3 ms·
> Web devs My big gripe with websites is when they break my standard 'flow' of opening links in a new tab to view later, or my 'flow' of web use in general. Fo
by gigaflop 5y ago
> Web devs
My big gripe with websites is when they break my standard 'flow' of opening links in a new tab to view later, or my 'flow' of web use in general. For years upon years, I'm taught by experience that clicking a link should either replace my current window or open a new one, and that middle-clicking will ignore that, opening the linked content in a separate tab.
Great! I can do a (cognitive) lazy-load and effectively finish my first train of thought before further narrowing my field of focus.
Now, when searching on Google Maps for restaurants in an area (and plenty of other sites for other purposes), middle click does nothing (aside from engaging the scroll thing that I never use). I must follow Google's flow of clicking, being taken to a new tab, and returning to my original one in order to complete my original task, since I also can't just rightclick->open in new tab.
All this, on an element that is made to look like a hyperlink, but not actually act like one. It's just some cheap-feeling .js SPA that acts more like an app than a website, which makes me do extra work to accomplish a given task.
> Updates
I totally understand wanting security patches to be made available at high speed and wide breadth, and if Windows Update spun off security updates into some sort of module for Windows Defender, I'd be much more willing to accept the nags to update. However, I don't think it's in MS's interest to do so, as that would mean less auto-installed telemetry, and less MS-beneficial default settings being auto-applied or re-applied upon update, less people 'accidentally' defaulted back to Edge and Bing.
We're also in a different internet ecosystem than the XP days. Software is often built to expect constant connectivity, or be entirely reliant on it.
A somewhat relevant example is how PC versions of Call of Duty dropped support for dedicated servers after Modern Warfare (One or two more releases had dedicated servers, but I can't be bothered to remember which). My clan from those days ran a Hardcore-mode Search and Destroy server, and we were able to form and govern our own community, because we effectively 'owned' an instance of the game server, and had control over it.
Nowadays, you hit quick-play, drop in, and everyone is just as unimportant and anonymous as the next person. When the main servers are offline, so are you, because the lobbies are yet-another-instance of some VM or server software hosted in the cloud by the company. The game exists as a 'Live Service', which just means that they're going to drip out some purchasable content and 'season passes' for bundles of the dripped content.
I'll be rebuilding pretty much my whole PC in the next 2 or 3 years, since everything in it is getting old (and a GTX 1080 isn't as good as it used to be), and Linux will be my main OS since I play much fewer games anyways. Windows will be for when I just need DirectX and whatever proprietary DRM/Anticheat spyware for my software to be usable, and I'll practice ripping out telemetry from the OS when I get bored.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y agoI like SPAs when they're done right. Google Maps has some hiccups, but overall I like the way it works. Did you ever use MapQuest in the early '00s? Having to do a full page load to move your view was awful I've considered running Windows only as a shell for running a Linux VM (that I would actually do my daily driving in) and Windows-only games, but I don't know how well that would work. How good is GPU acceleration in a VM is you're not using PCI-E pass-through? I'd also worry about the RAM requirements to make that work well, as I'd effectively be splitting my RAM in half, though I was planning on going to 64 GB on my next upgrade anyways.
- gigaflop 5y agoKey phrase, "when they're done right" :) GMaps is good when I'm using it for navigation, but exploration is clearly not its intent, which is probably why I take so much issue with it. My utility company seems to use an SPA for their portal, and I've never had an issue with it, since everything I need it to do is readily accessible. I've yet to try setting up GPU or PCIe passthrough, but I imagine that they wouldn't take up too much overhead on their own. It isn't 1:1 comparable to your situation, but Linus Tech Tips has a few videos titled something like "X gamers on 1 machine", which shows it's doable. Having a guest OS in a VM would likely be the bigger performance bottleneck (with extra input lag), and I'm pretty sure that some anticheat software detects and discriminates against being run in a VM. I'd sooner try to get a game in a working state on the Linux OS with Proton or Wine, and drop down to installing on Windows if it fails or gets too fussy.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago> I'm pretty sure that some anticheat software detects and discriminates against being run in a VM I've always thought that the ability for a program to detect that it's in a VM is a failure of the hypervisor. My main goal was really to just avoid having to reboot my system and switch to Windows any time I wanted to play a game that only worked in Windows.