sylver_dragon

Been using the beta for a while and I gotta say, it’s pretty awesome. I just hope they have the purchasing as sorted as they claim. I’ve had so many issues in the past letting my kids purchase games.

Playtron’s CEO, Kirt McMaster, added, “We are thrilled to join forces with such a legendary games publisher as Square Enix. The PC we know is morphing into new forms that require a purpose built OS for gaming that meets the demands of powerful new gaming hardware such as handhelds and new players who have grown up in a mobile 1st world with much more sophisticated UX sensibilities. This investment will accelerate the development and deployment of GameOS and create new experiences for players around the globe.”

Huh, so Playton’s CEO is an early example of an AI being used to replace people.

What’s next?

We already got Windows taking timed snapshots, and ads in the Start Menu. I’m not sure I want to know.

This is going to suck for a lot of people. I’m all for encryption. If any of the laptops, in the business I work for, lack encryption, I’m going to throw a fit. But, for home use the situation is not the same. I’d argue that the risk of device theft leading to critical data compromise is pretty low and the risk of the user needing someone to perform offline data recovery for that user is much higher. And the number of users who will actually have the key saved in a location they can get to it, and provide to the data recovery tech, can probably be counted without taking off my shoes.

This is dumb. It’s yet another case of Microsoft picking a default for users which helps Microsoft but isn’t good for users.

Have you considered just beige boxing a server yourself? My home server is a mini-ITX board from Asus running a Core i5, 32GB of RAM and a stack of SATA HDDs all stuffed in a smaller case. Nothing fancy, just hardware picked to fulfill my needs.

Limiting yourself to bespoke systems means limiting yourself to what someone else wanted to build. The main downside to building it yourself is ensuring hardware comparability with the OS/software you want to run. If you are willing to take that on, you can tailor your server to just what you want.

I do agree with what you are saying, but for a complete beginner, and a very general overview, I didn’t want to complicate things too much. I personally run my own stuff in containers and am behind CG-NAT (it’s why I gave it a mention).

That said, if you really wanted to give the new user that advice, go for it. Rather than just nit pick and do the “but actshuly” bit, start adding that info and point out how the person should do it and what to consider. Build, instead of just tearing down.

No, but you are the target of bots scanning for known exploits. The time between an exploit being announced and threat actors adding it to commodity bot kits is incredibly short these days. I work in Incident Response and seeing wp-content in the URL of an attack is nearly a daily occurrence. Sure, for whatever random software you have running on your normal PC, it’s probably less of an issue. Once you open a system up to the internet and constant scanning and attack by commodity malware, falling out of date quickly opens your system to exploit.

Short answer: yes, you can self-host on any computer connected to your network.

Longer answer:
You can, but this is probably not the best way to go about things. The first thing to consider is what you are actually hosting. If you are talking about a website, this means that you are running some sort of web server software 24x7 on your main PC. This will be eating up resources (CPU cycles, RAM) which you may want to dedicated to other processes (e.g. gaming). Also, anything you do on that PC may have a negative impact on the server software you are hosting. Reboot and your server software is now offline. Install something new and you might have a conflict bringing your server software down. Lastly, if your website ever gets hacked, then your main PC also just got hacked, and your life may really suck. This is why you often see things like Raspberry Pis being used for self-hosting. It moves the server software on to separate hardware which can be updated/maintained outside a PC which is used for other purposes. And it gives any attacker on that box one more step to cross before owning your main PC. Granted, it’s a small step, but the goal there is to slow them down as much as possible.

That said, the process is generally straight forward. Though, there will be some variations depending on what you are hosting (e.g. webserver, nextcloud, plex, etc.) And, your ISP can throw a massive monkey wrench in the whole thing, if they use CG-NAT. I would also warn you that, once you have a presence on the internet, you will need to consider the security implications to whatever it is you are hosting. With the most important security recommendation being “install your updates”. And not just OS updates, but keeping all software up to date. And, if you host WordPress, you need to stay on top of plugin and theme updates as well. In short, if it’s running on your system, it needs to stay up to date.

