Anybody here whose main use of computers is NOT games?

A lot of people in IT, especially programmers I have met, are completely uninterested in gaming.
To be sure, there are PLENTY of gamers in IT, but many people I have met are done with computers once they get home.
- My friend, a longtime Java dev, hasn't written a line of code since his last day at work. I do lots of hobby coding and will probably die at the keyboard lol.
  
  I work with several devs who would rather never see a computer again.
  
  longtime Java dev
  I can see why
  
  Ha, I'm the other way. I recovered my joy in a coding as a hobby once I stopped doing it at work. And yes, it was Java at work, and no, not Java as a hobby.
- many people I have met are done with computers once they get home.
  This is me. After 25 years in corporate IT, I have little to no interest in sitting down at a computer anymore. My personal box only gets turned on a few times a month. Casual browsing and such is done on mobile, gaming on console. Once upon a time I spun up VMs for fun and knew everything that was running on my system. Never had the patience (or desire) to go full Linux, and between work sucking out the joy and enshittification overrunning modern commercial OSes, I just stopped having the energy to get excited. So the box only get used when I have something to do that's more involved than light spreadsheet work etc.
  I am very much a Lemmy outlier lol.
- I work from home, but yeah, as soon as the day is over I kind of need to get away from the PC for a bit.
  Which is a shame, because I also love (or loved) PC gaming, and have a bunch of great games which I never feel like playing because they're "at work".
  
  For me it's the amount of debugging it takes to get new games to run. Most games these days come with some sort of third party launcher or drm that takes a lot of work to kill in order to get them running.
  I just spent 12 hours debugging because of shitty-closed source software that i have to work around, i dont want to do it again.
  
  Ugh, that sucks. I can understand not wanting to go back to the same environment once you clock out for the day.
  
  And this why I have a PS5.
- I’m a developer and games are a snooze fest in my book. I’m just always frustrated and think too much about how it was programmed and want to change stuff; I never get into the world of the game.
  When I first got into VR though it was mind-blowing. I’m an on again, off again VR user and haven’t thrown any more money into it but it’s a great way to exercise.
- Woah this blows my mind. I thought I was just weird.
  
  I learned this early on in my career, when I was in college actually. I wanted to talk with a coworker who was already in IT and found he had zero interest in memes, games, or anything 'nerd culture.'
- I think people generally nowadays care more about their health (physical and mental), and spending whole days in the front of a computer screen is not a good idea.

i dont really game. my hobbies are more self-hosting, service related stuff. giant media library.. distributed av system. lots of docker, server stuff.
the selfhosting communities have some interesting traffic
- And home automation! Microcontrollers! I do try to game, but its just not that fun anymore. Nothing beats 8vs8 quake on school lan anyways

My main use is for porn.
- Why do you think the net was born?
  Porn Porn Porn

I never play, i always code.. And i am not even that good at it 😢
- Practice makes perfect!

4 hours and 52 comments, and not a single mention of what we all knew even before Avenue Q:
The Internet is for porn. Everything else is just what happens between porn.
More seriously, my desktop is where I do larger research that will require more than a couple of tabs. Little to no gaming there. Other PCs are mainly for videos.

I do play games, but I also work on creative projects and watch shows/movies on my computer. I use Illustrator to create typeface designs, graphic design for laser cutting or stickers, 3D modeling and slicing programs for my 3D printer, Google Docs for writing, coding for Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects, et al.
- 3d modeling and printing are major things now. I'm into that as well, and also playing with Arduino and ESP32 for home automation and building little robotic tings. Writing code has always felt kind of like a game to me.

I use the crap out of my computer.
-Video editing -Music editing -Word processing -Spreadsheets -Microprocessor programming -YouTube viewing -Image editing -Shopping -Investing -Web surfing -3D printing -CNC Routing -Website development
Oh and gaming.

I rarely play games on my computers, coding is the bulk of what I do, the rest is data analysis, email and research.

I use online games as a way to hang out with friends. Usually it's about an hour or two a day. The rest of my computer time is spent coding or doing work stuff.

I spend a lot more time coding than playing games. It's not unusual for me to not be active on steam for a month.

I'm not a gamer. Work at computer all day, only mobile (no games either) outside work.

