Maxy

You could try adding the __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATION=1 environment variable to the custom launch options, it improved performance and lessened bugyness for me.

You could also try to run the launcher with software rendering^1^ by editing ~/.paradoxlauncher/launcher-v2.2024.1/Paradox Launcher (you might have to change the version). Try adding --disable-gpu in the last line, between --no-sandbox and "$@"

You could also try disabling gamemoderun. It hasn't really improved performance in my experience, but has caused some bugs for me. It also muddies the logs.

^1^Shamelessly stolen from https://www.protondb.com/app/394360#ju-PgaxbiU

Could you give a bit more information about the hardware and software setup?

• which GPU do your desktop and laptop have? (from what I could find online, the A285 has an iGPU from 2019. I really hope this is wrong)
• wayland or X11?
• hoi4 native or via proton?

I believe I had similar issues on my Nvidia GPU, but resizing the window was a complete fix in my case.

If the installer is small enough (<650MB I believe), you can upload it to virustotal.com to have it be scanned by ~65 antivirus programs

Ah, it looks like we have a small misunderstanding. I thought you were talking about uncompressed video, which is enormous. This is only used in HDMI cables for example. A 1080p60 uncompressed video is 2.98Gbit/s, or about 1.22 terabytes per hour.

A remux is “uncompressed” in the sense that it isn’t recompressed, or in this case transcoded. A remux is still compressed, just to a lesser degree than a transcode. This means the files are indeed larger, but the quality is also better than transcodes.

To clarify the article’s confusing statement: they claim that remuxes can reduce size by throwing away some audio streams, while keeping the original video. This is true, but the video itself hasn’t gotten any smaller: you are simply throwing away other information.

Remuxes aren’t uncompressed, nor are they losslessly compressed. They’re just a 1:1 direct copy from some other medium (generally blu-rays or DVD’s).

Disclaimer: I have exactly 0 personal experience with eGPU’s.

According to the archwiki:

While some manual configuration (shown below) is needed for most modes of operation, Linux support for eGPUs is generally good.

Don’t forget they have amongst the highest obesity rates in Europe.

Yes, some minor formatting changes occur when opening a docx file in libreoffice. Hardly sounds like a deal breaker to me. And yes, you do get a pop-up when saving to docx in libreoffice (with the toggle to disable the pop-ups right there in the message). Microsoft office does the exact same thing when saving to an odt file though:

Once again, if you have to collaborate with office-users (and you cannot deal with the horror of having a different amount of space between the items), just use office online. How many times do I have to repeat myself?

Let me guess you’re someone who works in IT and never had a typical “office job” that includes spending 90% of your time writing reports and pushing spreadsheets around.

1. No, I do not work in IT, nor do I aspire to work in IT. I'm just a regular PC-user, who just so happens to have other opinions than you do. HOW DARE I?!?
2. Wouldn't IT-workers of all people know what the more optimized editors are?

This is why you don’t get it, you’re not the typical user of MS Office and you don’t share the same use cases the OP, the article author and myself share.

1. The article you shared was talking about gaming, the adobe creative suite, virtual machines, electrical engineers, labs, architects and sysadmins/developers. Please don't try to claim that the article author and OP ever had "the same use cases".
2. I guess you are finally correct though, I'm indeed not the typical user of MS Office (thank god). The typical user pays $70 a year just to edit word docs, while calling the family tech support each time they try to add a horizontal page in word. If your use case is being trapped into a proprietary office solution, where you have to provide a reason before microsoft allows you to shut down your onedrive, where all your documents are saved in a mythical "cloud", then I am glad that our use-cases differ.
3. I hope you see the irony of you using markdown in a comment describing why I am "out of touch" for using markdown.

If you want to use windows, that's fine. But please don't share such blatantly ignorant articles, and don't try to defend them when multiple people point out why it is wrong about so many things.

I probably won't reply to your next reaction (should there be any) unless you come up with some actual arguments, instead of "the line spacing is broken, you're out of touch, not me".

Yes, libreoffice doesn’t really work for live collaboration. But office online is a good solution for that collaboration, and it works in any browser (including Firefox on Linux). Therefore, the author’s conclusion (you need windows to collaborate on word docs) is still wrong.

