3 KiB
| author | authorTwitter | desc | image | keywords | lang | title |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Youwen Wu | @youwen | why we can't have nice things | ./images/i-hate-you-microsoft-torvalds.jpg | microsoft, linux, windows, trash software | en | i hate you microsoft |
two terrible mistakes
recently i decided to try valorant again after a 6 month hiatus (mistake 1). this, of course, meant rebooting into my slowly dying windows OS that remained dual booted and barely touched (mistake 2). i exclusively use windows for gaming now as it's the last frontier that linux hasn't conquered. this has actually been a great productivity boost for me as windows is so terrible that i don't even want to boot it just for games.
spoiled by linux
at the risk of sounding too much like i have a neckbeard and fedora, linux truly helped me enjoy computers again, after macOS and windows took that from me. following a brief period of time configuring hyprland, i really felt comfortable with my desktop. i could switch around desktops, launch applications, and shuffle windows like an extension of my mind. without all of the baby-proofing and bloat designed for "casual users", everything was instantly snappy and responsive (even compared to apple's famous UIs).
immediately upon booting back into windows and being greeted with the ridiculous ad billboard login screen, i immediately remembered why i despised it. even the login screen was janky when i seemed to overload it with quick inputs. the desktop stayed barely responsive for several seconds after and every single ui action seemed to require me to slow down and walk it through each step, lest it fail and refuse to register inputs altogether. it's astonishing how the biggest companies seem to make the most terrible sh*t.
but this isn't a post comparing linux and windows
linux vs windows has been done to death, so i won't say more. the point of this post is to vent my frustration with the most basic things being so hard to fix on windows.
the first thing that happened when i tried to play valorant was a vanguard (their ring 0 malware anti-cheat) error telling me that i needed to enable "secure boot", whatever that did. i vaguely remember having to disable that to get GRUB and arch to work. according to google, it basically forces you to sign all of your efi boot partitions for dubious security benefits -- in other words, make it harder to install free operating systems.
ok, fine. i'll just re-enable this thing. surely it can't be that hard?
the glorious arch linux wiki of course had an entire page dedicated to enabling secure boot. while it was fairly straightforward, i ended up lost in what i call "linux limbo", and so after an hour of trying, i gave up.
linux limbo: a stage of troubleshooting something on linux where every command seems to succeed, yet nothing actually works, and you're left without an error log to work with.
whatever, i'll just enable secure boot, then boot directly into windows and bypass GRUB.