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> discussing currently relevant games We shun most of this as faddish and low quality. Fortnite and Battlefield are replaced with OpenMW and Veloran. If you'r

> discussing currently relevant games We shun most of this as faddish and low quality. Fortnite and Battlefield are replaced with OpenMW and Veloran. If you're doing things blindly in Linux, there's no point. The value is in understanding and leveraging that understanding to achieve your goals. In many ways, this isn't about Linux at all. It's about parenting.

eptcyka 1y ago
At the time it was a GTA title. Regardless, the Linux alternatives are useless, there is no alternative to the socially agreed upon phenomena, the child can either participate pr they cannot. The exclusion is not necessarily a bad thing, but you end up having the child swim upstream a bit.
- em-bee 1y ago
  that's fair. unfortunately windows has changed so much since that time that the downsides of allowing kids to use it are much worse now than they were even 10 years ago.
- coffeebeqn 1y ago
  That’s not really the case in 2025. Proton is very good
- testdelacc1 1y ago
  All games run on Linux in 2025 except multiplayer titles that want to install kernel level anti cheat.
  - eptcyka 1y ago
    Does Fortnite? I remember finishing hl2 on dx level 7, and then trying the same with ep1 and ep2. Those games are a lot harder when half the physics objects are not rendered. Do not get me wrong - I run Linux on all of my personal machines today, I play games on them, I know what's the state of gaming on Linux. I also know that every now and then I will get to at the very least read some logs to figure out what's going wrong, e.g. the native port of Civ VI was looking for a version of openssl whose time had passed. Further, relying on Wine/Proton inherently means you will always lag behind the bleeding edge in terms of DX APIs, as wine/mesa people need to catch up to implement them. Even worse if it is not related to graphics,e.g. as the spatial audio APIs don't have an open source analogue that is ferociously trying to keep up with feature parity. And of course we also have kernel level anti-cheat. I have immense respect for everyone who is involved in making games (and windows software in general) work on Linux. But there will always be stumbling blocks when you are playing 2nd fiddle, and you've not been given the sheets. And nobody told you where the gig is happening.
    - NekkoDroid 1y ago
      > Does Fortnite? That falls under the "multiplayer titles that want to install kernel level anti cheat"
    - OccamsMirror 1y ago
      Fortnite will work with Heroic Games Launcher. Though I believe you may run a higher risk than normal of being banned by Epic for cheating. So try not to be too good.
      - thetoon 1y ago
        It does work in Chrome with Amazon Luna, IIRC.
scott_w 1y ago
> If you're doing things blindly in Linux, there's no point. The value is in understanding and leveraging that understanding to achieve your goals. I don’t know about that. Just to be upfront: I’m not advocating putting your kids through this because I think they have to have that motivation for themselves to really benefit. However, I basically did blindly follow guides to try and get things working without fully understanding what I was doing. Over time, things stick and I’m able to look under the surface and get a better understanding and better solve the problem I’m facing. Hell, any “Learn X Language” book works like this! There’s always boilerplate that you need to kinda skip over for a while just so you can get a running program. Hell, I’m leaning Rust and I’m using #[] “decorators” and I couldn’t tell you exactly what they’re doing!
himeexcelanta 1y ago
I’m sure you also give out raisins and sugar free mints at Halloween too.
- rpdillon 1y ago
  We don't get many kids coming to the house on Halloween. Only two this year. We buy this big bag of candy at Costco, and we always end up with a lot of extra, and my kids end up sitting and eating it. Not great.
haunter 1y ago
>We shun most of this as faddish and low quality. Fortnite and Battlefield are replaced with OpenMW and Veloran. My parents didn't let me read Song of Ice and Fire Harry Potter (and do a lot of other contemporary culture things) when I was younger because they said they are pop culture fad. Only haute culture literature in this household! I've had a good childhood but I also missed out on a lot of good things because parenting decisions like this. And Fortnite is actually an awesome game, it's the mugen we were all dreaming for.
testdelacc1 1y ago
The point isn’t to play the best “non-faddish” games. It’s to play what’s in the zeitgeist and form bonds with people their own age. I’m so glad my parents didn’t override my decisions on literature or video games or TV shows. I watched anime then, my parents didn’t get it, and that’s perfectly fine. I continue to enjoy it now. If they had made me adopt their mindset of “anime = fad” or “anime = cartoon = childish” I’d have been worse off. Instead of enjoying masterpieces like Frieren I’d be snobbishly thinking about what a fad it is.
- rpdillon 1y ago
  We avoid fads because they come and go too quickly. My kids connect with their friends on games that are more enduring, like the From Software titles.
  - bossyTeacher 1y ago
    I feel so sorry for your kids. They deserve a better parent. Remember: your kids are NOT you and they DESERVE to have agency in their lives EVEN if it goes against your interests and desires.
    - graemep 1y ago
      That is such a sweeping statement. Part of what a parent does is guides kids to good decisions, and protect them from the consequences of bad ones. They need agency, and more as they get older, but you do not let them just do what you want.
    - rpdillon 1y ago
      My job is to guide them and use my judgment where their judgment is poor. That is intrinsic in the nature of parenting. Thank you for the guidance though. I understand that you feel strongly and that you hope my kids can be happy even though they're stuck with me as a parent. I do too!
