Alright so, for anyone who doesn’t actually know about this because it was a few years ago now: the person who made/maintains the official Gshade is a petulant toddler who previously placed malware within a Gshade update (which anyone who uses it knows, if you want your Gshade to work again it HAS TO BE updated).
If you’re going to use Gshade instead of Reshade, use a fork that isn’t the official one – but frankly, I’d STRONGLY suggest Reshade instead, give its open source nature and the fact you can ignore updates for literally ever if you want and it’ll still function perfectly.
For a quick summary of what happened: Gshade was always infamous for having absurd amounts of updates, and as they became more excessive people started to complain about having to update almost every damn day. Someone got fed up and created a fork that would bypass the ‘you must update to use it’ bullshit. The catalyst was the petulant child literally dropping a couple ACTUALLY EMPTY updates just to piss people off further because of the complaints about the excessive updates. Just for the extra context of ‘he very much did bullshit like this even before the malware bomb’.
This turned into an arms race between him and the person maintaining the version that gave updates the middle finger, which eventually ended in him placing code that would ‘detect if someone was using a third-party non-official Gshade’ and forcibly shut down their entire PC. Not the program (which still would have been bad, mind you, but at least SOMEWHAT more reasonable), but your entire fucking PC. Anyone whose dealt with things that ‘detect third party software’ KNOWS that this shit always has false positives from some other ENTIRELY unrelated programs, and that’s exactly what happened.
The dev’s response to this was basically quadrupling down, with one quote from them being pretty much ‘I could have done something actually harmful, but I didn’t!’ (spoiler: forcibly shutting down a PC is harmful if you’re unlucky – that’s why ‘hold power button to force shutdown’ is a last resort, because you’re basically spinning a roulette wheel). So, ‘I’ll fuckin’ do it again!’ level of response to the concerns, basically.
There’s more bits to the story, but that’s the gist of it. Given the price of PC parts and PCs in general right now, unless you’re willing to risk that potential $2k on a replacement rig if baby has a tantrum again, I suggest folks ditch Gshade in favor of Reshade. The 'convenience' is not worth it.
Edit: for anyone who's willing to poke their head into reddit, this is the long-form HobbyDrama post about the malware incident if you'd like to read the entire shitshow in detail.
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