If you use Gnome on such a display, the sizing is exactly right; unlike Windows, which was tiny at these displays and was a cause why many mainstream users preferred the low resolution 1376x768 ones.

> All of these are touch-centric concepts and have no reason to exist where keyboard and mouse is the primary input method.

They are not touch-centric at all; did you ever use ipad or android tablet? Floating windows are not optimal for touch use. Tiling WM with a gesture support is much more suited for this use.

As a long time Gnome user, you probably learned keyboard shortcuts. What you consider missing there? Gnome is one of most keyboard oriented UIs available.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by Karunamon on Thursday February 09, 2023 @01:02PM (#34728305)
That's a fine reason for chunky, toy-like bars and buttons on the sub 1080P displays of yesteryear but a really shitty excuse for continuing to use that sizing when even throwaway computers nowadays have full HD displays.

Are they truly incapable of changing the widget scaling based on resolution and/or input method?

As to the keyboard shortcuts, I am familiar with them, but that's table stakes. Every mainstream DE can be driven more or less comfortably with a keyboard. That doesn't excuse the use of a full-screen, context-destroying application switcher/launcher that even Microsoft realized was a bad idea on the desktop nearly 10 years ago with the launch of 8.1. Said company even realized that touch and mouse are fundamentally different input methods and adjust UI accordingly! If only the Gnome developers were so up to date!

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by klipklop on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @04:58PM (#34715954)
I do 99% of my PC gaming with a Steam Deck. All the major games I am interested in "just work." If Elden Ring and most/all of my fav indie games work, I don't see why I will need a windows PC ever in the near future.

I was able to get several non-steam games from the early 2000's working as well with Proton.

Likely if more games are built against/for dxvk/proton things will get even easier.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by josephcsible on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @05:15PM (#34716203)
> The major game engines technically work on Linux but the experience isn’t smooth

That hasn't been my experience. In recent times, I've always had one of these two things happen:

1. The game runs just as good or better on Linux than it does on Windows

2. The game can't be played at all on Linux, because of the DRM, anti-cheat, or anti-tamper

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by empyrrhicist on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @05:26PM (#34716383)
I've had weird crashes - just frequent enough to dissuade me.
Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by capableweb on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @06:38PM (#34717358)
As a game consumer, Linux works well enough for 99% of the cases.

As a game producer, the editors and engines might work, but it's missing a lot of polish and it's kind of a frustrating experience.

I think you missed the first "As a game developer" part message of the comment you replied to, they are speaking about developing games, not playing them.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by Karunamon on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @10:53PM (#34719560)
The 1% of cases you mentioned is an extremely impactful lot; usually multiplayer and esports titles with broad appeal and massive player bases.

Platform compatibility is a quality, not quantity problem. If the one game someone wants to play most doesn't work, they're not going to switch.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by capableweb on Thursday February 09, 2023 @04:55AM (#34721781)
> If the one game someone wants to play most doesn't work, they're not going to switch.

People keep saying this but more and more people are using Linux and the Steam Deck sells very well. How could that be if what you are saying is true?

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by Karunamon on Thursday February 09, 2023 @11:11PM (#34735519)
People don't care by and large that the steam deck runs on Linux, they care that a trusted company (probably the single most trusted company in gaming) released a hardware gaming device. If valve had put the same effort into the same hardware but made it Windows centric, most of its problems would go away. They just have very good reasons for trying to break away that platform.

I used the word "switch" rather than "use" on purpose. Nobody with a steam deck is using it as their primary computer or gaming device. Nobody is going to at least until the biggest stuff out there runs on it

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by filleduchaos on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @10:32PM (#34719423)
Games and game engines are two very different products.
Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by smeagull on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @06:25PM (#34717175)
I'm just annoyed how few games release for Mac. I have a nice M1 all paid for me, but I can't game on it like I can my linux laptop - except that one has integrated graphics.

My backlog of unplayed (and yet to be bought) AAA games now encompasses most of 5 years at this point.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @04:00PM (#34715058)
If the VR story on Linux was even remotely palatable to me I'd have already switched. If some games I want don't work, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. As it is, I'm with you on 10 almost certainly being my last Windows.
Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by t0bia_s on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @06:10PM (#34716976)
As someone who use Adobe profesionally, I cannot leave Windows.

