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Eyedust @lemmy.dbzer0.com

How I gave up a one-game addiction to switch to 100% Linux (long story warning)

Let me apologize first. I'm both old and new to Linux and have made a ton of noob moves since switching back. I know most people in this community are probably already Linux users, but I'm hoping that some Linux-curious people will stumble upon this.

Lets start with the game. I am a former League of Legends addict. Embarrassing, I know, but I had been playing since the glory days (I started right at the beginning of season 2). I never ranked; I would play ARAM and URF to either pass time or keep myself awake if I felt drowsy. I was good, too. Not great, but more often than not I'd go 16/2/12 or something similar. It released massive amounts of dopamine for me. The ARAM bridge felt like a home away from home.

Moving on from League... I had been starting to smell Microsoft's shit from a long loooong ways away. Like, Win7 days (rest in peace, XP). I had been introduced to Linux and the basics of maintaining Linux from a class I took in high school. Lets be honest, though, Linux wasn't really in a gaming state then. You could, but you would be jumping through a lot of hoops for a 50/50 chance it would be stable gameplay. Honestly, though, Microsoft's stink flows much further back than you'd think and it was already grating on me then. I was already considering the move.

I sat on Win10 for a while and even opened my PC to the Win11 beta. It was okay, I didn't auto-hate it like most because a lot of the Windows UI I used was third party and I changed theme colors through the registry. There were ways to remove bloat and most Microsoft snooping garb, but it took work. Thinking I knew what I was doing, I messed with the system32 folder. If this were the Win7 days, I probably would have known what I was doing. I simply wanted to change the internal image viewer to a 3rd party viewer. Microsoft gave default selections for a lot of things, but changing photo gallery was a fight for some reason.

Needless to say, I messed up. No default apps would open anymore. Couldn't even get calculator running. So I reinstalled. Back then, you still had to use Win10 and update to 11. I reinstalled, saw my windows old folder, knew everything was safe, and updated. Huge mistake. Win11 was not just an update, even if you start it from the update panel. It's a full OS install. My ignorant self thought it was just a Win10 glow up. My windows old folder got overwritten by an empty windows old folder.

After a whole day of recovery process I probably recovered 99% of my files, but my time with Windows was quickly closing. My friend pointed out that this was a good time to try Linux. Steam Deck had just launched and Linux was gaining ground in the gaming scene and FAST. So I backed everything up to external (which I should have done earlier, smfh) and grabbed the most likely candidate, Pop!_OS. Soon after, at my friend's pestering, I switched to Arch- Manjaro- and then later EndeavourOS.

I messed up EndeavourOS by using topgrade. It didn't occur to me that it was user error, and I just thought it was something EOS didn't rub shoulders well with in my system. So back to Manjaro. Then D4 came out. Another shame of mine. I'm a huge Diablo 2 fan and played my fair share of D3. I got the early access. Couldn't play. Panicking, I reinstalled Windows 11... just to find that the game was pure garbage. I played for a bit, hoping things would improve but.... Blizzard got me again. But I was not moving back. I had moved so much already. Funny thing is: Proton came out with an update not even 24 hours later that fixed D4... Doh.

During my second time on Win11, Riot pushed out their knuckleheaded kernel-level anticheat. I wasn't worried, I was on Win11, w/e. Then Microsoft dropped some big shits on Windows. Snapshots of your screens ("it'll be held in a private encrypted partition of you drive!", yeah fucking right... pull the other one), ads in the start bar, and then pushy af popups to integrate your system with their AI. I was insulted. Win11 was already one giant piece of malicious software even before all this. Granted, I used startallback so I didn't get the ads, but it was the idea of the thing.

So I did it. I dropped League and moved to base Arch. I will not let Microsoft have even 100gb of my drive now. I make do by playing other games, being actually productive in life, or diving into something new within Linux. I grew up. I said no. PC owners should be banding together and dropping Windows right into the garbage. Screw their proprietary plugins, screw their insecure kernel access, screw their ads and data-harvesting AI, and screw their sneaky photos of my screen. I knew when they backpedaled on that screenshot shit that they'd push it more quietly later. I told everyone that they would. And they did.

Dive into VSCodium, or Neovim, or VIM, or emacs. Explore open source and, like me, find that most apps are pleasantly better than their commercial counterparts. Play with your terminal. Wreck things and reinstall (just hard copy everything to external first). Lets make ODF industry standard, like it should have been before Microsoft outbid and muscled docx in. It may take ten, twenty, fifty years but fuck it. I'm all in and my bet is on Linux. My next big project for my next PC build? Gentoo (I am not quite ready for Linux from Scatch, lmao). Its time I actually learned more. I've already dived deep into the Arch Wiki and I've already dived into NixOS and nixlang. We need to go deeper now.

Linux is easier than ever now. Experiment with it! Scared to fully make the move? Grab a small SSD to test it out safely! Just... know what you're doing with partitions before you do. Either that or take your main SSD out before installing. However, most Linux distros let you use them right from the USB stick to check them out. Just ignore the installer and play around a bit. Remember that USB is going to be substantially slower, so don't make your decision off of speed. You'd be surprised at how much faster Linux can be.

tl;dr: Switch to Linux and stop giving out your data for free. Ad analytics should be a choice, and one you're paid to do. Your information is incredibly valuable and so is your privacy. If you pay for a product, that company should NOT be triple dipping and making more money off of you, no matter how non-invasive it is. Its all invasive, even if its hidden.

