r00ty

Yeah it’s definitely windows. But I don’t have a choice on my work laptop. The old 16gb model became a nightmare after swapping to windows 11 and moving to using teams. That combination just killed it dead.

It isn’t already? Even my new work laptop came with 32gb of ram. In windows at least 16gb is useless before you even try to launch a game.

Seems to be not so bad for those with a credit card at least. They have my payment info already. So just adding another form isn’t terrible.

Also the text says mature sexual content. So seems like it’s specifically the porn games I guess.

I would argue most don’t need it. But my point was that steam don’t (maybe cannot?) stop it. They run the .exe. If the exe asks for admin and the user grants it, they have admin. So a malicious “game” could definitely do this.

Aha OK. That’s better than I expected then! Thanks for that. Running KDE Plasma here and I know CTRL works because I use it as PTT in several apps over XWayland. I just assumed they allowed them all.

In general steam is going to run a .exe for a game, and as such that’s really going to be able to do anything a user process can do under windows (or linux if it has a dedicated linux binary). Steam doesn’t run games inside a sandbox. That includes prompting the user to elevate the process to admin, and if the user clicks yes, being able to do anything an admin level process can.

There may well be some pass/fail testing before they will list a game, and for sure if there were reports showing a game was doing something malware/illegal they would certainly investigate/remove games that breach this.

But, steam is not a protection in and of itself.

Won’t protect you from a steam game, that runs in XWayland, which allows global hotkeys (and effectively I guess key monitoring). But yes, overall it’s a nice security feature.

I actually stopped having problems with steam on Wayland quite some time ago. But, one of the first things I did was turn off scaling (I have 1080 and 1440 screens). There used to be random issues with the menus in steam, and that went away a few months ago.

My only problems (as an NVidia user) with KDE plasma on wayland right now is occasionally discord will just freeze and I need to minimize/maximise to bring it to life. And very very rarely (and actually it might have been fixed, I’ve not seen it in weeks), one screen will entirely freeze and I have to either switch to a console and back or logout/login to bring it back to life. Oh and not a bug, but the OBS issue with global hotkeys. Now I can run it in X mode, but then it will randomly cause an issue where it makes games shudder. Only in X capture mode. It’s most odd.

It brings enough positives compared to X that these really minor problems are worth it.

Yes. But this is precisely the reason I won’t play games that need kernel level anti-cheat. I barely trust game devs to run usermode code on my machine. I sure don’t want to let them near kernel mode.

I think the real answer is going to be an evolving server side anti-cheat. If you do it client side, they will always find a way round it.

Here is the thing. They cite users running kernel level cheats, and the need to detect them. Well, if they allow user mode anti-cheat to function under linux I see two eventualities that will likely force them to change their mind.

1: Cheats find a way to spoof running under wine/linux while in windows and continue to use only the user mode cheat while running their windows kernel cheats. 2: They develop kernel mode cheats for Linux and move cheating to Linux.

Either of these could end up either forcing them to either stop linux clients entirely, or somehow segregate them.

One thing I’ve seen with serious cheating communities… They will go a long way, a long long way just to cheat. Almost as far as spending time to get good at the game. Almost, but not quite.

I hope it doesn’t go this way. I don’t play games with kernel anti-cheat as a matter of principle. But it would be annoying if it happened to a game I already played.

I think baseline Linux is much less CPU and memory intensive (that is before you start running your own user stuff).

If I just leave normal apps running in the background I rarely hear my fans spin up on Linux. But on Windows, I can just boot it, login and then randomly the fans spin up and CPU usage in double digits. Why?

I would agree probably if we ran teams on Linux it would be a resource hog. But you know for work I setup MS SQL server on Linux, and you know even though so far as I can tell they’re doing more work on Linux to run it there, it seems to run faster and take less resources on Linux. That is subjective though, since I cannot tell if the usage level on the Linux SQL is comparable to the windows one. But from my limited uses it’s definitely lower.

If you start with the OS eating your memory and cycles, there’s less for the bloatware you have on a corporate machine to burn.

You know, I hate using my work laptop. It’s so sluggish and horrible to use with Windows on. And it’s always the Microsoft software eating up the memory. Teams and edge being the worse offenders.

For server use Linux has been a better option for decades. But, windows was still pretty decent for desktop use. But Windows 10 started a bad trend and Windows 11 has made it far worse. I don’t miss it. This system is dual boot, and I’ve not booted into windows on it, since November.

Windows is a strange game. It seems the only winning move is not to play.

“8gb ought to be enough for anybody”