I personally also believe that WYSIWYG editors are highly overrated: markdown is significantly better for note-taking and similar small documents, and reports would often be better off with LaTeX or something similar. But I understand why the “4 commands is too much hassle to install VirtualBox” crowd might prefer word.

People who need MS Office because once you have to collaborate with others Open/Libre/OnlyOffice won’t cut it;

I use office almost daily, Libreoffice is fine for local editing and office online works if I have to collaborate.

People that just installed a password manager (KeePassXC) and a browser (Firefox/Ungoogled) via flatpak only to find out that the KeePassXC app can’t communicate with the browser extension because people are “beating around the bush” on GitHub instead of fixing the issue;

I simply installed the Bitwarden extension in Firefox and it worked flawlessly. I’m not quite sure why you would want a desktop app for a password manager (never needed this even on windows), but if you do, basically distro ships a regular Firefox package which will work just as on windows.

Anyone who wants a simple Virtual Machine and has to go thought cumbersome installation procedures like this one just to get error messages saying virtualization isn’t enable when, in fact, it is… or trying to use GNOME Boxes and have a sub-par virtualization experience;

4 commands doesn’t seem that cumbersome, it can quite literally be done in 30 seconds. Add to this the fact that it will be updated together with all other apps managed by you package manager, which is incomparably faster compared to windows update (or even most apps’ integrated self-updater)

My experience with gnome boxes was also one of the most hassle-free one ever when working with virtualisation. Worked without advanced setup on a very low-end laptop (i3 4th gen, 4gb DDR3), so I’m not quite sure what would be “sub-par”.

Designers because Adobe apps won’t run properly without having a dedicated GPU, passthrough and a some hacky way to get the image back into your main system that will cause noticeable delays;

Adobe doesn’t have a monopoly on design software. I’m not an artist though, so it could be true that the Linux alternatives aren’t full replacements. I would like to point out that, IIRC, Linus Media Group (a company with 100+ employees) uses macs for Adobe apps; windows would constantly crash, so even here the author’s conclusion (just buy a windows key) doesn’t hold up.

Gamers because of the reasons above plus a flat 5-15% performance hit;

In my experience running games though proton, this is more like a 5% difference in either direction. Native games generally run significantly better for me. Though I will admit this can depend on specific hardware and games (and proton has improved a lot over the years).

People that run old software / games because not even those will run properly on Wine;

Wine is actually starting to support an API which Microsoft has deprecated (https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-8.16-Released). These apps might only work on Linux in the future, not on windows anymore. I will admit that I’m not much of a retro gamer, and other API’s might be a different story.

Developers and sysadmins, because not everyone is using Docker and Github actions to deploy applications to some proprietary cloud solution. Finding a properly working FTP/SFTP/FTPS desktop client (similar WinSCP or Cyberduck) is an impossible task as the ones that exist fail even at basic tasks like dragging and dropping a file.

Want to start using a new language? Just apt install the new interpreter/compiler and start right away. Want to use sftp? Just type sftp into your terminal. Also, most regular file managers just support these protocols out of the box; not having to install a separate app to use these protocols sounds like a Linux win to me. Furthermore, when developing software intended for server use, linux is simply superior due to its similarity to the environment the software will eventually run on.

Just to make it clear, I understand that Linux is not perfect for everyone. But this article appears almost wilfully ignorant to multiple facts. It almost sounds like the author tried Linux for 2 hours, had a single issue they couldn’t resolve during that time (probably nvidia related, which is nvidia’s fault), and decided to give up and write salty articles instead of seeking help.

Some context for the last tldr’d paragraph:

The negative Wall Street sentiments about the global economy have been echoed elsewhere. Last week, the Economist published a leader article entitled: “The world economy is defying gravity. That cannot last.”

The more you compress the longer and more CPU intensive it is to decompress

I believe this is becoming less and less true with modern algorithms. Take for example ZSTD: while the compression speeds differs by several orders of magnitude between the fastest and slowest modes, the decompression difference is only about 20%. The same holds true for flac, where the decompression speed is pretty uniform across all compression levels.

These algorithms probably aren’t used by repacked like fitgirl (so your answer is generally correct in the context of repacks). I do believe it is still interesting to see these new developments in compression techniques.