I don't game very much (just recently I started playing outer wilds though a few times per week). I feel like I probably enjoy tweaking my laptop more than actually using it.😆 I dont even code much. I like finding open source alternatives to software and generally improve my laptop. Spent about 4months learning nixos:)
I don't know, at least I might be able to help others improve their pc's too

I'm a recreational coder first and foremost. Sometimes I play games, but rarely all the way through

I used to use mine for games but I don’t really play games any more. So for the last year or two my PC has been mostly dedicated to CAD, PCB design, coding, et cetera.

Audio! I'm a hobbyist musician.
Gaming is a close second.
- That reminds me, for a long time I've had an idea for a piece of instrumental music that would be the intro to a video. I'm not a musician but used to play the piano a little. I do have a little synthesizer keyboard from when my kids were young. If I noodled out a melody on that and recorded it, is there software I could use to make it sound like multiple instruments, add drum effects etc. so it sounds real? I don't know if there's a musical term for doing that - flesh it out?
  
  Maybe "arranging" or "composing".
  As for tools to make it happen: You can use a "DAW" (Digital Audio Workstation) which is how most people compose these days. I use Reaper because it's a tiny download, very full featured, and cheap. Ableton is very popular and has the biggest community online. Cakewalk is completely free (with a sign up.) ProTools is what a lot of professionals use, though it's dying a slow death because it's very expensive, they've gone full subscription model, and the things it can do that drew people to it can be done just as well with other DAWs that aren't so predatory.
  A DAW won't do the work for you, though. If you want something to make harmonies or drum beats for your melody for you, there are a lot of "plugin"s or "VST"s you can download that can help with that process. Or, if you just want to give something a melody and tell it to make a song, there are probably AI solutions these days.
  Good luck! Beware the audio rabbit hole. This can be a cheap, or ridiculously expensive hobby.

Linux stuff
- this for me too

Hmm it's difficult to quantify. On workday I spend an average of probably 6-8 hours on a computer with job related tasks. Not really coding most of the time, since we're maintaining and building a network, so it's more configuration, planning, coordination, and documentation work. Some days we're out to actually deploy hardware, or run around and debug stuff, so it's hard to estimate the average screentime.
My free time involves a lot of computer time too, but it is split up into more smaller categories, either on the desktop computer or the smartphone computer. Manga, Games, Youtube, Movies, Anime Series, Lemmy, Pornography, News, Banking and Investments.
In the end I think my job is the biggest unified chunk of time, but that's kind of arbitrary, if I started subdividing it into different tasks maybe gaming would become the biggest chunk.

I do 3D animation and illustration. Fortunately, running games requires the exact same kind of hardware so my workstation doubles as a playstation

I don’t use my laptop much anymore (don’t have a desktop either): Some modeling, accounting, spreadsheets, or doc composition; things that are cumbersome to do well on a tablet. General browsing and videos are on my phone, tablet, or cast to the TV. When I want to game it’s usually on my switch.
It’s The laptop is really my device of last resort. I know it will do exactly what I want it to do, but I have to dig it out, clear space for it and usually plug it in if it’s not a quick job because the thing is old and an energy hog. My tablet is newer and I got it a convertible laptop-like keyboard case. The battery lasts so much longer and it’s just easier to lug around to where I need it for whatever.
- Laptops ... I never could get used to them. The keyboards feel too tiny and I can't stand trackpads. Give me my dual monitor PC! Apparently there are people who actually write code on phones, which would be my idea of hell.
- Coding, surfing (too much), little gaming. To a 90s kid most modern games suck donkeyballs for lack of story or being developed to be console-friendly, or both.

I still game on my desktop. But it's never been the primary use.
Graphic Design, video editing, 3D modelling, etc... has been the reason for my upgrades over the years. The fact that each of those upgrades allowed my games to perform better was a side-effect instead of being the primary reason.

I don't even really have a computer.
For games, I have a switch or Xbox, and everything else I use my phone or iPad.

Same for me. Coding, 3d modeling (for fun), lately some fpv simulator to get better with drones before I shred a real one. I even worked in the gaming industry, but it just doesn't keep me interested for long anymore.