  - anvuong 1y ago
    Enduring based on what metrics? Fornite is now an 8-year old massively (and still is) successful game. And the Battlefield series is actually 7 years older than the Souls series if you count from Demon's Souls. Comparing these 3 games is even more absurd because they are from entirely different genres, and they are not mutually exclusive, one can enjoy more than one genre. I agree with other commenters in here, I feel sorry for your kids and thankful that my parents didn't treat me like what you are doing with your kids now.
hamdingers 1y ago
> We shun most of this as faddish and low quality. This is almost word for word the same way my parents talked about Harry Potter and Pokemon when I was feeling alienated in school for only being allowed to read religious books for entertainment. It leads to some pretty strong resentment, if that's the kind of thing you care about.
- rpdillon 1y ago
  My boys are sitting and reading through this with me as I make comments. They are very surprised by the resentment expressed by many of the comments. My eldest read your comment and said that Battlefield and Fortnite are trash because of the multiplayer component that leads to gameplay that's low quality. He doesn't feel this way about Elden Ring, for example. In short, we exercise judgment.
  - hamdingers 1y ago
    What does that even mean? How can we trust your kid's judgement of games they're not allowed to play? When I was a kid I parroted my parents opinions about Harry Potter books being a pathway to practicing witchcraft. Now in hindsight I recognize those weren't so much my opinions as they were a performance to get my parents approval. To be clear I'm not psychoanalyzing your kids (not liking multiplayer is rational), I'm sharing my own related experience.
    - j45 1y ago
      The witchcraft angle as expressed included a personal interpretation that included being righteous towards and at the expense of others externally, to validate one's self internally. It's not the child's fault what they recieve without question and have to do the work to undo. In the case of judgement, we can pick something simple like TV shows. A parent can speak to their kids about the addictive quality of some shows that leave them upset when turned off, vs 15 minutes of something that didn't and have them start to be aware of the difference, and how they seem to get bored of both and want to go back to the real world. Doing that long before it's needed, allows the development of awareness, which as long as it's modeled by the parents, leaves the home as the important teacher of navigating the world, not the households of friends and teachers alone.
tietjens 1y ago
This comment is epically pretentious, but I agree that kids shouldn’t be playing online games designed as skinner boxes to increase playtime and financial spend. Makes kids miss out because everyone is playing them? Eh, too bad. They gotta wait for their late teens, imho.
- rpdillon 1y ago
  I don't see the pretension. We're simply making decisions about how to spend our time. Many times that doesn't align with what the majority of people like to spend their time doing. That's fine.
markus_zhang 1y ago
Just curious how did you persuade them? From what I see kids usually want to play whatever other kids play, like TikTok or Roblox or Fortnite.
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
> If you're doing things blindly in Linux, there's no point I digress. Everyone has to start somewhere and not everything has to have a point in the start When I started using linux, I got so fascinated by open source software that I would just search for software/software types and searched open source alternative to X and go to alternativeto or others and try it out etc. I used to copy paste dnf commands in the start and I still remember that phase. I think I learnt linux from myself and have given challenges along the way and I feel like there are things that I have still done blindly along the way (building linux isos) But the fact was that I still felt proud that I was atleast able to replicate the commands and able to have some familiarity with the process. I feel like if I wanted to able to know more about xorriso and cpio to a deeper degree to understand what wizard magic commands I was running to building custom linux iso s etc. Now I don't know about fortnite etc., I am a kid but surprisingly games don't interest me that much, I am way more in my movies / tv shows (just ended dexter s8) right now. There is some alienated feelings when people online my age mention the games they play but I think that games on linux are genuinely great support from what I know and my pc doesn't have anything beyond integrated gpu so yeah my cousins didn't want me to play much games and so they didn't buy a good gpu during the pc and I think they did succeed in this. Its complicated to how I feel the situation or even let alone think how I would even try to approach this situation if or when I become a parent myself. Honestly, parenting can be a bit hard but I still don't know if you should shun something that you think is faddish or low quality partially because I think that the best thing you could do (imo) is educate them on the positives on linux and how they might outweigh the benefits of fortnite in the short to long term in a fun manner. Its um complicated and there is definitely a feeling inside me on that i do some incredibly niche things which would be so complicated to explain to someone my age in my proximity. I think there is only one or two of my friends who actually know even 1% of the stuff that I do in linux (one of them had installed hyprland because of me haha)

eptcyka 1y ago

At the time it was a GTA title. Regardless, the Linux alternatives are useless, there is no alternative to the socially agreed upon phenomena, the child can either participate pr they cannot. The exclusion is not necessarily a bad thing, but you end up having the child swim upstream a bit.

