From what I understand, the limitation in speed/scalability for lemmy/piefed/mbin is the database, not the back end language, so the specific language used appears to matter much less than it would seem.

Piefed has some some pretty great features over lemmy, but for the sysadmin side of things, it has a noticeable improvement regarding network resource usage, and potentially raw speed.

Piefed also appears to be less buggy overall. As an example, Lemmy has suffered from a persistent memory leak that’s been around for years, with no fix in sight. You can see the opinion of our sysadmin who has been running slrpnk.net (lemmy instance) for 5 years now to find that just because lemmy is built in a memory-safe language, it doesn’t automatically translate to a good experience.

i loathe the idea of giving google more money

If you don’t mind used or open-box phones, you could pick up a used (and more critically, carrier unlocked) Pixel off ebay, if you want to deprive them of revenue.

Unfortunately some carriers like verizon will not automatically unlock the bootloader even after unlocking the carrier restriction, so buying a used one that wasn’t factory unlocked from Google could be a slight gamble.

I guess I do sorta have the equivalent of a tactical nuke in my back pocket when it comes to low-spec Linux game recommendations 😅

Ah, wasn’t aware they were so far behind, thanks for the heads up.

Hadn’t heard of IodeOS either until seeing that chart. They also seem a bit slower than Lineage for certain updates, but for the more privacy minded, may be the best option for non-pixel folks.

Only downside with the miyoo is the size of it makes my hands cramp up if I play any game that requires a lot of movement, like fast paced racers. Didn’t think it’d be an issue since I have really small hands, but alas.

It’s excellent in every other way though, probably will get one of those grips that it can slot into to make it more comfortable, but I do kinda wish I’d opted for something a bit more ergonomic out of the gate, with controls on the sides of the screen, or a clamshell design, instead of the classic gameboy shape.

If you have a compatible Bluetooth adapter (it can be hit or miss), you can select Real Wiimotes in the controller section of Dolphin, and make sure continuous scanning is enabled, then once a Wii game is running, you press 1 & 2 simultaneously on the Wiimote, and it’ll sync up (but certain controllers, like Wiimotes with motion plus built in may need you to use the dedicated sync button instead to sync).

You’ll also need a USB IR bar for the Wiimotes to function, which can be had for around 8 bucks from ebay.

However, I personally couldn’t get the Wii motion plus functionality to work in the handful of games that use it, and some games still don’t work right in dolphin, like Wii Sports Resort.

Seconding the Wii. I personally dismissed it for many years as a gimmick console, but recently gave it a chance and did a deep dive on its library, and was astonished how many good titles it had available.

However, after experimenting with Dolphin vs using the games natively on a modded console, I ending up forgoing emulation, as I found that it was significantly less convenient to use compared to just booting up the console and immediately having the controllers synced up and working perfectly.

That avoided the need to boot up my couch PC, navigate to Dolphin with my Bluetooth keyboard/mouse, make sure it was set up properly (some games need certain settings enabled to avoid weird visual glitches, like Resident Evil 4) launch it, full screen it, and then sync the Wii controller (certain models of controllers must be synced with the sync button in dolphin, while others let you hold down 1 and 2 simultaneously). And if I left a game to play a different one, I had to go back to my Bluetooth keyboard, launch a game, full screen, and sync all over again.

I could’ve negated most of that faff by installing a retroarch distro to my couch PC, like Batocera, but I personally hate the UI/UX of retroarch and its various frontends.

I also found that my Wii motion plus controllers simply wouldn’t work correctly for the games that utilize it, and some games still don’t work properly in dolphin, like Wii Sports Resort.

The only downside of using the actual Wii is that it only outputs 480p, but with cheap component cables and the deflicker disabled in the ROM loader, it usually isn’t that bad once you’re moving around and immersed.

But that’s just my 2 cents.

What alternative OS you adopt depends on your phone and needs.

If you just want to mostly degoogle you phone, but aren’t that concerned about privacy or security, LineageOS is basically that. It’s as close to a stock android experience as you can get, minus the pre-installed google apps. It supports a wide range of android phones.

If you want more security and privacy, GrapheneOS is currently king, but the downside is it only works on Google Pixel phones, and it’s possible certain apps won’t work (banking apps can be hit or miss, and the Uber app I believe blocked it). It otherwise functions just like a regular android phone and can install sandboxed google play to use any app you could need, making it just as easy to daily drive. It’s the best choice if you’re an activist, journalist, or fear state actors. But even if you’re not, I’d say it’s the best choice if you already have a pixel phone.

CalyxOS has paused development, so not currently an option.

eOS has a bigger focus on security and privacy than LineageOS, but isn’t as secure as Graphene. The advantage is that it supports more phones than just the google pixel.

