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Cake day: May 5th, 2024

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  • Dealing with proton shenanigans is much easier than dealing with all of Windows and Microsoft’s bullshit.

    The windows “desktop environment” is so slow and clunky. It makes game development or really any workflow requiring the use of multiple open directories almost too hard. It makes me wonder how they even develop this piece of shit at Microsoft HQ. Do they have an in-house developers ui that’s maybe a little more efficient? Do they have special accelerated hardware that makes it run faster than fast on the development machines? I guess the windows server ui is faster than the windows 11 ui and maybe it has a better file explorer so maybe that’s what they use.

    When you need to install a program, all the choices available are too spammy and corporate. The hp printer driver is 300mb and takes 15 minutes to install on a ssd on Windows. Meanwhile on Linux you type something like “sudo apt install cups” and 15 seconds later you have printer drivers.

    It’s pretty easy to identify the sweaty mlg titles that lock down everything with windows-only anticheat before buying them. Beyond anticheat games, I can’t even recall a game I couldn’t get running.





  • Another part of it is the gpu bios. The gpu bios contains x86 opcodes that it expects the host system to run for gpu-specific functions like video mode switching and probably lots of other stuff. I know that Vesa bios extensions mode switching requires a pointer to the functions in the gpu bios which the cpu runs. I tried to make a platform independent Vesa driver one time and couldn’t figure out how to circumvent using the gpu bios for it since the functions you’re supposed to call are compiled for x86. Even the well-refined projects like Seabios still rely on the VBE pointers for non-legacy video modes.

    Legacy vga does also has a bios but it’s relatively not that difficult to circumvent using the bios on legacy vga cards, only issue is that legacy vga modes are mostly useless.

    I think there’s a newish way of doing this stuff that doesn’t involve Vesa or legacy vga but I don’t know what it is. This I’m sure is only one of the many problems that have to be overcome if someone wanted to hack a 1080ti onto a raspberry pi or something.