em-bee 1y ago
that's fair. unfortunately windows has changed so much since that time that the downsides of allowing kids to use it are much worse now than they were even 10 years ago.
coffeebeqn 1y ago
That’s not really the case in 2025. Proton is very good
testdelacc1 1y ago
All games run on Linux in 2025 except multiplayer titles that want to install kernel level anti cheat.
- eptcyka 1y ago
  Does Fortnite? I remember finishing hl2 on dx level 7, and then trying the same with ep1 and ep2. Those games are a lot harder when half the physics objects are not rendered. Do not get me wrong - I run Linux on all of my personal machines today, I play games on them, I know what's the state of gaming on Linux. I also know that every now and then I will get to at the very least read some logs to figure out what's going wrong, e.g. the native port of Civ VI was looking for a version of openssl whose time had passed. Further, relying on Wine/Proton inherently means you will always lag behind the bleeding edge in terms of DX APIs, as wine/mesa people need to catch up to implement them. Even worse if it is not related to graphics,e.g. as the spatial audio APIs don't have an open source analogue that is ferociously trying to keep up with feature parity. And of course we also have kernel level anti-cheat. I have immense respect for everyone who is involved in making games (and windows software in general) work on Linux. But there will always be stumbling blocks when you are playing 2nd fiddle, and you've not been given the sheets. And nobody told you where the gig is happening.
  - NekkoDroid 1y ago
    > Does Fortnite? That falls under the "multiplayer titles that want to install kernel level anti cheat"
  - OccamsMirror 1y ago
    Fortnite will work with Heroic Games Launcher. Though I believe you may run a higher risk than normal of being banned by Epic for cheating. So try not to be too good.
    - thetoon 1y ago
      It does work in Chrome with Amazon Luna, IIRC.

scott_w 1y ago

> If you're doing things blindly in Linux, there's no point. The value is in understanding and leveraging that understanding to achieve your goals. I don’t know about that. Just to be upfront: I’m not advocating putting your kids through this because I think they have to have that motivation for themselves to really benefit. However, I basically did blindly follow guides to try and get things working without fully understanding what I was doing. Over time, things stick and I’m able to look under the surface and get a better understanding and better solve the problem I’m facing. Hell, any “Learn X Language” book works like this! There’s always boilerplate that you need to kinda skip over for a while just so you can get a running program. Hell, I’m leaning Rust and I’m using #[] “decorators” and I couldn’t tell you exactly what they’re doing!

himeexcelanta 1y ago

I’m sure you also give out raisins and sugar free mints at Halloween too.

rpdillon 1y ago
We don't get many kids coming to the house on Halloween. Only two this year. We buy this big bag of candy at Costco, and we always end up with a lot of extra, and my kids end up sitting and eating it. Not great.

haunter 1y ago

>We shun most of this as faddish and low quality. Fortnite and Battlefield are replaced with OpenMW and Veloran. My parents didn't let me read Song of Ice and Fire Harry Potter (and do a lot of other contemporary culture things) when I was younger because they said they are pop culture fad. Only haute culture literature in this household! I've had a good childhood but I also missed out on a lot of good things because parenting decisions like this. And Fortnite is actually an awesome game, it's the mugen we were all dreaming for.

testdelacc1 1y ago

The point isn’t to play the best “non-faddish” games. It’s to play what’s in the zeitgeist and form bonds with people their own age. I’m so glad my parents didn’t override my decisions on literature or video games or TV shows. I watched anime then, my parents didn’t get it, and that’s perfectly fine. I continue to enjoy it now. If they had made me adopt their mindset of “anime = fad” or “anime = cartoon = childish” I’d have been worse off. Instead of enjoying masterpieces like Frieren I’d be snobbishly thinking about what a fad it is.

