so like.

[bovaz@misskey.social]

@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place what I used to have at work was a remote azure instance running Windows, where I had VS and all the development stuff. Then they decided they'd rather replace dev laptops more frequently, so we are back to having everything on our machines.

[0x0961h@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eniko Oh definitely. From what I see "verification" in Linux so far is just "how old are you" "i'm 40000 years old" "thank you, enjoy your system"

Plus you can always download pre-ageverif ISO of a system

[webbop@tech.lgbt]

@0x0961h @eniko unfortunately I see why it's there (to not be illegal), glad that it does bare minimum tho, also, I have never gotten Fedora to ask for my age (hopefully never)

[robinadams@mathstodon.xyz]

@eniko @deshipu The EU system... I have mixed feelings about. I know a few of the researchers who contributed to the working group papers, and they're good people, concerned and even activists about privacy. (Bart Jacobs in the Netherlands is fucking awesome.)

There was an argument around 2022 "We should get an open source EU-wide privacy-protecting ID system and quick, because Apple and Google are sure as fuck going to do their own and if we don't, those will become the de facto standards."

At least in the early design it was supposed to preserve privacy as much as possible. Like, you can make it give a zero-knowledge proof of the boolean "Is this person over 18? Yes or no." without revealing any more information (Name, date of birth, age in years, etc.) The user can know what information the service is getting from it.

And it's open source so everyone can check that the software does indeed preserve privacy the way it should.

At least those were the design criteria going in. I need to check if they became realised.

I don't know, maybe I'm being naive, but overall, I'm glad the EU did this. They're the only Thing who could be big enough and willing enough to make sure a solution like this exists and enough services in the EU offer it as an option alongside just Apple, Google and Palantir that I can hopefully get away without one of the evil companies getting my ID.

And yeah, depressing that it came to this, but given the options in the world atm, I'm glad I'm living in the EU right now.

[jibsaram@68k.social]

@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place I'm not sure if it would work for your needs, but could JetBrains Rider be an alternative to consider? If it could be a viable alternative for you, it could help set you free from Windows, or at least give you the option to switch later if you wanted to. I'm very much biased here, but I wouldn't want to wish Windows lock-in upon my worst enemy, so I'm just really hopeful there's a possible path forward/out here

[bigkrimpin@mstdn.party]

@eniko yes and more so than i want to admit. i've met so many people online through discord servers and whatnot, i'm afraid that's not going to be possible in a few months. right now i'm waiting for fluxer to release their self-hostable version which i'm going to move my server to and hope everyone moves along with me. but damn, is it ever dire that we have to resort to shit like self-hosting our chat platforms...

[eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@jibsaram their free licenses do not cover commercial use and i would need their C# and their C/C++ one and i just don't have that kinda cash to burn

[krishean@tech.lgbt]

@eniko @bovaz this is my solution (vs2022 in a win10 vm on linux), although i only use the build tools so i can't really give a proper review of how the graphical interface works. i did install community edition at one point to generate an example/template project and from what i remember performance was ok, not fantastic but it got what i needed done

[eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@krishean @bovaz yeah but you probably wouldn't wanna run the perf profile for a game in the VM right?

[bovaz@misskey.social]

@krishean@tech.lgbt @eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place I don't know. Right now I'm editing stuff and debugging in a solution opened in VS2022, while I have another solution open in VS2022 as a reference for some functionality, and yet another in VS2026 as reference for a separate functionality. I opened the frontend solution in vscode.
Last time I tried something like this in a vm I had to force close it and find a different way.

[haijo7@snac.haijo.eu]

@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place you could run an offline VM with a minimal windows install on linux. No updates or telemetry, but you should be able to use visual studio. If you want to compile code for windows on a linux system without a vm, you can also use mingw

[jibsaram@68k.social]

@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place ah yes. Unless I'm mistaken all that should be included in their Rider subscription, but I understand that needing to commit to the ~$19/mo plan can be challenging. I sure hope you'll find a way to be happy with your technical environment. I'm very glad I made the full-time switch to Linux 5/6 years ago, even though in my case I was coming from macOS. I'll keep my fingers crossed you'll be able to find a way to do it too.

[witchgirls@woof.tech]

@eniko So as someone who's tried making windows games on a VM I can tell you that you definitely need a spare GPU to use *only* for the Windows VM -- but it can be a regular/bad one. I had mine on a super old RX 550.

Setting the VM up is an absolute pain in the ass, but once it's done it's done and it "just works". You'll also need something like Looking Glass for you to be able to access the VM in a window, or if you have a second monitor you can just make it output to that.

If you do that + give the VM enough cores and RAM, the performance should theoretically be only mildly worse than native. It was good enough for me at least.

But yeah, it's definitely something that'd take an entire weekend to get fully working correctly and with the least amount of pain points possible...

[terral@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eniko I just made the jump on my main desktop this weekend after using Linux mostly on laptops and servers and stuff. There's a lot of relief from no longer feeling entirely at the mercy of Microsoft's random whims and desires

[eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@Haijo7 have some serious concerns about performance when doing this while developing video games

[krishean@tech.lgbt]

@eniko @bovaz i build things like OpenSSL, Curl, and GnuCOBOL for windows in the vm, but those are all cli tools. i have built a few things like GZDoom, but since i don't have pcie passthrough set up and most opengl or (any) vulkan games won't run in a vm i can't test them in it

[foxis@social.foxis.dev]

@eniko I've had good luck with Linux and using Rider instead,plus all the dotnet click tooling works pretty well on Linux. Not perfect, but works well

[tekhedd@byteheaven.net]

@eniko @jibsaram Bummer, because if you have budget, Rider is unbeatable... But, yes, budget. For personal use there's a lot of VIM in my life.

I tried all the OSS IDEs a couple years ago, and I now use vim. (netbeans for java) Says it all really.

[beaiouns@is.nota.live]

@eniko more cranky than depressed here, but it did remind me to become flagrantly noncompliant: https://agelesslinux.org/download.html

[novemdecimal@sunny.garden]

@eniko

i'm on the same boat as you, hearing the news about more and more countries passing age verification have been making me feel hopeless, and I ended up setting up my filters on Mastodon and banning myself from watching news youtubers because of it

the thing is, I also can't go completely offline either, my internet is kind of my lifeline as I wasn't able to make any IRL friends in school, so I rely a lot on Discord for social interaction, I'm essentially a social outcast

2026 has been the wildest year in this decade and might even be worse than 2020 for me, it has also been the roughest year on my mental health because of shit like this

i'm hoping maybe the fediverse and decentralization will save us but i think this is just copium, so