News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:US tech stocks see sharp falls over AI cost fears by itanalot on Friday October 30, 2026 @01:36PM (#50307361)
Windows will soon lose the normie consumer market, and all that's left for them will be gamers (of which they will make zero dollars from) and enterprise (of which their successes will broadly match laptop job employment figures)
Re:US tech stocks see sharp falls over AI cost fears by 542458 on Friday October 30, 2026 @01:42PM (#50307466)
This seems backwards to me. Linux is in a lot of ways more appealing to gamers than ever (proton/wine/etc is amazing), with the only thing really holding back being anticheat solutions that block Linux. But for the normie market the problems are the same as they've ever been - libreoffice is a poor MS office substitute, despite one million AI clones the Adobe suite and similar software remains table stakes, even the normie-friendly distros have the occasional arcane terminal-based fixes to jump through, and (the biggest obstacle of all) it has no mindshare and isn't preinstalled on computers that normies buy.
Re:US tech stocks see sharp falls over AI cost fears by olyjohn on Friday October 30, 2026 @04:15PM (#50309543)
[delayed]
Re:US tech stocks see sharp falls over AI cost fears by zzbzq on Friday October 30, 2026 @03:18PM (#50308886)
I love my Steamdeck but I've never found the argument for Linux gaming very compelling when it explicitly hinges on running Windows emulator software. It's really just an argument for consoles. PC gaming isn't really a good idea because PCs aren't really a good idea, and with the PCs, the big 3 OSes aren't really a good idea either. Salvage the kernels and build narrow, bespoke things without all the cruft.
Re:US tech stocks see sharp falls over AI cost fears by zamalek on Friday October 30, 2026 @01:41PM (#50307438)
> all that's left for them will be gamers

Tim Sweeny being "one of the people who dooms Windows" was the least likely thing on my multiverse bingo card - but he's eroding that too. EAC v2 will have kernel mode (eBPF) anti-cheat. Microsoft has lost their moat at the throne of AI.

Re:US tech stocks see sharp falls over AI cost fears by Terr_ on Friday October 30, 2026 @02:03PM (#50307819)
> Microsoft has lost their moat

I think it's a little more complicated than that, there was a submission about it earlier [0], where the author argued:

> EACv2 can't accept self-signed kernels and bootloaders, that would defeat the purpose. This means that, in order to play Fortnite on Linux, you will be forced to use a distribution that Epic approves of, with a bootloader that Epic approves of. This almost guarantees that anyone not running RedHat software is shit out of luck. But it gets worse. [...] Microsoft gets to decide what Linux distributions will run Fortnite. [...]

> Microsoft, the company that, has throughout its entire history, thrived on first controlling the competition to destroy them. They even coined a term for it: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". [...] You might as well install Windows at that point.

[0] news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50298563

Re:US tech stocks see sharp falls over AI cost fears by jjmarr on Friday October 30, 2026 @02:19PM (#50308053)
I don't understand why the kernel needs to be linked to the distro. I use Gentoo and kernel upgrades are orthogonal to my userspace because of Linus' "we don't break userspace" policy. I do not even need to recompile packages when I change my kernel.

If EAC signs a custom kernel I will just boot into that one when I want to play video games. Unlike dual-booting Windows it won't delete my Linux boot entries and I can use all my applications.

Re:US tech stocks see sharp falls over AI cost fears by zamalek on Friday October 30, 2026 @03:10PM (#50308761)
Exactly, this is exactly what I'm going to do on NixOS. Apparently Epic is greenlighting CachyOS, so I'll most likely just pull their bins.

> GP: EACv2 can't accept self-signed kernels and bootloaders

Also, from what I understand from the NixOS discussion[1] on this, it's using mok. That does put which keys are trusted in Epic's hands (which also isn't perfect, but is still vastly better than Microsoft). That article author seems to be poorly informed, or may be spreading FUD.

[1]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/eac-linux-v2-requirements-vs-b...