DFX4509B

• ‘You can keep your old hardware, we won’t force you to upgrade.’
• ‘Your old GPU, yes, even your R9 Fury, still has a home here, don’t worry, we won’t leave you out in the cold unlike our competition.’

…Among other jabs at Windows in the spirit of the old Mac vs. PC ads, or to be more apt, in the spirit of Sega’s old ads picking on Nintendo in the '90s.

Also…

• ‘Linux does! What Windon’t.’

Void, and I really wanted to like it on account of not relying on systemd, but its package repos are too barren for me.

Like, Void’s repos are even more barren than EL’s stock repos before you add RPMFusion and EPEL among other third-party repos into it, and its AUR equivalent don’t help matters.

And Void’s musl port is even more limited than the glibc version because it doesn’t support multilib, so you can’t have Steam or WINE on Void musl, for example, while you could on the glibc version that supports multilib.

That depends, the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games are easily modded regardless of OS, and I’ve had good luck with HedgeModManager too for Sonic Generations, and even for Civ3, C3X fixes the black map bug however I haven’t found a good fix for the crackling and popping audio.

I’m more of a proponent for running some Linux distro for my main OS and then virtualizing Windows if desired for things that are broken in WINE/Proton somehow but work fine in Windows, at this point.

I don’t trust Windows enough to run it baremetal in a dual-boot anymore though, virtualization at least isolates it from the host where it counts, where in a dual-boot, even if it generally doesn’t happen, there’s still the looming threat of Windows screwing up the Linux install somehow, where that isn’t a problem when virtualizing since, as I said, it’s isolated where it counts, even if paravirtualization is a thing for storage drivers and networking and the like, and hardware passthrough is a thing for things like GPUs.

There’s still the odd game that’s somehow broken in WINE that isn’t broken by anticheat or DRM, but by just being crusty code, but those edge cases will do fine in a Windows VM /w a spare GPU being passed through to it.

Anything that uses kernel anticheat, so basically any modern multiplayer title, is platform-locked into a baremetal Windows install, but since I have no interest whatsoever in modern multiplayer titles and thus no interest in anything with a kernel anticheat, I can do just fine virtualizing Windows in that scenario while using a Linux host for everything else.

(which, Soulbringer, one of my previous edge-case titles, works great in Proton /w dxwrapper+DXVK, but Civ3’s audio is still broken in Proton even if C3X fixes the graphics, so that’s still being ran in a Windows VM, which I currently have Win11 LTSC running in a VM /w my Vega 56 being passed through to it for just that very purpose, while I’m using an RX 6600 for my host card)

As for apps like Maya, Blender is actually competitive with it nowadays.

As an addendum relating to modern multiplayer titles, those are the few titles where it would make more sense to play them on console instead of PC anyways since the way in which they’re locked down goes against PC’s main selling point: the fact that you actually own your system to a degree where the consoles are effectively locked into the PS, Xbox, or Nintendo walled garden.

The Goanna browsers will run on pretty low-spec hardware, and there’s also h.264ify for sites like YT, unless Google blocked YT from loading on Goanna browsers.

YT’s ad revenue only pays out fractions of a penny, if you want to make money on content creation, you’re better off doing that through crowdfunding eg. with BuyMeACoffee, and that revenue stream is platform-agnostic.

Also, PeerTube’s design basically allowing you to own your content can work out well for hobbyists which already have some other income source as well, better than being at the mercy of Google.

In the case of PeerTube, not worrying about Google age-gating or straight-up yanking your content if you tick them off is a good start, basically, you’d actually own your content posting on PeerTube instead of YT.

YouTube, and one technically exists in the form of PeerTube, with PlasmaTube being a good client for PeerTube.

Puppy would fly on there, or even DSL 2024. Heck, both those distros would fly even on a Pentium 4 of all things.

Assuming it’s not completely useless for this purpose, you could load FreeDOS on it and use it for playing older PC games.

MS-DOS 6.22 would be sub-optimal as it was designed with 486-era and older hardware in mind and since it doesn’t support FAT32 and only supports FAT16, you’re limited to 2GB partitions, while FreeDOS is actually designed with newer hardware like this in mind and supports FAT32 and thus larger drives.

Fooyin’s great so far as a Foobar2k alternative.

Based on how increasingly user-hostile Windows has been getting lately, I don’t trust it outside of a VM or outside of a second system I don’t care about if I want or need to run it baremetal for some reason, and that includes LTSC.

At least LTSC for now seems to be spared from MS’ worst anti-user atrocities, but there’s nothing saying those SKUs won’t get screwed somehow at some point down the line.