100% of supercomputers, 80% of mobile devices (as Android), 4 or 5% of desktops depending on whether you count ChromeOS. Desktop share is a few percent higher if you just count gaming PCs, eg. the Steam survey, since it’s more widely used at home than on business machines.

The rate of adoption is accelerating, too - slowly but steadily.

As a “caps lock is another control” enjoyer, I know that pain. Don’t need to take your fingers off the home keys to type ^[ , whereas the proper escape key is a bit of a stretch.

Well, having not played the Xbox version… ;-) Once you’ve got it running, it remains one of the finest games of all time.

Getting it running is the real sands of time, tho. It has a particular hatred of multi-core CPUs, requires a graphics card that supports both hardware transform & lighting but also truly ancient versions of DirectX, and is obstinately not-widescreen. You’ll be wanting a fan patch; last time I tried one, it was a bit of a crash-fest (it wasn’t, back in the day) and some of the SFX looked plain wrong.

Graphics still held up perfectly - the art style is very strong - and the story remains charming. All I wanted from a remake was the damned thing to start up in a modern screen resolution, and it seems they’ve managed to spend years on it without even managing that.

AmigaOS is still available and able to run all your Linux favourite applications as well as ‘classic Amiga software’, except of course it requires you to be running a PPC processor. Plus it costs money. So you’d have to invest £lots in ‘most of a new PC’ to see whether it even works for you.

Now, if we could open-source it and get it running on x64, I’d love to be running workbench again. It was ahead of its time.

https://amigaos.net/

Dark Souls 3 is a great game to play at SL1. You’ve got quite a selection of weapons and armour that you can equip, plus one spell, so it’s a bit of a puzzler to find optimum combinations of stuff to beat all the bosses.

Dark Souls 1 is okay to play at SL1. You’re limited to being a pyromancer and have a good selection of flame spells that you can cast, but you’re limited to weapons with fairly boring movesets, and you’ll be doing a lot of running back to Blightown to get pyromancies and level up your flame.

Dark Souls 2 is goddamned brutal to play at SL1. Your dodging is tied to your agility, which means you’re a sitting duck until you get some stat boosting gear. Start the game by murdering Cale for his hat of +3 dexterity, grab the work hook and the ladle to swap out in your off-hand for their small stat boosts, and get yourself to Tseldora to grind the peasant set for its small adaptability bonus. I hope you’re good at beating end-game bosses with a rapier, no shield, and bad rolls - maximum four in a row due to your low stamina, which makes throne watcher / defender hellish.

Scholar obviously has all of the pain of 2, plus you can’t rush into the DLC areas for their high-powered rings. By the time you get the ring of the embedded for its massive SL1 stat boost, you’ll have most certainly earned it.

Yes, I did play through all four at SL1 in preparation for the release of Elden Ring. DS3 is fun at SL1, but I also do not recommend the others to anyone. Elden Ring is quite good at RL1 - it still allows some quite varied builds, and it forces you to learn the bosses rather than just “DPS race” them like you do normally.

Heroic get a referral link if you buy games from GOG via their launcher, which I always make sure to do. The fact that Heroic has ‘first class’ integration with Glorious Eggroll, and in fact updates GE for Steam for you as well, means that it’s damn good for Linux gaming. If you don’t need Steam’s workshop or social factors for a game, there’s no reason not to buy through it.

If GOG could collaborate with Heroic on their API integration, then that would be perfection - could retire Galaxy in that case.

https://heroicgameslauncher.com/donate

If you’re just wanting to play it, you don’t really need the models, do you? Couple of packets of the cheapest army men you can find in the toy shop will do it you want fancy pieces, but just folding a piece of card in half so that it stands upright and writing on it what it is will suffice.

3D printing would do very nicely for the one-off models that you don’t want to kitbash, of course. Also great for playing DnD with; another game where you’re not obliged to use the ‘genuine books’ to play either.

In which case, I’ll set aside a very good bottle of whisky for that day.

I bought Subnautica on Steam when I wanted to replay it, despite having it free on Epic, just because it was easier than dealing with their trash.

Interesting, but misguided, I think.

If you’ve selected Python as your programming language, then your problem is likely either to do some text processing, a server-side lambda, or to provide a quick user interface. If you’re using it for eg. Numpy, then you’re really using Python to load and format some data before handing it to a dedicated maths library for evaluation.

If you’ve selected Go as your programming language, then your problem is likely to be either networking related - perhaps to provide a microservice that mediates between network and database - or orchestration of some kind. Kubernetes is the famous one, but a lot of system configuration tools use it to manipulate a variety of other services.

