Oh, the greybeard stereotype, for sure. Carrying the weight required for the ‘classic RMS’ look isn’t good for your health. Cute twinks in knee-high socks carrying a blahaj are much better, everyone loves them.

Now, the fully-actuated fursuit for if you want to be taken seriously as a sysadmin? That’s an expensive hobby.

especially if you have the infrastructure in place

I thought Bitcoin mining made no sense at all on GPUs any more? Unless you were running ASICs then the power costs just weren’t worth it, and application-specific is part of the acronym, there. Why would these things even be able to run an LLM?

In any case, Bitcoin just needs to iterate as fast as possible in order to find a match, doesn’t really need a lot of RAM. Whereas LLMs need really large amounts - NVIDIA’s latest data centre racks have about a terabyte for a reason. Even if you had cornered the market on GPUs five years ago for Bitcoin, what use are those cards for this?

A fine question. But alas, my PC was only up to emulating it at ‘PS4 native res’, so don’t know.

Well, an increase from (60 to 70) fps to (85 to 87) fps is nothing to complain about. It was obviously completely playable when it was managing “a bit over 30” since it was designed that way, but I’ve no problem with more.

Apparently they have fixed the “vertex explosion” bug as well, where your face would occasionally turn into a mass of spikes that obscured what you were doing so much it was unplayable - needed a quit out and restart, and was the major interruption to the game.

Yeah. You can sell ‘pure consoles’ at a loss and make it up with games sales. This is basically a mini PC that you could reinstall the OS and use for any purpose. Selling it at a loss would be crazy.

If it’s like anything else running in WSL, absolutely as slow as balls. Most Linux apps are written with the assumption that filesystem operations are incredibly fast, whereas that’s not true with Windows. Most games open one big file and do big reads from it so it’s not such a problem, whereas something like Git assumes that touching tens of thousands of files should be basically instant.

It’s not a million miles away, but it’s still got some problems. The ‘extract archive’ functionality seems to do it for me; think it must be wanting to pop up a (nested?) file chooser, but causes a session crash.

Cinnamon legacy for getting work done, and KDE wayland for playing games, for me. Nice to go 100% cinnamon though, for sure.

Indeed, one of the big things holding Wayland back is that you don’t really ‘support It’, you have to support every damn desktop environment, and they’re all moving targets. Gnome should fix their shit.

I understand that things have changed a bit since I first moved over to Linux - moving from Red Hat Linux to Ubuntu ‘Warty Warthog’ was such a revelation in overall user-friendliness and usability, back in the day. But upgrading my graphics card from an NVidia one to an AMD was a similar change. I might have only just installed the base operating system and a desktop environment and haven’t got around to a web browser yet, but I’ve already got full hardware accelerated graphics - that’s crazy.

Most distros now make the NVidia drivers a complete non-issue, I think? My 6600XT is requiring just a few too many compromises on new games, so I’ll need something new too, sooner or later. I used to hold off on graphics cards updates until I could get something twice as good so that it was a noticeable upgrade, but I could buy a pretty decent second-hand car for all the ones which are ‘twice as good’ now.

An upgrade from a 1050 Ti shouldn’t be such a problem. Well done on keeping it alive so long - I had a GeForce GTX 970 that would have been a similar age, but it let out its magic smoke years ago.

Yeah, surprised it’s only 77%.

Just as an observation: Mullvad’s best UK -> US connection seems to be New York. The transatlantic fibre optic cables make landfall nearby, and there’s lots of big data companies there that host VPNs.

Alternatively, a lot of more ‘special interest’ sites don’t have age verification on them yet.

Indeed - most Java IDEs have FernFlower built in, so it’s dead easy.

Decompiled Java is surprisingly close to the original, especially compared to eg. decompiled C++; good luck with that. You get all the class, function and variable names back on the original line numbers.

What you do not get back is any comments. So you can see what and how, but not why. Admittedly, most comments are kind of useless and do not explain ‘why’ very well, but for weird-but-critical code they can be essential.

Indeed - I’ve seen more people recommend Hannah Montana Linux (apt-based) than any of those for newcomers recently.

You are entirely right that a Linux distribution is really just its package manager, the default packages installed, and some remote repositories which may (or may not) have had some customisation applied, which will have been pulled and built from a source repository somewhere. All that’s really needed to swap between eg. Arch, Manjaro or Cachy is to update the repo files and issue a package manager update command, although I’d probably like to verify my backups and get a stiff drink first.

The House of Linux is built out of bricks, and the bricks aren’t that scary - you can take them to bits and look at them if you like, they’re usually zipped-up folders of text files and the binaries you’d get from compiling them yourself. But if that’s not what you’re used to, then yeah - 🤯 .

In all seriousness, I wish that most distros had art half as good as what Void Linux has - got some really gifted people, there.

Strangely enough, “Windows always fucking up my dual boot setup” is what caused me to drop Windows for good about a decade ago. And Linux gaming has come on absolutely leaps and bounds since then.

True, but network effects are important to that.

There were huge numbers of people that wouldn’t move to Linux because it didn’t support all of their games. Now it does, and lots of people are moving.

There are lots of people that won’t move to Linux because they have a random bit of hardware that’s not supported, or a highly-specific bit of software they need to do their job that only runs on Windows. The manufacturers wouldn’t support Linux because not enough people used it. Ah, but now we have all the gamers, so there are quite a lot of people using it.

Each domino that falls encourages the rest. Steam Linux users are more than 3x Steam macOS users, and we’re not that far from overtaking it for general desktop usage. In some regions, that’s already the case, and while the Windows 10 exodus can move to Linux easily, they’d need to buy new hardware fo use the Mac operating system. Not many companies would question providing Apple support; once Linux has a comparable share, it would be foolish to leave that out of consideration as well.

Listen, there’s dozens of Linux users on Void, Slackware and Gentoo. Dozens! Especially the ones wanting to run the latest games. Can’t just leave all of them out.

Strangely, the search page for ProtonDB shows the ‘proton rating’ for games which have a ‘native but abandoned / broken’ native Linux build, whereas the actual page for the game just shows ‘native’ and I can’t see the button to show the rest of the information. I’m sure it used to be there; they’ve started hiding a lot of stuff in favour of making the ‘steam deck’ results more prominent. But in some cases, ‘proton rating even with a native Linux build’ is quite important.

eg. Dawn of War 2 Chaos Rising.

• search page shows ‘gold’
• actual page says ‘native’, but ‘loads of rendering issues, really slow, broken on multi-monitor setup, use proton instead’.

Mark of the Ninja: Remastered:

• search page says ‘platinum’
• actual page says ‘native’, but ‘frequent deadlocking issues makes game unplayable, use proton instead’.

Games which run on Vulkan / OpenGL don’t have any GPU translation overhead, and some run straight-up better via Proton than they do on Windows. Doom 2016 does for me, for instance.

Of course, that game is so well optimised it’s the difference between 140 fps and 200+ fps, which is not terribly obvious, but even so.

That’s fascinating stuff, thanks!

Moved my father-in-law from Windows 10 to Mint.

Biggest problem was all his ‘documents’, which were office365 web links rather than ‘actual documents’. Linux presents them as the urls that they really are. They open just fine, though, and can be exported as real local docs for libreoffice etc.

Security and privacy were the main selling points for him. He’d done some reading and thought that Mint was among the best choices for a newstart that just want everything to work; no interests in playing games or anything. I agreed that was the most solid choice. I use Arch btw myself, but wouldn’t recommend that for beginners.

Aww, man alive. Most perfect desktop environment I’ve seen in years, and then it’s a full OS rather than just a DE. Had been looking in the ArchWiki for how to install it and everything.