Richie’s Computer Stuff

The other thing too are the shareholders. It’s not enough to just make a profit, there has to be quarterly growth or it’s seen like a failure. Because the PC market is saturated, they have to switch from expanding user base to extracting more value from each user. This is where you get things like upsells for subscription-based services which continuously generate revenue from each user instead of just once (no more one-time license purchase), data harvesting, and ads that are carefully tuned for each user to maximize engagement and conversion rate.

I also suspect this is part of why Microsoft lets you use Windows without activating, even though they want you to (and will nag you to do so). Even if you never buy a license, there’s still ecosystem lock-in, data collection, ads, and future upsell potential. That’s just my thinking though. I haven’t personally used modern Windows (10/11) in over five years so I don’t know if it’s changed since.

They go for quarterly growth regardless of the, uh… tradeoffs it actually creates. There is no way Microsoft isn’t aware of the growing irritation from users, the backlash, and resistance to frivolous and aggressively added AI features, which makes the fact that they keep doubling down all the more baffling to us. While I know this is a broad oversimplification and I’m not hitting every point involved, I’m fairly sure the user base is not who they’re serving, they’re more interested in meeting market and shareholder expectations.

Keep in mind that I’m not an expert on the matter (not even close), I’ve just watched a few videos and articles to give me some sense of this sort of thing, so I am just speculating and thinking out loud. I am in no way defending what Microsoft is doing, and I’m glad I did that little lockdown-based experiment in 2020 to see if Linux really could replace Windows for me (it was a resounding success!!).

Actually, my local Value Village stores have those. At two of them, you’ll hear it going off quite frequently in the store. I wonder if it’s a just a thing they do.

I remember wanting to use Linux at that time. I thought it was so interesting, but my technical expertise just wasn’t there. None of the games I liked playing would run on Linux, and I wasn’t ready to let go of the pans of glass inside a frame that my PC was still running at the time. I’d play around with it in virtual machines and on live USB devices, but that was it. I was always thrilled when I could get an old computer for free that was powerful enough to run a modern Linux distribution.

Well, fast forward to 2020, and I discovered that Linux gaming had quietly made leaps and bounds, and so I thought I’d just install it on my PC exclusively and see how it worked out. Well, it stuck, and I’m never going back.

Oh god the swearing mudcrabs! How could I have forgotten about that? Oh, and the one that turns the spiders into Spider-Man! Those are positively… legendary!

Mods are fun. Half the time I start the game and I begin experiencing intermittent crashing, and now have to test each mod individually to find out which one is the culprit. Is it any of the Beyond Skyrim mods? No. Is it the archery rebalancing mod? Nope, not that one. Hmm… my high-res hair mod has caused problems before. Uh… not this time. Could it be the one that redoes the entire College of Winterhold? No, thank the gods.

Two hours later… it’s the mod that makes goats scream. Ffs. That was my favourite one!

That’s essentially it. I suspect this is probably a bigger problem when profit is what drives the development of the game rather than passion. I know it’s more nuanced than that because profit-driven developers can still be passionate and care about the quality of the product, but I personally suspect that profit-first development is where there’s less tolerance for bug reports. And, keep in mind that I’m still speculating, but I suspect that many of those profit-first devs are probably the same ones that rush releases… and we know what that generally does to the “final” product.

Bug reports really are a good thing. It’s as you said. One group needs to change, and I don’t think it’s the Linux users. Some developers consider it free Q/A and free testing, but like you said - if bonuses and rep are on the line, well it’s easier to see how this sort of thing happens where Linux versions of software get pulled because of the volume of bug reports. I think it’s dishonest, really. Many of the big names have the developer volume to make this less of an issue.

I just wanted to add to what you said by sharing this bit of information, because I do find it very interesting to see. I hope I don’t come off as argumentative, because that’s not my intent.

I recall this post on Reddit from an indie game developer of the game “ΔV: Rings of Saturn”. They said how 38% of the bug reports for their game came from Linux users, despite only making up 5.8% of the purchases for the game.

It does make it seem like the Linux version of their game was buggier, but of the some 400 bug reports they got, only three were specific to the Linux build. In this case, getting more bug reports from Linux users did not indicate the game was buggier on Linux.

I will not say this is the case for all cross-OS games because this is just one example, but it seems that Linux users are more inclined to provide bug reports than Windows users are, and that doesn’t necessarily mean Linux versions of software are buggier. In some (maybe even many, I don’t know) cases, the Linux version certainly is buggier or performs worse due to developers spending less time on it or other reasons I’m not aware of, but it’s not always the case. The higher volume of bug reports from Linux users may give the perception that the Linux version is buggier.

And, as the developer mentioned, those bugs exist whether or not they’re aware of them. I’d argue that the decision by some developers to remove Linux versions because of the higher volume of bug reports is short-sighted because many of those bugs are not going to be OS-dependent, and now there are fewer reports of them.

This reminds me so much of Pointless Sites. I’d spend hours on that site as a tween bored in computer class.

Yay, I get to join!

Omg you guys that’s obviously a chicken.

One way to deal with this I’ve been doing for a little while is to use a service that enables me to use email aliases. It’s mostly meant to avoid email address leaks, but will also make it harder for online services and companies to track you, since it’s a big point of tracking. You can also use it to figure out who sold your email address. Not a perfect solution, but it’s something. I’ve been using Proton. Whether or not you trust them is up to you, but they do offer this ability (I just can’t remember if it’s free or paid).

I guess they need to train the AI to better differentiate between gut issues and last night’s borscht.

