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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • I think the “black box” nature of electronics is mostly illusory due to how we treat our devices. A friend bought a walking treadmill that wouldn’t turn on out of the box. She contacted the company, they told her to trash it and just shipped her a new one.

    She gave it to me, I took it apart. One of the headers that connects the power switch to the mainboard was just unplugged. It took literally 10 minutes to “fix” including disassembly and assembly, and all I needed was a screwdriver.

    This is a symptom of industry switching to cheap “disposable” electronics, rather than more expensive, robust, and repairable ones.

    From the treadmill company’s point of view, it’s cheaper to just lose one unit and pay shipping one way rather than pay to have the unit returned, spend valuable technician time diagnosing and fixing an issue and then pay to ship the repaired unit back.

    About 50 years ago, you could find appliance repair shops that would fix your broken toaster or TV, and parts for stuff like that were easily available. Now, with the advanced automation in building these, combined with the increased difficulty of repair(fine-work soldering, firmware debuging and the like) it makes way more sense to just replace the whole thing.





  • Is it possible to have kernel-level anti-cheat in Linux?

    Yes, Absolutely. But, people would throw a fit. There is probably no way to opensource it without also making it easier to bypass. There would be a concerted effort to reverse engineer it and remove it from the system while maintaining functionality

    Maintainers of anti-cheat software are not volunteers. If there was an order from management to port the system to Linux, it would happen. It’s just that with the Linux userbase as small as it is, it’s simply not profitable to cater to them.

    I think that if it ever happens, there will be a influx of people moving to linux, or abandoning their duelboots

    I fully disagree. The thing keeping regular people away from Linux as an OS is not that they can’t play some online game with Anti-cheat.

    Linux is in a weird place right now. It’s actually a perfect fit for non-technical users that use their computers for email, web browsing, and Netflix, but those users don’t know what an operating system is, let alone that there are options. More technical users tend to require more specialized applications, and if there isn’t a native linux port available, you have to do some research for alternatives, or to find a way to run it in wine.

    Windows is shitty, but it’s comfortable. And I know that it will run any software I throw at it with basically no research or troubleshooting.