I did a bachelor of videogame programming in Belgium 99% on Linux (minus exams), but it was definitely a huge struggle. All the courses and assignments were Windows-only, and 90%-ish required Visual Studio (non-Code) and Windows-only libraries like DirectX or Win32. I got by writing my own tooling to auto-convert these to CMake projects and convincing each teacher to allow me to hand in CMake projects. I wrote SDL backends for most of the win32 assignments, falling back on clang’s excellent cross-compiling for stuff that requires e.g Windows.h. I wrote a blog post about this: https://blog.allpurposem.at/adventures-cross-compiling-a-windows-game-engine And using e.g DirectX natively on Linux, easier than expected: https://blog.allpurposem.at/directx

I also wrote a small wiki on my general experience + a summary of courses and main problems encountered… Windows was non-negotiable during exams: https://dae-linux.allpurposem.at/ I maintain tools, converted assignments, and information on this for future students who want to attempt something like me, but it’s hard to recommend the Linux challenge if you are totally new to programming!

Hope some of this is helpful!

Thank you for sharing! I will check it out.

I started getting spam in German to an email address I gave to the town hall of my town. They use multiple domains to send it, but they all have the same link format that redirects to a fake AI-generated dating site. I’ve tried reporting some to the police, as well as the hosting providers, but haven’t heard back at all. I’d like to delete the address, but it’s the one town hall uses to reach me…

Found out just now he made a video about it and explained his actual experience using it, it’s really cool! Glad to see more folks sharing this stuff.

Awesome! I hope he will help share this with more folks, the friends who I’ve talked into finally giving modern non-Ubuntu Linux a shot love it, but there’s a lot of work to get over the damaged image created by the countless “linux user installing a browser” memes. I’m sure someone with his reach can help though :)

The amount of folks I see use Opera GX “gaming browser” because some influencer said so…

I dual booted Ubuntu originally, but I never used it. Had to really make the jump when I installed Arch on my desktop in ~2020 because I heard it would run games better. I’ve stayed 100% on Linux since! After trying quite a few distros (Fedora, Debian, EndeavourOS, Garuda, Archcraft, more I’m forgetting) I have finally settled on NixOS… it’s been over a year and I still haven’t switched, that’s gotta be worth something :)

Ouch, that sucks yeah. Guess I got lucky with the games my friends like to play. Only one is I guess Valorant, but I don’t engage with that one anyways. Guess you’re stuck on the dual boot until devs of these games start ticking the Proton support box :P

What games keep you on Windows? Besides a few anticheat-enabled ones which choose not to support it, basically everything works fine. I game (and work in gamedev!) 100% on Linux.

I think this pinpointa what makes configuring Linux so much fun for me. It’s one little problem/challenge after the next, it never prevents me from working but it does always give me something to work toward. Currenrly working on a notification display for my bar, and I hope it will be just as satisfying in the end as when I got my mouse to animate with movements or when I got my config to set my wallpapers correctly no matter the host.

You can’t self-host Ghost? I’d like to stay on the same domain indeed, not wanting to also mess up folks subscribed to RSS.

Awesome! Once this is out, I think I will migrate my blog from WriteFreely to Ghost. I hope I can reduce disruption for existing followers though…

I like this picture of a cat that shows up every time this repo is linked. Good things are to come when this cat appears on my feed.

Thank you! It definitely does, I will be using that Restic article for sure! I actually use NixOS on my main laptop, which I found via Vimjoyer’s videos. It’s great, though I wish documentation for more advanced usage was more readily available. I started making the server, currently my biggest roadblock is testing the infrastructure without going live (I made the flake generate a VM for now but it takes a long time to build it every edit and I can’t even get ssh working) and figuring out how I’ll eventually install it with minimal downtime.

I want to move my whole server to NixOS. It’s gotten to the point where I have no idea where all the Ubuntu config files went, and handling half of it via Docker vs baremetal. I hope this will allow me to set up proper backups as well, and maybe get better at Nix! I started a few days ago using the VM feature, but it’s tricky to work on for now, perhaps I haven’t found the right workflow.

I never knew about this (using Linux) but when I plugged my mouse onto a friend’s laptop and suddenly a big banner animated onscreen, my heart sank lol. No idea how this works but it was pretty unexpected.

The “immutable” type of distros could be worth a shot. They don’t let you break the system and if anything does break, you can undo it with a reboot, so they tend to be pretty stable. My family runs a few flavors of Universal Blue, which are based on Fedora and hasn’t broken for them, but I don’t know the exact hardware. I’ve been running NixOS (also immutable) on a Framework 16 since the laptop came out, I can’t count a single hardware issue I encountered. However, NixOS does come with a steep learning curve, so it’s hard to recommend, and it also has trouble running software that hasn’t been already packaged for it.

Genuinely curious, how do they update? My server (ubuntu) yells at me every time I ssh in to reboot “as soon as possible” because “livepatch has fixed vulnerabilities”. So if you don’t reboot, you don’t get kernel updates, and your server becomes vulnerable?

I realize I never replied, but thank you! I got into contact with them and am now in the final stages of getting it all set up to start in a couple months. They seem awesome and I am excited to work with them!

So tired of hearing about this platform that, afaiu, is barely even federated and not really decentralized. Why the hype when fedi exists?