I hear you so hard on this one. I’ve been running Windows Enterprise with a tonne of fixes in GPOs for too many years now. I’ve been using Windows since the beginning. Thankfully I’ve also used Unix, Linux, and macOS for almost as long too.

I’m shitcanning Windows in a matter of weeks, even taking time off work to focus on it. I have one remaining Windows box (gaming workstation). But not for long.

And the crazy thing is, with the sorry state of Windows 11, my Linux systems are actually more stable.

Isn’t 64bit Steam Client due to drop for Windows imminently? They end 32bit support at the start of next year supposedly.

Have you had anyone with experience with security look at this thing? There’s a lot of really questionable practices in your schedule shell scripts. I especially find how you’re handling VPN secrets kinda worrying. And the backup_challenge_clients.sh script isn’t robust at all. Your nginx config has a few bad choices like lack of try_files, the regex \.php$. It’s definitely not hardened so I hope people don’t put this Internet facing.

I’ve spent like 5min in the GitHub to get a feel for the project maturity. Personally, I don’t think this is suitable for actual use yet.

If you’ve not done any security assessments on your project yet, you might not want to (a) call it “Safe”box and (b) might not want to start charging money for it until you do.

I worry you’re setting yourself up for a hard-to-shake-off embarrassment should a nasty vuln be found. Maybe a name like “selfbox” etc that drops the connotation of security would be safer.

Edit: Kudos on the project website though! Looks fricking gorgeous.

Almost without a doubt. Original Sin 1 and 2 were my all-time favourite RPGs until the same developer casually released Baldurs Gate 3 and stole the #1 slot.

I know people in the working group in the cybersecurity space working with MS on these APIs and this really isn’t their plan. They aren’t doing it to kick people out - cybersecurity want out for themselves as no one wants to do a CrowdStrike.

There are countless other use cases for kernel drivers that won’t be in scope of the APIs being drafted.

What’s that got to do with MS’s decision to kick them out? What’s the Venn diagram of mission critical systems and systems running Valorant/League?

I’m not disagreeing that these bullshitty kernel drivers running from boot exist, I’m stating that MS aren’t going to do shit about it if even more risky kernel drivers aren’t planned to be removed from the OS and there’s plenty of other popular anti cheat drivers that are only loaded at runtime.

Yes but many don’t. And the risk impact of BSODing gaming computers vs business systems is dramatically different.

We won’t see MS do anything about kernel drivers until the majority of security industry has moved to whatever new userspace APIs MS release.

Even then, do gaming anti cheat developers really care?

IMO simply vote with your wallet and don’t buy games that need kernel drivers and still fail to address cheaters who always find a way around.

There’s little reason to force them out given games run temporarily. We’re more likely to see security products move out of the kernel first since they run full time and from boot (meaning there’s stronger implications if they fail in kernel space e.g. Crowdstrike). And even then, they’re not forcing them out, just offering APIs in user space to negate the need to be running in the kernel for those use cases.

I’d love to see games denied the ability to run drivers in kernel space on Windows but I don’t think we’ll see that any time soon.

That’s rather silly. Might as well include road signs “advertising” places to go and how far away they are.

I live in the countryside. You know, that place with all the green.

Zero but I’m neither average nor American.

Rainbow Six Siege, Forza 6 / Horizon 3, Halo 5, Gears of War 4, Apex Legends, Fifa 20, COD:MW (remake) are a few examples of games that launched with 12 support only.

Note how they’re the big, blockbuster games that are widely played by most non hardcore gamers.

It’d take Roblox 2, COD:69, and Footballz9000 to launch with DX3D13 only to slow down the wheels on SteamOS/Linux. When average gamers can’t pick up and play the games marketed down their throats, they’ll ditch their Steam Decks for whatever MS are pedalling.

Valve have been amazing at funding and supporting CodeWeavers the past decade but even with Valve’s practically bottomless pit of money, it took 7 years just to barely catch up to a set of APIs that haven’t changed practically since 2014.

Playing catchup forever isn’t sustainable. Proton is a stop-gap while Valve try and shift an industry away from a behemoth. Native is the end goal, not maintaining middleware and a creaking stack of patches.

I mean, UWP and Appx was a thing that happened. I doubt it’ll be the last time MS attempt to shift away from PE.

Consumers are being forced to 11 and it seems to be working. I wouldn’t be surprised to see MS bifurcate their consumer and enterprise offerings to accelerate shifts in the consumer space and catalyse shifts in enterprise.

MS have been keen to take stricter control of binaries on their platform for a long time now.

Again, I think you’re coming at this from enjoying Proton today but say DX13 comes out tomorrow, it could be years before Proton is compatible.

It took about 6 years for Proton to be somewhat capable at supporting DX3D 12 after 12 launched in 2014. Arguably it was closer to 7 or 8 years (that’s how long Proton took to get to the state it’s in today).

This is what I’m talking about. If MS purposefully make it difficult to reverse and reimplement (which they have an incentive to do), and game developers continue to focus and target MS platforms, we could be waiting half a decade to play those games on Linux.

Totally. And then DirectX 13 comes out and needs to be reversed and implemented, all the while developers don’t think about Linux.

If MS get cheeky with the MZ/EXE/PE format, we could be several years behind.

I’ve been using Wine for years and I think anyone who has been using it all this time will get what I’m saying.

Just because Proton/Wine has caught up (mostly) doesn’t mean it wasn’t a long and painful journey to get there.

There’s still plenty of other Windows-only APIs that games rely on.

Proton still perpetuates Microsoft’s monopoly on graphics APIs etc.

Also Steam already has this feature. I can bounce between Linux, Mac, and Windows with my saves. I don’t need something for Windows only…

Valheim

Do you mean Zen Browser? Zed is a text/code editor.