rpdillon 1y ago
We avoid fads because they come and go too quickly. My kids connect with their friends on games that are more enduring, like the From Software titles.
- bossyTeacher 1y ago
  I feel so sorry for your kids. They deserve a better parent. Remember: your kids are NOT you and they DESERVE to have agency in their lives EVEN if it goes against your interests and desires.
  - graemep 1y ago
    That is such a sweeping statement. Part of what a parent does is guides kids to good decisions, and protect them from the consequences of bad ones. They need agency, and more as they get older, but you do not let them just do what you want.
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    My job is to guide them and use my judgment where their judgment is poor. That is intrinsic in the nature of parenting. Thank you for the guidance though. I understand that you feel strongly and that you hope my kids can be happy even though they're stuck with me as a parent. I do too!
- anvuong 1y ago
  Enduring based on what metrics? Fornite is now an 8-year old massively (and still is) successful game. And the Battlefield series is actually 7 years older than the Souls series if you count from Demon's Souls. Comparing these 3 games is even more absurd because they are from entirely different genres, and they are not mutually exclusive, one can enjoy more than one genre. I agree with other commenters in here, I feel sorry for your kids and thankful that my parents didn't treat me like what you are doing with your kids now.

hamdingers 1y ago

> We shun most of this as faddish and low quality. This is almost word for word the same way my parents talked about Harry Potter and Pokemon when I was feeling alienated in school for only being allowed to read religious books for entertainment. It leads to some pretty strong resentment, if that's the kind of thing you care about.

rpdillon 1y ago
My boys are sitting and reading through this with me as I make comments. They are very surprised by the resentment expressed by many of the comments. My eldest read your comment and said that Battlefield and Fortnite are trash because of the multiplayer component that leads to gameplay that's low quality. He doesn't feel this way about Elden Ring, for example. In short, we exercise judgment.
- hamdingers 1y ago
  What does that even mean? How can we trust your kid's judgement of games they're not allowed to play? When I was a kid I parroted my parents opinions about Harry Potter books being a pathway to practicing witchcraft. Now in hindsight I recognize those weren't so much my opinions as they were a performance to get my parents approval. To be clear I'm not psychoanalyzing your kids (not liking multiplayer is rational), I'm sharing my own related experience.
  - j45 1y ago
    The witchcraft angle as expressed included a personal interpretation that included being righteous towards and at the expense of others externally, to validate one's self internally. It's not the child's fault what they recieve without question and have to do the work to undo. In the case of judgement, we can pick something simple like TV shows. A parent can speak to their kids about the addictive quality of some shows that leave them upset when turned off, vs 15 minutes of something that didn't and have them start to be aware of the difference, and how they seem to get bored of both and want to go back to the real world. Doing that long before it's needed, allows the development of awareness, which as long as it's modeled by the parents, leaves the home as the important teacher of navigating the world, not the households of friends and teachers alone.

tietjens 1y ago

This comment is epically pretentious, but I agree that kids shouldn’t be playing online games designed as skinner boxes to increase playtime and financial spend. Makes kids miss out because everyone is playing them? Eh, too bad. They gotta wait for their late teens, imho.

rpdillon 1y ago
I don't see the pretension. We're simply making decisions about how to spend our time. Many times that doesn't align with what the majority of people like to spend their time doing. That's fine.

markus_zhang 1y ago

Just curious how did you persuade them? From what I see kids usually want to play whatever other kids play, like TikTok or Roblox or Fortnite.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago

> If you're doing things blindly in Linux, there's no point I digress. Everyone has to start somewhere and not everything has to have a point in the start When I started using linux, I got so fascinated by open source software that I would just search for software/software types and searched open source alternative to X and go to alternativeto or others and try it out etc. I used to copy paste dnf commands in the start and I still remember that phase. I think I learnt linux from myself and have given challenges along the way and I feel like there are things that I have still done blindly along the way (building linux isos) But the fact was that I still felt proud that I was atleast able to replicate the commands and able to have some familiarity with the process. I feel like if I wanted to able to know more about xorriso and cpio to a deeper degree to understand what wizard magic commands I was running to building custom linux iso s etc. Now I don't know about fortnite etc., I am a kid but surprisingly games don't interest me that much, I am way more in my movies / tv shows (just ended dexter s8) right now. There is some alienated feelings when people online my age mention the games they play but I think that games on linux are genuinely great support from what I know and my pc doesn't have anything beyond integrated gpu so yeah my cousins didn't want me to play much games and so they didn't buy a good gpu during the pc and I think they did succeed in this. Its complicated to how I feel the situation or even let alone think how I would even try to approach this situation if or when I become a parent myself. Honestly, parenting can be a bit hard but I still don't know if you should shun something that you think is faddish or low quality partially because I think that the best thing you could do (imo) is educate them on the positives on linux and how they might outweigh the benefits of fortnite in the short to long term in a fun manner. Its um complicated and there is definitely a feeling inside me on that i do some incredibly niche things which would be so complicated to explain to someone my age in my proximity. I think there is only one or two of my friends who actually know even 1% of the stuff that I do in linux (one of them had installed hyprland because of me haha)