I'm a sysadmin, so non-game stuff is my entire day job.
When I use my PC at home, it's a variable split between internet, media and gaming, depending what I damn well feel like at the time :D

My gaming PC became my self-hosted server around 5 years ago. Now it runs 24/7 serving up media through Emby, providing backup/cloud/vpn services to my mobile devices, DNS adblocking for everything on the LAN/VPN, password manager syncing, and whatever else I feel like playing with :)
Time, energy, and willpower just never seem to come together for gaming anymore. And on the rare occasions it does, that PC still games just fine; even after making the move to Debian last year.

Same as you. I used to game a lot (too much) in my younger days. Now I use the computer to support my tabletop gaming hobbies, 3d printing, a little coding, and streaming.

No games here, I never have found them interesting for whatever reason. Because of this my laptop is a 2018 Chromebook with reflashed BIOS running Ubuntu. It has significantly less processing power than my phone but is plenty sufficient for everything I ever need a computer to do.

I don't use my computers for modern gaming. Like OP, I prefer tabletop games, though I do speed run crossword puzzles and play some PixelDungeon on my phone when I have spare time. I also built a Retropie, and play some old Atari and PS2 roms on a bored Sunday. My stuff can run Civ IV, which is probably the last title I bought.
My main systems are for work, or for supporting self-hosted services including local infrastructure, home lab stuff, email, blogs, home automation, media servers, etc, etc. Lately I've been getting into SDR projects using RPi or old laptops.
So, uh... Yeah. Fun stuff, but not so much gaming.

My job is coding so my primary use is doing that stuff. I do game an awful lot though.

I know you said you’re not into games much anymore but If you’re into D&D you might like Baldur’s Gate 3. I also know of a group for older gamers if you’re ever thinking of dabbling again.
- Thanks, a friend of mine is also trying to get me to play BG3. I do have an Oculus headset and have enjoyed playing Demeo on it, a D&D-style 3d game, just not often.
- By a group, you mean a Lemmy community?
  
  It’s a discord group, only reason I really use the platform. It’s a fairly active group of 30+ year old gamers. I’ve yet to find a similar group on any platform that’s decently active.

Does making game code count? I like making game things and binning them before they resemble something playable! :)
Besides that... I mostly... no that's it, I rarely play things, unless that time every 6 months that I get really into a top-down RPG. For a weekend, my main use is exploring a colorado wasteland or a small town, but it's followed by me starting to make a game aaaand giving up again... but it's fun! :)
I really should make music, I sometimes feel the spark went and it's sad. :(
- imo thats way more fun than playing a game, it's a game in itself, ultimate sandbox
  
  That's exactly it! I always say it as "I'm going to play in Unity/Godot", I'm really happy it's not just me! :)

I pretty much stopped gaming when I started working serious jobs after college. I was a designer and front end dev, then design lead for a startup (where I allowed myself to be overworked, especially around deadlines). It’s a lot of screen time and playing games when I got home lost it’s appeal. Plus I’d switched to Macs, and my favorite multiplayer games were being over run by cheating (mid 2000s).

I use mine mostly for work. But also games, music, and movies.

I think, here on Lemmy, there's relatively many folks who use their computers for other things, given there's so many techies here...

I mostly use my computer for:
CAD (both 3D modeling and circuit board design)
Programming (mostly embedded firmware in Rust lately)
Chatting because doing that on a phone is too slow and autocorrect sucks.
Work (remote desktop, mostly)
News
AI tomfoolery with stuff like Stable Diffusion and LLMs.
Every now and again I'll get addicted to a new game and use my PC for that too. My latest addiction was Baldur's Gate 3 when it came out 🤷
- Presumably you're familiar with Arduino/ESP - that's been my playground for a few years.
  
  Oh yes! Loads of fun.
  Trying to get a good workflow for Micropython at the moment. It's so I can make things easier for a robotics team I'm coaching.

I’m in my 40s and I sort of just dropped out of gaming on PC. I game on a console when I feel like I want to game.
My desktop rarely gets turned on anymore and I only use it for a cracked version of Wizards of the Coast’s 4E character builder because I play in a group that runs fourth edition.
My laptop is for learning things (IT related), general browsing, taxes, and whatever I feel like doing that feels cumbersome on a phone.