PostmarketOS is not based on Android, and instead is a real Linux Distro made for mobile. It’s still very much in an alpha stage, with varying levels of support for different phones, many of which cannot take calls or even use their camera properly. I would only recommend it to developers or people who want to tinker with a project phone.

The reviewer concludes it’s not a good sequel, didn’t enjoy most of their time in it. It’s a fairly okay detective game wrapped up in crappy action-brawler combat and a pretty lame open-world.

I assembled a rather large list of free Linux games a few years ago, and most of them are low-spec friendly. Hopefully you find something interesting from it :)

https://lemmy.world/post/14336843

Tyranny (a different RPG by obsidian) puts you in the role of a fairly high ranking judge working for a brutal expanding empire. You have the option to play a really nasty person if you wish. Not terribly funny though, usually quite a serious vibe.

If you’ve been holding off on Cyberpunk 2077, it’s in a really solid state nowadays, and has a pretty dang good main story with lots of roleplaying options, and plays well with a controller.

Terra Nil is a cool relaxing solarpunk strategy/builder game about restoring the environment. Not sure how complete controller support is, but its rated playable for the steam deck (could be hit or miss).

The Mass Effect series supports controller, and they’re pretty fun sci-fi RPG’s with good characters.

Disco Elysium is a more text heavy RPG. I personally bounced off it due to its theme, but it’s pretty unique, worth a shot if you click with it.

Glad you enjoyed! :)

I’ll be posting more of StrafeFox’s stuff here, they’re criminally lesser known considering the consistent quality of their videos.

That’s a good point. I went back to the video to rewatch it, and turns out I totally missed where they said they only freeze things during a testing phase, then unfreeze it after they’re done and allow updates to commence as normal.

They mentioned that due to Linux receiving more frequent updates often with meaningful performance improvements, they’ll have to throw away older data and re-test more often on Linux, as Windows doesn’t really change much in performance between updates. So I would guess that they would use release drivers with new cards, and likely would only re-test their entire suite if the release driver also gave a big performance boost on older cards.

AFAIK, It’s not an issue of automated testing, and I don’t believe they re-test all their cards on Windows with every new review either. Instead, they maintain the same versions of software on Windows as well until enough time has passed and enough updates have piled up that they do finally re-test everything with new games to create a new dataset to compare against. They’re trying to do the same methodology on Linux.

Without re-testing their entire suite of cards for every new card review (which is cost prohibitive), performance changing from updates would make the comparisons between cards less useful, as it cannot be determined if the newer card being tested is better or worse purely on the merits of the hardware itself, since newer software may be artificially making it look better or worse than the tested cards that came before, and thus the actual integrity and usefulness of the testing comes into question.

They are trying to assemble a like-for-like dataset that doesn’t require their entire catalog of cards to be regularly retested to ensure that it remains like-for-like. Keeping all the software the same across tests ensures that they can add new data piecemeal and still retain an apples-to-apples comparison.

I’ve seen the ancient gameplays video you linked, but there is very little out there for linux vs windows benchmarks that are of high quality.

The video I linked is 2 months old, only focuses on graph data (no gameplay videos) across both AMD and NVidia cards and multiple distros. It’s quite high quality IMHO. Are you confusing it with something else?

EDIT: I just realized you’re referring to the name of his youtube channel. D’oh!

GamersNexus’ normal GPU benchmark videos are to help gamers compare GPU performance on various games to determine what they should purchase for their needs. With this new video, they are now providing the same service for Linux Gamers going forward.

The goal of this video was not to compare Windows performance to Linux performance. There are videos that exist which do that, if that is what you’re were hoping for.

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Personally, in this case I think the title itself is enough info to determine if it’s an interesting enough topic to visit the youtube page to then read the description for more info before clicking play. Some lemmy clients even provide the youtube description in the post itself (the desktop Lemmy-UI only shows a short preview of the description).

For videos that don’t have a simple premise and are difficult to capture in a short post title, I sometimes add a longer description and my own thoughts in the post body (such as when I post movies to [email protected]), but for videos like this, which is quite straight forward, I don’t feel the need to summarize their methodology of the benchmarks, since it’s there in the video for those interested, but most will be more interested in the benchmark data itself.

A brief statement on how the OS used may be detrimental to windows would have been useful, for example.

This testing is not comparative to Windows benchmarks, it is only testing and comparing benchmarks on Linux between different GPUs. This is sort’ve a big deal, because GamersNexus is known for extremely rigorous and consistent testing, to the point where all in it cost them 10K in labor to fully set up their Linux testing suite. Long term this is a great boon to Linux gamers for deciding what hardware to purchase for their needs.