Comment by rpdillon
2 days ago
> 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.
> 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.
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.
It sounds like the difference may be— if your boys are able to make the comparison— that you also did not forbid them from those games? That would explain some of the difference from resentment in these areas that is often born from the material being banned. That leads to social isolation, because multiplayer w/ people you know is really not so much about the game mechanics compared to the shared social experience.
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Just to be clear, I don’t think your parenting decisions here are harmful, and I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for the centimeter thick gentoo manual. My only plea is to acknowledge the downsides- and it might well be the case they are minimal. I wish you luck and patience in parenting.
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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.
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That's an opinion... All multiplayer games are bad.
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Limiting reading like that is extremely restrictive and unnecessary.
I do not think it can be compared to choice of OS where you have to choose one per machine (unless you dual boot or run VMs).
I am guessing when you say "religious books" you mean a narrow range of books approved of by a very narrow minded religious group. Not much mention of, say, scriptures and mystics using sexual imagery, for example. right? Of the many deeply religious major authors who did not fit that particular groups views?
If you follow the context of the thread it should be clear my reply is about GP prohibiting their kids from playing games with their friends, not the OS choice.
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>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.
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.
That’s not really the case in 2025. Proton is very good
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.
All games run on Linux in 2025 except multiplayer titles that want to install kernel level anti cheat.
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.
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> 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!
> 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)
I’m sure you also give out raisins and sugar free mints at Halloween too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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I was 100% on your side until you list FromSoftware games. As good as they are, they're a single-genre game developer that has a very narrow design and audience.
There's nothing more substantive or enduring about their games intrinsically, that's 100% you just projecting your own opinions about what games are 'enduring' onto your kids, and is not giving them the 'guidance' you seem to think it is.
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Again, that’s you substituting your judgement for theirs. There’s nothing wrong participating in a fad btw. Free time doesn’t need to be “productive” by only consuming something exalted like From Software.
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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.
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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.
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.