My scepticism is that this should’ve been done within the coreutils project, or at least very closely affiliated. This isn’t an area of the linux technical stack that we should tolerate being made distro-specific, especially when the licensing is controlled by a single organisation that famously picks and chooses its interpretation of “FOSS” to suit its profit margins.

On a purely technical level, GNU coreutils should very seriously consider moving to rust if only to counter alternatives before it’s too late. While these utilities work well in C (and usually stay secure thanks to the Unix philosophy limiting the project scope), FOSS projects are continuing to struggle with finding new contributors as younger devs are more likely to use modern systems languages like Go and Rust. Not to mention that any project using Rust as a marketing tool will appeal to anyone rightfully concerned about hardening their system.

fedora has been this for myself. maybe tweaking every now and then to fix whatever edge cases I’ve run into but it’s the least painful distro I’ve used so far

SAS drives are much cheaper if you’re fine with getting a controller card

Not quite the same but you might like the Linux from Nothing series, building out a Linux install from first principles.

Obviously lots of linux youtubers have done videos on linux from scratch too but the step by step nature is pretty enjoyable to watch.

Do they not provide an md5sum? I’ve never seen anyone check an app’s integrity issuing public keys

Hector and others were really bad losses for the Rust kernel devs but Lina? That’s catastrophic. She was a figurehead in getting apple silicon working so well on Linux that even Linus moved his development machine to an M1 Macbook.

Linus has royally fucked it with how long he sat on the side of this. Im so sorry to Lina and others who have been burned by this community.

Short answer: Yep, cheat softwares regularly do this too, but it’s costly and prone to being immediately patched, and it’s potentially illegal.

Anticheat systems are designed around this since a cheat client would try to do exactly that. One way for example is for the anticheat to provide a cryptographic key to the game which it uses to prove to a multiplayer server that the anticheat is functioning and untampered with. Even if you bypass anticheat locally, you still have to prove that the game client is legitimate to the server. This does happen! But kernel anticheats are much harder to access and tamper with, and in our case of using WINE are unlikely to even work from the outset.

So okay, let’s hypothetically bypass anticheat locally. We modify the game to tell the server it’s legit, and it works! A few days later the game gets patched, and suddenly our bypass is defunct. For cheat sellers this part of the cost of business but for people just trying to game on Linux there’s little money in it, and if there is it won’t ever be spent on circumventing anticheat (which also falls under some legal grey areas if not outright illegal depending on your country).

Given enough time and resources we could probably find some novel way to crack anticheat on a game as such as it becomes playable on Linux. But it’s so much easier to use that effort somewhere else or just use a Windows VM that is guaranteed to work even if slightly slower.

There’s also the challenge of getting developers to retroactively fix AC support for games that are still popular but not otherwise maintained. Though this is usually an issue with kernel level stuff that can’t easily be fixed on Proton’s end on a case by case basis.

GTAV? I thought there would be more fanfare considering how much coverage the removal of Linux support got

WINE Is Not an Emulator (that’s what the acronym actually stands for).

At a program level, WINE creates a dummy Windows directory structure, slaps files where an exe expects them, and executes the program.

EXEs (well, all programs) will use system calls to request resources (ie. files, access to hardware like GPUs, data from other processes) which Windows maps to certain areas of memory and has its own protocols for how to handle requests. Linux has its own protocols and methods that are incompatible, hence why Windows and Linux apps can’t run natively together.

Then the magic happens: WINE maps these requests to Linux requests so that the running program is none the wiser. It asks for GPU resources like a Windows app would, then gets those resources back just like a Windows app would expect. There are thousands of edge cases, hundreds of system calls, and a bunch else that complicates things but that’s how WINE (and Proton) works.

The reason this fucks up Kernel-level anticheat is that it isn’t trying to communicate via these established channels. They usually operate with full resources outside of the jurisdiction of your OS, and scan your memory bit-by-bit rather than asking the OS politely via system calls for info on other processes.

With WINE, whilst a typical application will not notice the differences they’re designed to not throw a fit if your underlying OS is configured differently, a kernel anticheat will not even recognise the system as a valid OS even if it was able to run in the first place.

The solution here is systems like EasyAC that give up the benefits of being able to analyse processes at the kernel level in favour of portability. Another potential solution (though unlikely imo) is a cross-platform kernel anticheat protocol, that all major operating systems agree to implement, similar to how operating systems will implement the TCP/IP protocol to communicate across networks regardless of underlying OS.

Now the reason "WINE"s acronym is particularly important is that if it DID emulate windows, as in what most virtual machine providers do, then anticheat would be running in an environment mapped out like a real Windows install - because it is. This is how many Linux gamers prefer to run certain titles, and something that should always be functional. It is much more annoying to maintain, However - balance how much you really wanna play the latest COD with your willingness to debug GPU passthrough shit.

log off chud

inb4 Trump claims the chinese are putting mind control chips in American shampoo

Weird thing to downvote, this is how I tested Linux since if I broke something or wanted to try a different distro I just deleted the VM and tried another. It’s way more annoying to distrohop once you’ve installed a system to your machine that also has all your files and configs set up.

Nothing over here like that. Seems quite consistent on memory usage.

Youtube is basically an RSS feed for people who don’t know RSS feeds (…myself included)

RISC-V is just about at pi3 levels of performance so it’s not really that good for end user stuff yet. Alibaba launched a new core recently that might improve things though.

On their servers? possibly. RISC-V is competitive when you stuff a bunch of cores into it and make it do basic server tasks that haven’t gotten more complex over the years. And in AI, you may just need a cheap CPU to orchestrate your GPUs/NPUs so anything will work there.

I think we’ll see m1+ levels of desktop performance on RISCV within the next 4 years though. trump will do wonders for the Chinese semiconductor industry.

That’s the thing, though. I don’t have to turn off mitigations on Linux. And I don’t even think it’s possible to disable the very same mitigations in Windows - Windows itself is just a super inconsistent platform for software benchmarking.

In fact, whenever I’ve found benchmarks it’s not that much of a benefit, especially as the mitigations get more optimised with time.

It’s gonna happen I think.

Desktop ARM is great but it’s still locked behind like 2 vendors (Snapdragon and Apple) and has hardware more locked down than x86.

x86 is, well, x86.

RISC-V might be slower right now but China’s mega investment is going to force others to rush into the ISA to try and beat them to market. Give it 5 years and we’re gonna see a totally different landscape to now.

Jellyfin server? it’ll do hardware transcode handily! Lots of RAM is good for something like TrueNAS since ZFS will use it as a cache.

Level1tech was reviewing the Ryzen 9950X/9900X and he noted how performance on Windows was wildly inconsistent depending on peculiar settings such as sidestepping security features and marking apps to run as administrator (aka also sidestepping windows security features) yet on Linux you can get better performance via Proton OOTB.

Linux has its quirks too but people kid themselves when they convince themselves that the dozens of weird tasks and apps and tweaks they make to Windows are “plug and play” compared to Linux, which in my experience has been way less tweaking.

The main tweaks I’ve done on linux usually include installing ROG-control-center (optional laptop faff) or cryotweaks on Steamdeck (which just sets some sensible options already enabled on most distros)