It frustrate me.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by Zurrrrr on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @06:18PM (#34717098)
If you own your device, no reason you HAVE to be tied to Adobe, it's just about compromise.
Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by smeagull on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @06:26PM (#34717203)
Well if you're using Adobe, then you don't care about telemetry or spyware, so it's not a problem.
Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by BizarreByte on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @07:36PM (#34717981)
I don’t think that’s fair to say that if one is using it professionally. If it puts food on the table you just have to grin and bear the things you don’t like.

It’s not realistic to give up a tool that makes you money over personal feelings about telemetry and the like.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by exodust on Thursday February 09, 2023 @12:57AM (#34720259)
It's not about giving up a tool, it's about swapping it for a different tool. Creating a "food on table" dependency with Adobe is what's unrealistic.
Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by t0bia_s on Thursday February 09, 2023 @04:45AM (#34721721)
I'm profesionall freelance artist, with daily usages of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, After Effects, Audition and Lightroom.

Yes, it literally brings food to my family on table.

No, there is no competition if you need compatible project between different programs (dynamic link). After Effects don't have alternative at all.

No, Adobe wont work on linux. MacOS is not alternative for Win in term of privacy. And usually overpriced if you need power.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by exodust on Thursday February 09, 2023 @08:20PM (#34734357)
> literally brings food

It literally doesn't.

> I'm profesionall freelance artist

Artists shouldn't be tied to brands and products. Artists get shit done using tools they have available.

All you've done is list 7 Adobe products, claiming "no competition", no choice but to subscribe to Adobe. The bottom line is you make things for clients: videos, illustrations etc. If Adobe Cloud crashed tomorrow, would you remove your clothes and wander the streets in despair? Crying and begging for food? No. You'd get the job done using other tools. Because you're an Artist, you're resourceful.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by t0bia_s on Friday February 10, 2023 @04:46AM (#34737592)
"Artists get shit done using tools they have available." Agree. Those are tools named from Adobe, not the only I use.

"If Adobe Cloud crashed tomorrow, would you remove your clothes and wander the streets in despair?" If your ISP or power has blackout, would you?

"Because you're an Artist, you're resourceful." Also pragmatic. I use tools to get things done faster. Adobe has top notch software developed over decade by payed professionals, with millions of investment. I strongly disagree with their terms of use (no option to work offline is ridiculous), but as you said. Artist are resourceful.

It doesn't change anything on fact that I would like to abandon Windows completely and stick with linux.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by drunkenmagician on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @09:43PM (#34719117)
Adobe products (almost all I thought) run on macOS. Why can you not move? 3rd party add-ons / extensions?
Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by user3939382 on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @07:09PM (#34717700)
+10 on NetBSD. Great quality code and really friendly community that I've been interacting with here and there for many years.
Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by Zurrrrr on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @07:26PM (#34717887)
Yeah it's drawn my interest for a while now. I think it has a lot of interesting security features that look fun to explore, and there is some functionality I would like to try porting to it also.

Otherwise it's void if I can get it working. I use to run Slackware but not a fan of them trying to compete with Ubuntu. Not a fan of rolling release (as fantastic as Arch is) or source based, so for minimal systems that really just leaves void or alpine.

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by herbst on Thursday February 09, 2023 @03:53AM (#34721330)
Did exactly that when unasked telemetry started to get a thing, and windows started to turn just worse. So before/with Windows 7.

Really no reason to look back. As you said since proton is a thing the last anti Linux argument of games is a non issue (it kinda was before, but with more annoyances)

Re:Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users' control by DavideNL on Thursday February 09, 2023 @12:10PM (#34727256)
Same, I started the process of installing Pop!_OS [1] last week. I hope all drivers and things like Fan control work will properly, so far it seems to work really well out of the box so i was impressed - but i haven't tested any games yet for example.

[1] https://pop.system76.com/

PS. I still can't believe Windows has declined so much, what the hell is happening at Microsoft?