Linux, emacs, Python, forth, microcontrollers, kicad, gimp, blender, FreeCAD, spice, and astronomy are my main uses in no particular order. I occasionally play Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead. I used to be a regular cafe gamer, but I expect a clear and strait forward transaction of ownership with all purchases. Renting something that cannot be owned and reading some long legalise nonsense are not at all interesting to me. Maybe one day there will be a game industry again, but as far as I'm concerned, the world of proprietary exploitation, subscriptions, and extortion is the same as nonexistence.

I work all day on the computer. Its been a long time since gaming took up the majority of my computer time.
I think the stagnation in graphics improvements, combined with the extreme costs of high end GPUs and the massive growth in the industry, is what changed the dynamic. Most gamers just don't care about the high end like they used to and now its corporate BS that has a more direct impact on their gaming experience instead of better hardware.

I used to play a ton of games throughout my teenage years but fell off in my 20s. Now in my late 30s I still keep up with gaming news and discussion, but I rarely actually play through games anymore. I go through maybe one a year.
You're right that the discussion has changed, and that's due to a number of factors. Mostly, new games are pretty configurable and will run on pretty much any modern hardware. Long gone are the days where you simply couldn't play something unless you ponied up for a Voodoo 2. Add to that, that PC hardware is a lot more standard now. Gaming enthusiasts dont need to learn a bunch of competing hardware standards to keep up anymore.
And the other side is that with the introduction of microtransactions, keeping an eye on how companies are trying to monetize games is important. AAA games these days have Hollywood movie budgets and if they're not profitable, then hundreds of people are out of a job. Looking back, it's pretty amazing what 10-15 people could accomplish with a fraction of the budget and time that modern developers get(indie games notwithstanding)
- Maybe you're old enough to remember Sierra Games - King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc - in the 90s they hardly had any in-house game developers. Mostly they just marketed games written by very small companies or even lone developers. Back then I did a contract job for them to create an online tournament system (which they never used).
  
  I learned English from kq1 on an ibm xt. Parents was pretty surprised of me as an 10 year old hogging the English dictionary. I still remember spending half a years pocket money on kq4 when it finally was available in Norway. Also loved that heroes quest series. I believe it was renamed quest for glory at some point
  
  I have played through many Sierra games, although I was always more partial to the LucasArts adventure games. I feel like they had better writing, and the idea that there was no failure state meant that you didn't end up in unwinnable situations.
  I didn't know about the staff situation there though, that's super interesting. I just assumed that they had a small number of teams working on each title that each worked under the Williams'

Yes

54M here. Rolled my first D&D character in 1978. Played GURPS, Twighlight 2000, Traveller, you name it I probably have at least dabbled in playing it.
Today I play D&D 2024 and 5e, Call of Cthulhu, Castles and Crusades and a few others. Some on Roll20, or Foundry VTT (which is awesome BTW.) My primary gaming group is all fathers and mothers spread out across the country.
As far as actual Computer games, I used to be into Flight Sims, but dropping $500 plus on JUST a graphics card is just not something that is going to happen. It's not the wife acceptance factor, it the sheer balls the graphics card manufacturers have charging that much for their crap. I still dust off MS FS 2004 and run it on my Dell Precision laptop, but my machine won't run the latest version. I would like to see if it would run Battlestar Galactica Deadlock though.
Otherwise, I have had a home server for many years. It runs Proxmox and I have containers running Plex, Homeseer, SMB (acts as my NAS), and it provides backup services for every other computer in the house.
For reference, I am an IT Professional, with about 30 years in the business.
- gpu prices are wild, I think amds better ones are not too bad tho and can run vr flight sims fine, winwig dropped a good cheap (around 100$) my issue is warthundes the only arcadey pvp option, their next game might be good tho, I really want s good flight sim game to hop on and off, treat like cod, drop into a city to close quarter dog fight or be what I thought war thunder was (a massive war with servers for different eras you can drop in as any vehicle type lol, I was delusional)
  
  the dopamine from vr dogfights in close quarters with buildings to fly around and use as cover is insane, I also like the landing to capture base domination mode, warthunder could be so peak if they werent abusive
- Wow dude, I probably started D&D a year or two after you. It was the summer the first DMG came out. Still have those original 3 hardbacks, Deities & Demigods, etc. The DMG is pretty tattered. I actually DM a weekly 1e game at my house with some friends I found on meetup.com before Covid. We're all really into retro - I'm gonna see how they feel about Castles & Crusades, which I've never played in all these years.
  