The process generally looks something like:

• Install your updates.
• Install the server software.
• Apply updates to the software (the installer may be an outdated version).
• Apply security hardening based on guides from the software vendor.
• Configure your firewall to forward the required ports (and only the required ports) from the WAN side to the server.
• Figure out your external IP address.
• Try accessing the service from the outside.

Optionally, you may want to consider using a Dynamic DNS service (DDNS) (e.g. noip.com) to make reaching your server easier. But, this is technically optional, if you’re willing to just use an IP address and manually update things on the fly.

Good luck, and in case I didn’t mention it, install your updates.

Cleopatra had huge tracts of land. And all of the Romans wanted to plow her fields.
I’m walking about the wheat production of Egypt here, what were you thinking of?

At the time I stood my server up, I was supporting RHEL at work and support for docker seemed a bit spotty. IIRC, it took both setting up the docker yum repo directly, along with the EPEL repo. And every once in a while, you could end up in dependency hell from something which was at different versions between EPEL and the official repos. Ubuntu, on the other hand, had better docker support in the official repos and docker seemed more targeted at .deb distributions. So, I made the choice to go Ubuntu.

I suspect this is long since all sorted. But, I see no compelling reason to change distributions now. The base OS is solid and almost everything the server does is containerized anyway. If I were to rebuild it, I would probably use something more targeted at containerization/virtualization, like Proxmox.

I had dabbled with Linux before, both at home and work. Stood up a server running Ubuntu LTS at home for serving my personal website and Nextcloud. But, gaming kept my main machine on Win10. Then I got a Steam Deck and it opened my eyes to how well games "just worked’ on Linux. I installed Arch on a USB drive and booted off that for a month or so and again, games “just worked”. I finally formatted my main drive and migrated my Arch install to it about a week ago.

I’m so glad that I won’t be running Windows Privacy Invasion Goes to 11.

Since the article seems to have failed to link to it, here’s the actual data: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

It’s not a crazy as you think.

My experience has been pretty similar. With Windows turning the invasive crap up to 11, I decided to try and jump to Linux. The catch has always been gaming. But, I have a Steam Deck and so have seen first hand how well Proton has been bridging that gap and finally decided to dip my toes back in. I installed Arch on a USB 3 thumbdrive and have been running my primary system that way for about a month now. Most everything has worked well. Though, with the selection of Arch, I accepted some level of slamming my head against a wall to get things how I want them. That’s more on me than Linux. Games have been running well (except for the input bug in Enshrouded with recent major update, that’s fixed now). I’ve had no issues with software, I was already using mostly FOSS anyway. It’s really been a lot of “it just works” all around.

So let’s see, I can buy a computer with a new architecture, which will wreck havoc with running my existing software, all for some half-baked AI version of Clippy. That’s gonna be a, “no”.

One of the more recent updates added in a lot of new Points of Interest and helped make the random maps less “WTF” and more reasonable. Though the replayability is down to personal preference. My wife and I will spin up a new world, play until we reach a point of “well, we’ve basically done everything” and then move on to a different game. And then come back to 7d2d when we want to scratch that “crafting, zombie survival, base defense” itch.

In a lot of ways, 7d2d is like a comfy sweater. It’s not going to ever be radically different; but, it’s nice to wear for a bit. Personally, I’d be all for getting the gang back together. Unless you are all so saturated in other games to play, why not relive the fun? I’m also a sucker for survival/crafting games and have a Steam library full of them. There are only a couple which I keep going back to, Valheim and 7d2d being the top two. So, YMMV, but I’d say it’s a fun enough game and the official release is a good excuse to kill some zombies together again.

I guess Satan decided on a nice frozen makeover for Hell.

Joking aside, 7d2d has been one of my ongoing favorites since I bought it back in 2016. I’m glad to see them take this (long overdue) step.

Based on DOS:2 and Baldur’s Gate 3…

I remember Windows XP coming out and we all mocked it as Windows but with an interface by Crayola. But I’d gladly have that Crayola interface back rather than the flat modern crap we have now.

While I’m a fan of Kali, some work environments see anything Kali related and go full “zomg! WTF!” Mode. Even in less restrictive environments, it’s often easier to just go with the flow and avoid making life harder for the security folks, without a good reason.