gila [any, any]

Rather than having a bunch of cops on patrol watching for people breaking the road rules and pulling those people over and fining them; in China there are mostly just lots of cameras. If you’re caught breaking the law on camera too many times then they’ll come to find you and take your licence away.

From there the thought process is, this is more insidious because of spooky cameras. And people do a thought experiment from there about “what other behaviour are they monitoring / what other penalties could possibly be imposed?” and pretend what they imagined is reality, evidenced by a kernel of truth. That authorities enforce road rules via camera surveillance in many countries isn’t considered because, y’know, sinophobia.

ShadPS4 is great, runs on any steam deck-tier PC

It’s only quite recently that some countries have begun to start trading oil in yuan. It’s certainly not easy to circumvent the petrodollar system that’s been in place since WW2. For one thing, the US will start bombing you.

This game was already in development for several years when chatgpt, stable diffusion etc first released. Which also makes this news one of the least surprising things I’ve read in years.

Many cracks rely on underlying mechanisms of Windows that end users don’t really need to think about. So if “better for piracy” is purely about ease of applying cracks and successfully executing them, Windows is definitely better. That doesn’t mean it offers the best possible experience though.

Any old-school cracks (anything that isn’t a hypervisor bypass for games with denuvo, which isn’t recommended for most users anyway) will run on Linux, with varying levels of required tinkering. A lot of the time you can just add a cracked game or app to steam and run it there, but sometimes it isn’t quite that simple. It depends entirely on the game/app and how the crack functions.

If you’re willing to learn the tinkering part, it’s good knowledge to have and gives you more flexibility over how software/games are run. This is particularly useful for mid-tier machines that can’t max out all settings on all games, for example with forcing specific resolutions, display modes, virtual displays, upscaler presets, global upscaling, gamepad config.

Given there are very few roadblocks with Linux I don’t think there is an OS that is “best for piracy”, rather the best choice depends on user preferences and expectations. Certainly if your top priority is the least amount of effort to get things running, choose Windows. But you’d also need to accept dealing with Microsoft’s bullshit, and forego performance improvements you’d potentially get with Linux.

broadly, gain flexibility, lose familiarity. just try it and see.

one thing i’ll spell out, you’ve likely never had to consider the logic by which windows loads dll versions. essentially, if you put a modified dll file in the same folder as an executable, when the executable calls for it that modified dll will be loaded instead of the system’s builtin version. game and software cracks sometimes rely on this principle. but on linux via wine/proton, that isn’t the case. so you’ll need to configure wine/proton to do a “dll override” in some cases (i.e when your game/software crack utilizes a modified dll). the process is pretty straight-forward, the main thing is knowing you need to do it.

One of the reasons i love noctalia shell, settings gui has a slider for per-pixel global adjustment

Lineage is privacy focused, not security focused (other than security through obscurity etc). Graphene is more secure but may require tinkering for NFC payment / banking. Graphene is partnering with Motorola for their new phones, but old/current Motorola phones won’t be compatible. IMO best bet for daily driver is a used/refurb older pixel or pixel A, like pixel 6a or pixel 7a are sub-$200 even brand new sometimes. e/os is another option but I haven’t used it (don’t have compatible device) so can’t comment on it.

Yeah it’s a prequel though, if the rumours about it being a Faye game are true

“goddess of war” isn’t what they’re going for. she’s a regular human

ragnarok at least has some poc representation