I'll probably pick up a PC at some point, but this has been completely fine.
Hopefully I'll be gone by this point. This is not a world I want to live in. Feels like Bladerunner 2049.
But, I think leased compute has always made the most sense for sporadic users like myself.
It's not perfect, but I anyway had the computer for other reasons and may need it for the other reasons again after which I would need to re-setup anything. Bazite default/w. SteamOS UI install + a minor number of setting changes (1) and a login to steam and it's ready to go again. Can't complain. Just which the SteamOS UI version would also do the same background download+apply of updates the main versions or distros like Fedora Silverblue do.
While not quite yet console experience, for many games it really is not "that" far away. (For some other games very much very far away, don't expect any competitive PvP games or games with real world money related online economy working. To some degree it's not even about anti-cheat not working on Linux. It's about many such games struggling making it work on Windows and having no room to bother with another platform, and dishonest managers potentially using "all Linux fault" as an excuse when the anti-cheating strategy failed on Windows where most of their players where... (happened before))
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(1): Mainly SteamOS UI is made for Handhelds and as such has some bad defaults for more powerful desktops (which likely will change soon). I'm only couch gaming on it, hence close to everything else just stays with default settings. Sure it's not fancy customized Linux or most maximal privacy preserving Linux. But it's in the "good enough" area of settings, privacy and similar, which Windows in many aspects isn't anymore. No fighting windows forcing things down your throat, weather it's Copilot, the nasty way it tries to deceive you into using it's online drive, etc.
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Oh and as minor tip: You can majorly micro optimize kernels, schedulers, drivers etc. If you don't need to, then don't bother. That is where unexpected perf. regressions, issues after updates etc. come in. Like you still find reports about Bazzite being slower then windows due to them having don that in the past and having run into an unexpected perf. regression on some hardware without realizing. I mean it is fun to tinker. But I'm in the "please mostly just work" age by now.
However, the use case under discussion touches on things like handling kernel-level anti-cheat requirements, which is exactly the kind of place where I'd expect you to get in trouble trying to jigger around with virtual machines. Even before that point, I get the general feeling games and game platforms can get tetchy when you're not on Real Recognizable Hardware.
That’s what I’m personally banking on. I think anyone with the resources to bypass these would first just use a rubber hose.
As for Secure Boot, maybe? I haven't thought through how that would help in this context, but my instinct is to ask how you'd do the binding between “I intend to boot Y instead of X” and “only accept the boot signature for Y instead of X”, so that malware can't try to unexpectedly substitute X. It feels like there's probably places for attackers to mess around here unless you're very careful.
You don't need any major resources to exploit systems these days in this manner, especially with AI in the mix.
BIOS is usually a SPI chip. It'd make sense to perhaps tie the write enable line so that it cannot be written to, unless jumpered.
It used to be a thing motherboards did. A BIOS flash enable jumper.
They kept the CMOS reset one, but for some reason got rid of the flash write enable.
If by "DOS" you're specifically referring to shell (COMMAND.COM), then yes, it didn't know or care about the mouse. But MS introduced DOSSHELL (in '88), which had mouse support (along with other later core applications such as EDIT.COM), and of course, there were other thirdparty shells too (like Norton Commander) which also had mouse support.
But if by "DOS" you're specifically referring to the kernel (MSDOS.SYS), then you may be surprised to know that even the Windows kernel (NTOSKRNL.EXE) doesn't know or care about the mouse - this is handled by other bits like mouclass.sys and win32k.sys.
Be the change the market needs to see to adjust development practices.
Valve is doing their part. I get playing on Windows when there are mods, but if you can play a new game vanilla at launch on Linux - do it. It shows demand.
Been dual booting for >20 years now. It's nice that some games work on Linux pretty well these days, and of course I had fun messing with Wine manually to get some stuff to work decades ago. But it really doesn't bother me too much to reboot when switching between gaming and literally anything else.
Apparently you can get a mobo with switchable BIOS config (or was it just a switchable SSD?) so the OS didn't even know that there's a second OS around. If there's no connection of the other OS then MS can't break it [as easily]!
IMO it must be malicious, because otherwise it would be caught with remedial testing. I can't believe MS don't include dual boot setups in their testing.
The functionality is present on my new Lenovo laptop, various generations of HP elite/pro books/desks, old asus mobo and newer cheap gigabyte mobo, 7th gen intel nuc.
This description doesn't really do it justice. ~75% of top 100 games work well out of the box/with minimal tinkering according to https://www.protondb.com/dashboard (it varies a bit based on the rating scale)
Many work perfectly and many work even better than they do on Windows. Valve's work really changed the game over the past few years.
oh man, do I have some really bad news for you: