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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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I donno man. My biases are to hate things more the further away from the metal, and the more layers of abstraction there are. I've never actually finished a game I started making either. Maybe if I were more open to shitty engines I would have.

I will say, I most enjoyed making a game when I was just keeping it simple with C and SDL2.

What OS do you run on your daily driver system?

Always been a gamer first, so I've been stuck on Windows. Win10 currently. But god damned if the enshitification of Windows isn't driving me to Linux when Win10 lapses out of support. I have a spare computer I keep meaning to put Linux on just to start acclimating to trying to game on Linux.

Modern Windows pisses me off so much. What the hell, Microsoft.

Has modern Windows really gotten worse? These days I basically use Windows as a boot loader for the ~20% of my video games that won't run on Linux or a console, but during the era when I was giving up on Windows it seemed to me like it was mostly improving, albeit not fast enough for my liking. Vista was a step back from XP but it was still way better than ME or original NT; ME was a step back from 98 but it was still way better than 3.1.

Ads in start menu.

Installing without Microsoft Account is ridiculous. And now you can be banned by Microsoft from using own user account.

Bing reward popups are now system level lootbox notifications.

Solitaire has ads.

Windows will badger you to delete files, transfer them into OneDrive and then demand to pay monthly for more space. And describe it as running out of space, despite local SSD having GBs of free space.

(that is just from what I seen despite not using Windows, I upgraded from Windows 7 to Linux)

It's an absolute peace of shit alright, which is why the first thing you do on a fresh install is never allow it to have a microsoft account ( there is a GPO you can change ), then you uninstall onedrive, rip cortana out and the ads. There are tools which will do this for you.

I ran a tool that removed cortana, but an update restored it. Microsoft aggressively pushes regular security updates, which is good. Those updates sometimes undo my custom changes and restore the inferior default settings.

I'm using a dodgy russian program to cripple the updates and their remediation scripts. StopUpdates10

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