PS: I won't mention mac here. I really have no experience in iOS or macOS. Apple garden is Apple garden and that's about all I know. Microsoft and I go way back (Windows 3.14), and I've watched them slowly and then quickly corrupt over time. Like a turd rolling downhill and collecting garbage.

73 comments

  • Congrats and welcome.

    • Thank you. It only took 18 years to come back to it, lol. But Linux fascinates me, tbh. It felt really strange at first, but after about a year it feels like home.

  • It's kind of fascinating: the Steam Deck is the only device I can think of with a "halo effect" that doesn't involve giving a company more money: the ecosystem it pulls you into is an open one, and you don't even have to have purchased a Deck to jump in based on the idea alone.

    • Yeah, the Steam Deck launched at a loss to the company, with the business model that the income would come from the influx of Steam users buying games. It was a very well executed business plan that was fair to all involved. I just don't want to see what happens when Gabe is no longer president of the company...

  • Addiction is extremely dangerous and you can end up wasting years of your life on something that really isn't that important to you.

    It's sad how many people in my generation encourage others to become addicted to things like video games.

    Games like league reward people who put more time into them while punishing those who put in less. It's particularly exploitative because it encourages us to spend as much time in the game as possible so we're as good as we can be when we're playing with our friends. It genuinely feels good to be good at the game because that transfers to wins for your team and respect from your peers.

    More people playing competitive games need to realize the tricks at play to get them addicted as long as possible. I avoid games like that with other people because I know firsthand how detrimental they can be to my psyche.

    I recommend playing co-op games instead. Focus on working together against the computer instead of fighting each other. That way there are challenges you can eventually beat, rather than fighting players who always put more time into the game than you.

    I'm a Linux Pirate. It's possible to play co-op games online for free with programs such as Sunshine+Moonlight for streaming, emulators with netplay, and you can even play any LAN game online using something like Hamachi.

    • I use Tailscale instead of hamachi these days. I find it way better. Used to use hamachi in the early days of Minecraft multiplayer, was always so jank and maybe it’s gotten better, but Tailscale has the added bonus of letting me easily share other services with the people I host servers for.

  • Proud of you, chief, it's hard to do that kick the addictions

    CoD remains the only reason I have Windows (LTSC, on a different drive from Mint).The day someone else makes something that's CoD Zombies but good (Sker Ritual was... Not), I'll ditch it. Until then I'm stuck enjoying the occasional custom map release that's worth a fuck and dealing with Actiblizz :(

    • That's another hard one to kick. I never played, myself, but I remember Counter-Strike was huge when I was in school. The after school CS LAN parties in the computer lab were huge. A lost era now. But before that was CoD LAN parties.

      I went to them, but usually just to get the massive music libraries people had up for share. I think a friend of mine had almost 60gb in music and that was back when ~100gb HDDs were some of the largest you could get... Luckily I had frankenstein'd the first 100gb drive from my mom's old PC and put it in mine, so I managed to get it all. I think I still have the music on my old E-Machines. I should probably get it.

      Whoa, I went off track down memory lane. Sorry about that, lol.

  • For me it was Destiny 2. I genuinely enjoy the moment to moment gameplay, and no other game has really matched it for me. The story and characters were engaging enough, even at the games lows, that I wanted to see the saga through to the end. I did week one of the raid for “The Final Shape” and then I booted into my Linux install and have not booted windows since. I’m about to fully wipe that drive and reuse it in a different Linux machine. My desire to quit windows, and my acute awareness of how much of my life and money I had put into Destiny over the last decade or so, made the switch honestly pretty easy.

    I still game a good amount, but it’s much more intentional, and I don’t play any live service games which frees up money I don’t feel guilty putting toward indie games.

    I quit League in 2019 when I finally built my own PC. I refused to put any games from Riot on the new computer. I played enough of the game to enjoy following the competitive scene to this day, and every now and then I get the desire to play. I’d really only do it with premade scrims of people I know.

    I’ve recently found a gaming cafe in my city I might go to a few times a month to play a couple of those games I either can’t or refuse to install on my Linux machine.

  • We here in the Apple Garden know that Apple takes all our usage data and trust then that they are used anonymously. But Apple has no access to data when it is encrypted, they even warn you when you encrypt your data that you need to safe the keys yourself, they can only delete everything if you lose them.

    I was in a similar situation, but I got a MacBook M1 for literally everything but PC exclusive gaming, and I kept my gaming rig dual booting windows (on the HDD) and Pop!_OS (boots automatically, saved on SSD).

    Why did I get a MacBook? I just wanted it. I‘d probably throw SteamOS on the gaming rig one day and use steam-link with an Ethernet cable to stream the games to the MacBook.

    And yes, Linux is really easy to use nowadays. I’ve been thinking of throwing a lightweight distro onto my parents laptop. They only use Firefox so they won’t even notice it lol

    • I have a friend who does dev work and swears by Apple, but he does use Linux on the side as his main machine. Ever thought of diving into NixOS? I've used it for a few months and really enjoyed it once I could read and write nixlang.

      I don't dev that much, but apparently it can run reproducible environments for nearly every OS and you can have multiple environments via flakes. Need one for Golang? Need one for React? It can do it. You can even access it from your mac. I don't know much about that side of it, though, just that it can.

    • My main systems are all Linux, except for my music production MacBook Pro. The experience on an M3 Mac is just flawless.

      I always say the same thing. Use the right tool for the job, and for music, an Apple silicone system is currently unbeatable.

73 comments