What these uses have in common is that they’re usually disk- or network- limited and spend most of their time waiting, so it doesn’t matter so much if they’re not super efficient. If you are planning to peg the CPU at 100% for hours on end, you wouldn’t choose them - you’d reach for C / C++ / Rust. Although Swift does remarkably well, too.

Seeing how quickly you can solve Fannkuch-Redux using Python is a bit like seeing how quickly you can drive nails into a wall using a screwdriver. Interesting in its way, but you’d be better picking up the correct tool in the first place.

Back when I owned an XPS, one of the driver options was ‘compressed screen updates’, which only updated the part that had changed. As far as I could tell, made no difference to battery life whatsoever - turning down the screen brightness even a notch did much more.

Daily driver laptop for nearly ten years, and the part that finally failed was the CPU fan, which wasn’t easy to obtain replacement parts for, so treated myself to a new laptop entirely. Mind you, the power connection was a PoS, would have been as well keeping that on an annual reorder for how often it failed. Pretty good laptop otherwise.

A controversial take. Every new feature added to Github has made it more unpleasant to use, and a lot of that is down to Copilot, for me. Only way to get rid of it is to wait for Github to go down again, which is the only thing it does reliably at the moment.

Oh, that’s obnoxious. I thought it was another ‘button along the bottom’, but it takes up the space that should be ‘right control’? Bastards. Hopefully you can rebind it to something useful, even if the keycap symbol sucks.

Mind you, I’ve already got caps-lock rebound as ‘control’ and alt-gr rebound as ‘compose’. My laptop has the ‘penguin’ key (it’s a Tuxedo laptop, no Windows key here) used for Sway. (My desktop keyboard is a Model M from before the days of Windows keys, have had to bind ctrl+alt as the ‘Sway Key’.) I’ve already got some ‘useless keys’ that I could rebind to other things - looking at you, print screen - but one you could press with your thumb while chording would always be nice.

Those ZBooks look like fine laptops. If you installed Arch on them, obviously ;-)

It’s the Witcher 1 but redone in the Witcher 3 engine. They’ve reimplemented the combat rhythm minigame and the ‘sex cards’ are all in HD.

The problem is that the volume of slop available completely overwhelms all efforts at quality control. Zealotry only goes so far at turning back the tsunami of shite.

Indeed.

In some ways, this kind of thing is ideal for Rust. It’s at it best when you’ve a good idea of what your data looks like, and you know where it’s coming from and going to, and what you really want is a clean implementation that you know has no mistakes. Reimplementing ‘core code’ that hasn’t changed much in twenty years to get rid of any foolish overflows or use-after-free bugs is perfect for it.

Using Rust for exploratory coding, or when the requirements keep changing? I think you’ve picked the wrong tool for the job. Invalidate a major assumption and have to rewrite the whole damn thing. And like you say; an important choice for big projects as choosing a tool that a lot of people will be able to use. And Window is very big.

They’re smoking crack, anyway. A million lines per dev per month? When I’m doing major refactoring, a couple thousand lines per week in the same language, mostly moving existing stuff into a new home, is a substantial change. Three orders of magnitude more with a major language conversion? Get out of here.

The Centos “eight pointed star”?

Menu bar at the top at least makes some sense - it’s easier to mouse to it, since you can’t go too far. Having menus per-window like Linux, or like Windows used to before big ugly ribbons became the thing, is easier to overshoot. (Which is why I always open my menu bars by pressing ‘alt’ with my left thumb, and then using the keyboard shortcuts that are helpfully underlined. Window likes to hide those from you now since they’re ‘ugly’, and also makes you mouse over the pretty icons to get the tooltip that tells you what they are, which is just a PITA. Pretty != usable.)

Mac OS has had the menu at the top since before it was a multitasking OS. They had them there on the first Mac I ever used, a Mac Classic 2 back in 1991 or so, and it was probably like that before then too. It’s not like they’ve been ‘innovating’ that particular feature and annoying their users.

The actual fix is probably ‘enable mixed ASCII / Windows-1252 calls to Windows UTF-16 functions’, when some strings have different codepages to others’, or something silly. But that fix sounds better.

A rising tide lifts all boats - every improvement is welcome

I had 32GB of RAM in my desktop as 4x8GB; one of the sticks failed a couple of years ago, and it was cheaper to replace it with 64GB = 4x16GB than it was to get a replacement 8GB.

That’s convenient for work purposes (in fact, I could actually do with more) but massive pointless overkill for most games. Even games which do “big loads” - Witcher 3, say - aren’t noticeably quicker from RAM cache than they are off of an NVMe drive.