It really has. I had always tried to use Linux in the past, but gaming was always a fight, and the OS just never felt like it behaved reliable for daily usage for me, was always some little annoyance or bug or issue I'd run into and inevitably switch back to Windows for the sake of things just working without having to spend hours and days and weeks trying to fix issues. That was 10+ years ago. I finally decided to give it a go again, using an Arch based OS. I figured it's been a while, try something other than debian or SLES that I've been used to. Honestly, I kinda don't notice much difference in overall day to day use between gaming and day to day use on Linux versus previously being on Windows just a month ago. Everything kinda just works. The one thing I do notice is I use significantly less RAM, I seldom exceed 32gb as where I was regularly 40gb+ on Windows, and everything runs much better while I do the same day to day stuff as I always have. It's not a huge performance difference, but if I'm paying attention, yeah, I do notice my games tend to run better, and everything within the OS is far more responsive.
As for all the linux a-holes out there, please STFU, I don't wanna hear "winblows sux" or "this distro is better", it's why I didn't specify what specific distro I use. That toxic fanboyism is what keeps people away from seeing it as a viable usable OS.
My rambling is really just to say: Yeah, linux has come a long way, especially for gaming and day to day use. The work Valve and others have done to make stuff just run and work is astonishing.
Gaming has improved by leaps and bounds in the last few years, but non-gaming desktop use has been solid for ages. What little annoyances and bugs and issues kept you going back to Windows?
I found Windows 10 was the first bearable Windows, that I could use without wanting to go back to Linux all the time. Not great, but bearable.
I still used Windows for gaming throughout the whole time. (Until about a year ago, when I accidentally nuked my Windows installation, and then never bothered to set it up again..)
Depending on the job I had at the time, I also used Windows at work.
> As for all the linux a-holes out there, please STFU, I don't wanna hear "winblows sux" or "this distro is better", it's why I didn't specify what specific distro I use. That toxic fanboyism is what keeps people away from seeing it as a viable usable OS.
I've mostly heard that until perhaps about 10 years ago. I'm sure these people are still out there, but it seems to be much less common these days.
I use Arch Linux for what it's worth, but almost any distro can install almost any program (and they all run the same kernels), so it mostly comes down to what package manager and configuration system you want to use, and whether you like the defaults that come with your distribution.
I'm still having some trouble with screen tearing in some games on Linux, alas. I suspect these problems have been ironed out for the more mainstream window manager setups (like whatever you get in Ubuntu by default, instead of me using XMonad), but so far I couldn't be bothered to fix it, yet.
I tried a compositor like picom and gamescope (the one the Steam Deck uses), and they help a bit with eg the modern Hitman games, but I still have trouble with eg Silksong.
My only tip isn't really useful. Just avoid going to that hostile country for now. Unless there's a specific necessity. And if that's the case, then change all your social media accounts info, change the name, change birthdates, missmatch as much info as possible. Delete photos of yourself/family. Then for 'burner' accounts, make them on a different social network, like bluesky, myspace (they're still around), and then use an AI to generate ideas for posts and just make those as posts for the next while. The problem will be making a realistic timeline/history for new accounts. Alternatively "your kids aren't allowed to use social media", and that clears up a lot of work. But honestly just avoid the risk of traveling there in the first place, is it worth the risk of being detained?
PRISM [1] says hello. He may have fallen out of the news cycle, but he's not only still around but bigger, badder, and more invasive than ever. That phone you used to set up 2FA online with? Well that conveniently ties your real name, address, and more right to specific accounts. And he's collected it and passed it along for storage, in perpetuity.
Vivaldi is what I use. uBlock works fine with it. I have no issues with content loading or anything weird. I just describe it as "chrome, but if someone actually cared about the UI and functionality", and the mouse gestures are super nice.
I went to it from Firefox ages ago and haven't looked back or missed Firefox and all its issues even once.
I can't say your experience with it will be as good as mine or not, but it is a browser with adblock, which is also built in, but I prefer the plugin version.
I’ve never used it and will take your word on its usability. But it’s not FOSS and so I’d never adopt it. Web browsers are too critical a piece of the stack today for them to be proprietary.
Genuine question here: what's the actual benefits of blocking icmp?
Not asking "Why should I leave it on", I'm specifically asking for legitimate valid use cases for disabling it.
I really can only think of one, abd that's if your server just gets a relentless amount of pings that it takes up a significant portion of your bandwidth. (There was a news article about a news site in Australia, I think, that had that happen)
Same for me, I've entirely abandoned google's search engine. It's become rapidly more useless to the point where it's just become a search engine for their ad servers, to browse what ads and garbage is in their database instead of providing relevant information from the web about search terms.
You can selectively block elements from sites. I've blocked shorts from it and honestly forgot how annoying it was until these comments. Just right click, block element, preview before applying, make sure you don't butcher out unintended parts of the pages.
As someone with decades of search engine experience, it's mainly knowing key words and exact phrases to use as well as excludes to filter out garbage. It's a bit hard to teach/explain in a single post, but if you search basted turkey and get results of "turkey baster", then quote the key phrase "basted turkey" -shopping -sale -price, try and remove results from shopping websites with excludes. Understand most search engines will drop most 1-3 letter words from your search. Like searching for 'fire in the house' will only look for results most relevant to the words fire and house, because 'in' and 'the' are just common everywhere. So if you want that exact phrase, then quote it. Searching used to be something you had to learn how to do.
I use a variety of mostly search engines that get me an answer much faster. Google/Bing frequently point to sites/articles written by AI anyway. Using a LLM directly often gives too much garbage and doesn't often stick to just answering my question, so it becomes as useless as a modern google search. I prefer old style searching of just using key words and refining my query opposed to having it (miss)interpreted.
I enjoy traveling a lot. Specifically traveling. Not arriving and staying somewhere, not vacationing, not sight seeing. Traveling has always been a fun experience to me. The road trip, the adventure part of a vacation. Spend a day or two to drive as far as possible, stop by places to rest and relax, then get back to it. Find an interesting road, where does that lead? People dismiss the adventure of traveling and just rush to the destination. Like quick travel in a game, if you walk to the destination, sometimes you find cool stuff, sometimes not, and sometimes you distract and detour so hard that you end up with a new destination instead. I don't consider flying to be traveling though, it's just flying to me, a rush of getting to a destination.
My rambling is really just to say: Yeah, linux has come a long way, especially for gaming and day to day use. The work Valve and others have done to make stuff just run and work is astonishing.