I like to be able to sing along to songs when I'm alone in the car, so even if I don't understand the meaning of the words, I like to know the words.
I also enjoy word play, and Du Hast has some of that. So knowing the bit of trivia about 'Hast' and 'Hasst' being homophones in German and meaning 'have' and 'hate' respectively, and the main portion of the lyrics being wedding vows adds a layer of enjoyment to the song for me.
The candy crush thing, or more generally the fact that since Windows 8 they preload third-party applications, is a relatively speaking small problem. However, the fact the specific applications that get preinstalled are based on a targeted advertising profile for the user signed into the PC, assuming you sign in with a Microsoft account is a bigger problem. While I'm sure they take every possible effort to make those profiles anonymous the data in aggregate is impossible to anonymize. There is a setting in Windows to disable that data collection, at least for advertising purposes, but it gets toggled back on "accidentally" after some updates.
They also have a number of features, like copilot (the chat bot), previously they had Cortana, that do similar kinds of data extraction. Mostly, in order to actually process the user request, but also to be used to train the model. They store it in an anonymized form, but again, it's impossible to actually do that in practice.
That's just two things that are installed and enabled by default that: collect user data for, what I and many others find to be unwanted purposes, don't give the user the option to disable that data collection (only limit it), and seemingly doesn't even consistently respect the users choice in that matter. That is by definition spyware.
They also place advertising on the desktop for things like OneDrive subscriptions, MS Office, and other paid Microsoft services. Those preinstalled apps I mentioned before are effectively ads for those applications, many of which are paid apps or have paid components to them. That is by definition adware.
Spyware and adware are forms of malware. Which makes Microsoft a malware vendor.
So, between the inherent security nightmare that is this feature and the myriad of other things in Windows that push ads, steal user data, and generally make the simple act of using the computer less secure, when do we give Microsoft an APT designation and start treating them as the world's largest vendor of malware on the planet?
I haven't tried any RT stuff on linux since the 30 series launched and then it was very hit or miss, a cursory google search makes it sound like things have improved substantially though.
Honestly, if you don’t have the time to tinker and learn the system you’d probably have a pretty bad time with Linux.
Pretty much regardless of distro or DE, you are going to find games that either outright will fail to run or will require some tinkering and additional troubleshooting on your part to get them to run. Nvidia GPU support, while improving, is still pretty lackluster. Especially if you want things like raytracing or DLSS.
Also, it’ll be an entirely new OS, with its own learning curve just to figure out how to do basic things.
If you only have two hours a week to game and you want to be able to just jump into a game, know that it’s going to work, and not worry about it, I wouldn’t even say stick with Windows. I’d say stick with game consoles. All of the current gen consoles have some pretty good accessibility features for people who visually impaired.
All of that said, if you still wanted to try out a Linux distro, since your main focus is gaming, I’d recommend Bazzite. It’s generally pretty stable, is very easy to rollback if an update breaks something, and has a version that is preconfigured for nvidia gpus. In its installer you can choose your DE, I’d say go with KDE, since it has all of the accessibility features you listed, you’d just need to enable them in settings.
Pennywise kills a handful of people every 27 years and has been doing so for 300 years or so. He probably has kill count under 100.
Between the kills he gets that are directly shown on screen and the number of casualties you could reasonably assume were the result of his actions, Heath Ledger’s Joker probably killed a few thousand people.
Ronald McDonald on the other hand, was the main marketing vehicle for a company that sells food products that are incredibly unhealthy and addictive. He is probably indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions of people.
Heart disease kills several orders of magnitude more people than extradimensional demons or psychopathic clowns.
Something I only saw mentioned in a somewhat snarky comment in this thread (apologies if I missed it elsewhere) is that Windows has the option to do a full system image backup.
If you have an external hdd or a nas, from the Windows Backup applet in control panel (not settings) you can create a system image that will contain a full backup of your C: drive and, optionally other drives in your system. You can then restore that backup from the recovery options in your windows install media.
For the windows install media, I’d recommend using the windows media creation tool to create a usb installer on a separate usb key from your Linux installer and then setting it aside just in case. Trying to create windows install media from within Linux is, while not impossible, difficult.
Obviously, you should do all of this before committing to installing Linux to disk. Most Linux install media also functions as a live Linux environment from which you can try things out and see if things will work for you.
This is some good advice. I'd add two caveats though:
- For learning the distro's package manager, while I'd say it's definitely good to learn it (and do so early on), I'd also say beginners should probably stay away from the command line version of it unless it's absolutely needed.
- For running commands from random websites rather than a blanket prohibition, I'd say don't do it unless you can confidently say you understand what the command will do and are willing to take the risk that you're wrong.
My experience has been that 1440p is noticeable jump in quality on desktop monitors but less so laptops. On desktop 4K is virtually unnoticeable, a high refresh rate, HDR, and OLED are far more noticeable.
For TV, I’ve found that it depends more on distance from the screen and resolution and bit rate of the media. I sit about 8’ from a 65” 4K tv and the difference between Blu-ray quality at 1080p and 4K is night and day.
I couldn't quickly find an answer to this, but would setting the "UseRoutes" option in systemd-networkd to false prevent the dhcp client from using the option 121 routes?
If so, would this be a possible mitigation for linux devices using systemd?
I wouldn't say I'm new to Ubisoft, more that they haven't released a game I've been interested in playing since Assassin's Creed: Revelations.
As for day one patches being a necessity for games, I would argue that if a game has major game breaking bugs on final release (AKA launch day) then the game isn't worth playing, much less spending money on.
If a game can't even install on a system that meets its minimum requirements without needing a patch, then I'd say that's a feature not a bug. Since it tells me that I should strongly reconsider purchasing anything from that publisher in the future.
I like to be able to sing along to songs when I'm alone in the car, so even if I don't understand the meaning of the words, I like to know the words.
I also enjoy word play, and Du Hast has some of that. So knowing the bit of trivia about 'Hast' and 'Hasst' being homophones in German and meaning 'have' and 'hate' respectively, and the main portion of the lyrics being wedding vows adds a layer of enjoyment to the song for me.