Reminds me of my big upgrade a little while back. I wanted a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which of course meant a new motherboard and RAM too. I was coming from 64GB of DDR4, and while most of the time I didn’t need it, there were times where I did need it, or it was great to have.

I didn’t want to spend the extra money on 64GB of DDR5 memory at the time, and settled with 32GB thinking “it’s fine, I don’t need more than that most of the time anyways, and I can always upgrade later if I need to”. I got 2x16GB, leaving room for two more later on (and allowing myself to graduate from dual channel to that tasty quad channel).

Well, fast forward to now, and… it’s not hard to get close to that ceiling. Between video/audio work, BeamNG.Drive being an absolute pig on memory (the Linux kernel is like “absolutely f****** not”, and boots it out of memory to prevent an OOM situation), and running AI models locally just for funsies, I’ve been thinking about an upgrade.

lol imagine my face when I see how “64GB prices” are now “32GB prices”. And all of a sudden… I don’t really need it anymore.

Our geese are unreasonable and ruthless. Don’t even look at them the wrong way. One day you need a winter coat, and the next day is t-shirt weather. There are two times in the year where I blast the heat in the morning, and the air conditioner by noon. You apologize when someone bumps into you.

Damn, I really wish I could offer more help beyond ensuring drivers are set up correctly for NVIDIA. I mean, you could also check the power profile too, using something like cpupower-gui to see if it’s in power saving mode. I suppose you could also close other applications to see if one of them is interfering, since you said Firefox may have something to do with it. I suppose it’s possible Snap has something to do with it too.

You said this happens during Elder Scrolls Online, right? Maybe have her close the game’s launcher while the game is running. In my case, I noticed jittery performance in everything, including moving the cursor, until I closed the launcher. May or may not be the issue, but it does sound similar to what happens to me when I leave that game’s launcher open.

What? Don’t look at me like that! I totally need 70 computers! Yes they’re useful! They all have their purpose! That one? Its job is to be force-fed whatever weird obscure Linux distribution I just heard of! Oh, that one? That’s for testing Arch Linux configs on 25 year old hardware!

I’ve been using Linux and macOS since 2020. I shifted my main PC from Windows 10 back in April of 2020 right as lockdowns were hitting my locale, when I discovered how much Linux gaming had improved. I was curious to see if I could make it work for myself.

At that time, I had been interested in using Linux more frequently than on random old computers that I had lying around, but my opinions on Microsoft’s and Windows’ “quirks” were… less advanced. At that time I was unconcerned about Windows telemetry and advertising, but it also wasn’t as bad then.

It took me about a week to get everything set up and ready to go and to get settled. At first, I didn’t know if it’d end up sticking. Well, it did. I started with Ubuntu, and quickly went after Pop!_OS. I used that for a while, and eventually shifted to Garuda where I still am today.

Windows 10 end of life has almost no impact on me. My mindset has shifted dramatically since I first started using Linux on my main PC. When I used to not be bothered by Windows’ telemetry I find myself strongly off-put by it. Even macOS, which some say isn’t as bad as Windows puts me off and I’d rather not use it. Having had to set up Windows 10 for someone about a year back, I saw how much worse it got. It was insufferable.

Right now, my brother and sister in law still use Windows 10. They don’t see the problem with that. My brother specifically says he’ll just keep using Windows 10, because he “doesn’t have anything important” on it (I mentioned his Steam account has linked payment info). He’s also told me that he’d rather use Windows 11 (which he hates) than give Linux a try, a stance I don’t understand. It’s clear he doesn’t really understand the situation, and he doesn’t realize that Linux is not necessarily the difficult and unfriendly OS he thinks it is.

I’d rather him use Windows 11 than Windows 10, despite how awful I know it to be. At least there’s somewhat lower risk of nasty compromise there. I also know that he does play at least a couple games with anti-cheat that explicitly block Linux, so that introduces some complexity. But, I’m done preaching. I know how it makes me look, and I’ve tried in the past to change his mind but he’s unwilling to do so, so at this point the only way he’s going to learn is for something really bad to happen. Maybe his computer gets hit by ransomeware that took advantage of an unpatched vulnerability. That might be what it takes to finally make him do something.

I hate that it’s like this. I’ve tried to tell him about the risks. He doesn’t understand the full scale of it, and he dismisses me when I try to explain it to him. But at this point, what can I do besides say “I warned you” when something goes wrong?

I learned how far gaming on Linux had come, so during COVID I decided to try it out. I wiped my Windows 10 installation, and installed Ubuntu on it (later Pop!_OS, then Garuda, and Arch on other machines), and got to work figuring things out. I didn’t know if it’d stick, because I was still unsure of it as I wasn’t sure I’d get all of my games working. But, I got settled within a week, and over time things just got better. At that time I was so used to Windows’ bloat and other… “features” that I became blind to them. After more than five years using Linux, using Windows even for a few minutes is quite the shock!

I had that very experience somewhat recently. I had to set up Windows 10 on a laptop for a friend. I had been using Linux on my main PC for probably five years at that point, so I was “un-used to” Windows. Oh boy that was a dreadful experience. It was a lot like “no, no, no, no, don’t want that, stop it, turn that off, be quiet”, and then logging in and getting the final pieces finished? Headache-inducing. “Try this!”, “try that!”, “did you know you could do THIS?”, “subscribe to this product you should use!”

And then the preloaded “suggested software”, the search bar with “suggested/trending” garbage I did NOT want to see? Yeah it was not pleasant. I think unless I’m doing it professionally? I’m not going to accept that task again. I’m glad I do not have to use that software on my main PC anymore. It seemed to have gotten worse since I stopped using it five years ago.