  Here are the older edition books I have. My 1e DMG and PH have been lost to time. That copy of the Monster Manual is one of the originals. The Deities and Demigods though is NOT one of the issues with HP Lovecraft's monsters in it. I have seen one of those editions, one of my local games stores has one for sale for over $300, but that's not what I have. Not shown are all the 5e stuff I have. In my youth it was a challenge to save up enough to buy material when it came out. As an adult, especially since I got the wife playing, yeah... I've indulged quite a bit.

I have games installed but I mostly just write programs for fun now. I usually don't get a ton of time to play games, plus they haven't been as fun as they used to be as a kid.

Mainly gaming but if I’m looking things up online and need multiple tabs. I won’t use mobile. Mobile sucks ass for that.
Multiple tabs and two monitors makes things much easier to do research.
Spreadsheet work for my business… on mobile?
I’m crazy not stupid.

I still play games but now I have more things to do with computers. I started helping out an open source software project learning how to code basic things in lua, how to contribute using git pushes. make art texture graphics in gimp, mess with sound effects in audacity, clip videos together using kdenlive. I hope to learn how to use blender and do modeling. I test and review fellow devs stuff to try helping them out. As long as I learn new things and contribute it helps me feel like my computer time is more productive.
Then I got in on the local LLM scene a year ago with the release of llama 3.1. I'm a science nerd who genuinely thinks the study of neural networks is cool. The idea of getting computers to simulate thoughts to help solve problems is a neat thing. Also I wanted to see how far we came from cleverbot days. It inspired me enough to dig out the old unused gaming desktop and really extract the most potential out of my old 1070ti.
Now I wish I had more vram not for chasing high end graphics in video game entertainment, but because I want my computer to simulate high quality thoughts to help me in daily life.
- yep same, stopped chasing hardware for gaming just to need better hardware for rendering and using all the other software I got into

Does collaborative writing for fun count as games? The communities involved call them games, but there's no thoughts about control schemes or graphics, and no need to do anything outside your browser. That, chat, social media, reading (both for work and personal time), and the like take up the bulk of my PC time.
- I would call collaborative writing computer use but not a computer game. Programming feels like a game to me!

Programming, research and education would be my primary computer uses.

I build my machine about 8 years ago and it is time for a new one. I use it mainly for coding and research but I do like the occasional game (even VR). I try to max out specs so the PC lasts a long time.
- Wow, my current build was in September but the one before it lasted 11 or 12 years. I remember stretching the budget on it so I wouldn't have to do another one for a while. It worked!

I do so many different things on my computers that I rarely have time to play. I do have four or five games (as in Steam bought), but all I get to play is a clondike solitaire occasionally.

- Coding has always felt a lot like a game to me. Mostly.

I am an adjunct professor. My evenings are taken for making slides and marking. I wish I had time for gaming.

I last launched Minecraft about 4 years ago. Before that, I don’t even remember what games I might have played on my computer. The last console game I played with any regularity was GTA 5 on console, and once I beat the single player game I pretty much stopped. I simply don’t have time to spend on games I guess. I do have both Cribbage and Sudoku on my phone. Probably play them a combined average of 2-3 hours a month.

My usage is a roughly even split between games, music, and all other media (including social media).
Programming and other digital projects used to be on par with music but back then games was a clear first place and social media use was a blip.

Technically for me it's work now

I rarely use my computers for games. Occasional bomb squad game with my wife. That's about it. I use it a lot for watching things, and coding a lot, related to work/personal projects and such. It was weird for me to find out most people that spend a lot of time on computers here are doing it because of games. Not because computers are fun to work with.

I mostly use my Mac for business stuff, art and coding. The PC spends most of its time on offloaded AI tasks and rendering jobs. It was originally a toy for gaming but I’d rather use my Steam Deck for that now.

Yeah, I like gaming but lately I don't have the time for it and just like you I've switched to in person tabletop as it has the added benefit of interpersonal interactions face to face.
Anyway answering your question, yes I use it a lot, sometimes more or less depending on my job situation but mostly browsing, illustration, emails and 3D software make about 80% of my computer time.