As someone who works in gamedev, I’m sure that some of the people there are passionate about it and it is gutwrenching to see your work fail so hard. I’m sad for every project that launches after years of work and fails to get any attention or sales, and I’m definitely sure there’s someone losing sleep due to that.

I never worked in super-large projects, but I did work for a AAA studio and even there, you got people invested into the project.

From how I’ve seen it, you wouldn’t work in gamedev unless you are passionate about it, because you can get drastically better pay for the same job in other, more business focused, industries. So, if all you cared about is money, you have better options.

I really hope that CS will come up with recipes and emails where the board specificly “strongly recommended” that they reduce operation costs or denied internal investments. It probably won’t happen, because such pressure from investors is usually pretty vague, i.e they don’t literally tell you to cut corners, but they strongly suggest that if you won’t somehow increase revenue, you (the management) will have problems. Of course, it’s up to you how you do it, but to meet their often unrealistic demands, just doing a better job while also investing into internal failsafes is often simply not possible. It’s a loss-loss situation for CS, but I really hope they won’t loose this legal battle.

I’m sure there’s a lot of CS employees that would disagree with that, unfortunately there’s probably not much they can do about it.

I was just a few days ago giving my two weeks notice exactly for that reason. I’m getting so fed up with capitalism and companies working for the vultures who give zero fucks about what you do or whether you do it well or not, prioritizing profits over actually doing your job well. I don’t care about money, I worked in cybersec out of principle, to help people with their security. I don’t really care about money, as long as there’s job to be done for someone, I don’t really care if the project I’m working on is super profitable for me, as long as it at least breaks even. But no, we had to cut corners, basically scam our customers by selling products we had no qualified people for who barely scraped by enough results for the customer to not notice it. Non-existent R&D or training, because several milions of anuall profit are not enough. Fuck all of them, if I’m ever going to work again in cybersec, it will be a non-profit.

This OP’s article infuriates me, the nerves they have to demand more money for what’s entirely their failure, which they also directly cause in every company they touch. I’m sure that the fact that the failure was so devastating for most companies is also by large margin fault of their investors, some of which are probably also part of this lawsuit, that blocked investment into disaster recovery plans or backups, because their millions of profit per year felt low.

I feel like I’m getting pretty radicalized recently, ugh.

While I’m all for holding CS accountable for what happened, thisis not the way how to do it and to whom they should be accountable. If there’s any lawsuit, it should come from the customers who have been affected by the outage, not some fucking investors and shareholders that probably kept pressuring CS for the last several years to reduce costs and increase revenue, that are now scrambling to avoid consequences of their endless greed ruining companies they don’t care about by forcing endless growth at all costs and doing as much as they can to prevent internal investments, because that’s not what makes the line go up.

Fuck them. I hope they loose and have to eat their losses + expensive lawsuit. If CS would be able to actually invest their revenue internally, instead of it feeding pockets of greedy investors who give literaly zero fucks about the product or the service, this may not have happened.

I saw that happen at the cybersecurity company I was working at, when we got acquired by investors. Several milion of profit after costs suddenly wasn’t enough, and we had to reduce already non-existent internal projects or investments, that we have already been lacking to be able to do our job properly.

• OrangePi with HomeAssistant and PiHole.
• Old gaming PC turned 24/7 server with Jellyfin, V-Rising server
• Hetzner cloud with Matrix server for Messenger and Discord bridging.
• Synology NAS for SMB and sharing stuff with others through Synology Drive, which also serves as a seedbox for Redacted.ch, with Headphones and Transmission.

I wouldn’t call Crowdstrike a corporate spyware garbage. I work as a Red Teamer in cybersecurity, and EDRs are bane of my existence - they are useful, and pretty good at what they do. In the last few years, I’m struggling more and more to with engagements we do, because EDRs just get in the way and catch a lot of what would pass undetected a month ago. Staying on top of them with our tooling is getting more and more difficult, and I would call that a good thing.

I’ve recently tested a company without EDR, and boy was it a treat. Not defending Crowdstrike, to call that a major fuckup is great understatement, but calling it “corporate spyware garbage” feels a little bit unfair - EDRs do make a difference, and this wasn’t an issue with their product in itself, but with irresponsibility of their patch management.

I also have a dual-boot, with fresh install of Windows I debloated as much as possible, that I use for games that I can’t get to run even after trying protondb.com. However, it has only happened one or two times since I switched more than half a year ago, and I usually just give up on and refund games that I can’t get to work on Steam. I have a lot of other things to play, and usually I wasn’t that much dead set on playing that particular one. I do make sure to post on the forums of the game when that happens, though.

I’ve also recently stumbled upon https://windowsxlite.com/24H2ProV2/, which should be a debloated and minimized Windows (4Gb installed size is mindblowing, considering that all my Windows VMs have like 40Gb freshly installed). The site looks shady, but it was recommended to me by my coleague who works in cybersecurity, so I hope he knows what he’s doing. I haven’t got the time to test it yet, but it does mention that it should work for games, so who knows.

But a paid licence will affect users that are all right abd for whom you’re doing it.

I understand that using something with a risk of loosong access because you’ve upset the developer is something that will turn away a lot of people, but then again, I’d say that “don’t be a dick” is a pretty reasonable requirement. The only issue I see that it’s a pretty vague definiton, but maybe just limiting it to profanities and insult towards the contributors is something more concrete, which would be easy to fulfill and also enforce.

I wonder, is it possible to create a license that would allow you to simply ban people who are being a dick about something from using it? Sure, it may turn away some people, since there’s always a risk of abuse, but it’s your work and as far as I know, you are the one who sets the terms.

If I’m not mistaken, most of the FOSS licenses (or maybe even laws?) guarantee you that you would be able to use the software even if the project later decides to change to proprietary license. But I assume you can simply specify in a licence “Everyone can use it, expect X.Y.Z”.

Would that be legal? Sure, it would probably be pretty hard to enforce, but in some cases it could make for a pretty satisfactory (and petty, of course) C&D letters, for people that really deserve it. You insult the devs of a software your company depends on, demanding something while being a dick about it? Well, fuck you, no library for you and your company.

I’ve switched a few months ago mostly for gaming, and here are few tips and issues I ran into, in case you run into them too.

Not sure what distro you are using, but I’ve run mostly into issues when trying to get NVIDIA and Proton working on Fedora. Just getting the drivers to work took a few tries, and I never managed to get stuff like cutscenes to work properly.

However, I then switched to Nobara (I suppose PopOS may also work), and the experience was wastly better, with everything working out of the box (I did switch to KDE Plasma on X11, since Wayland kept freezing on me).

I’m not sure what of the many changes Nobara does helped solve my issues, but I guess it may be related to it including Proton GE by default, which I recommend getting, and a slightly streamlined installation of NVIDIA drivers.

I also recommend checking out Lutris, instead of using Wine directly. However, I never really managed to get it working, aside from WoW, so your mileage may wary. But I have most of my games on Steam, where everything is working out of the box, so it wasn’t that much of na issue. I only sometimes have to switch Proton version (by right clicking the game - properties - Force a specific version of compatibility tool).

It helps a lot. Because then, a Linux support won’t be such an afterthought, and you wouldn’t have to deal with stuff like popular games adding anti-cheat that bans Linux users.

Right now, some game developers aren’t even willing to enable EAC Linux support, which is like a one checkbox they need to enable for it to work.