You should really try Kodi. There are a ton of alternative theme options for it and the video player built into it can play anything

Cigars are often for celebrations, are they not?

That’s valid, but I prefer to use 0-indexing even though there’s no year 0. If somebody asks me about “the 2010s”, I’m gonna include 2010 in that, not 2020

Not a complete list but here’s a selection of movies that have come out since the turn of the century that I feel beat it out in ranking for “best action movie”:

Matrix Reloaded

Lord of The Rings trilogy

John Wick 4

Logan

Mad Max: Fury Road

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

House of Flying Daggers

Dredd

Everything Everywhere All At Once

But yeah, I mean it’s up there in rarefied air.

It’s a great movie with a terrible name and bad marketing. Definitely holds up

I highly doubt it’ll go smoothly. IMO what will happen is driving standards will rise, driving tests will become extremely tough and need to be repeated every few years, and self driving tech will get cheaper and most people will just summon cars like Waymo rather than bothering to remain liscensed. There will have to be an offramp, not a firm cutoff.

It’s in beta as of a couple weeks ago and it looks quite customizable, in fact. Lots of themeing options and an optional tiled mode. If it lives up to its espoused design philosophy, it looks to me like it’ll be awesome but I haven’t tried it yet.

COSMIC, the new desktop in beta, is written from scratch in Rust. Cosmic the older version was a fork of Gnome. 2 different DEs, made by the same company with the same name. Different codebases.

Yeah. It’s improved by leaps and bounds since DXVK and VKD3D came into existence. Wine was already incredibly robust and powerful with like 20 years of development on it, so Proton combining Wine with those other 2 projects for better DirectX support and then also managing Wine prefixes and tweaks automatically brought us from “if you’re persistent and tweak a lot of settings a good chunk of games work” to “most games just work”, and now even “if a game doesn’t work on Linux now it’s because the devs are blocking it actively”

And of course, Valve’s active financial support and direct contributions to all of the projects involved has improved the reliability and performance of all of the tech involved by leaps and bounds.

It’s the very nature of power. I don’t understand why people are still surprised by this stuff.

When Proton started, it was kind of a joke, killed the Steam Machine idea in large part because the game compatibility was so limited. A decade later, we have a multi billion dollar handheld PC market lead by the Steam Deck, a Linux handheld that can play tens of thousands of Windows games without issue, in some cases with better performance than their native platform.

Proton’s existence did not overlap the existence of the Steam Machine program, like at all. Proton’s initial release was on the 21st of August 2018. Steam Machines were first released in 2015 and had been delisted from Steam entirely by April 2018.

Wine existed back then, sure, but Steam Machines didn’t benefit from DXVK, VKD3D, or any of the myriad per-game and gaming-oriented tweaks that Valve and Codeweavers have made to Wine in the version bundled with Proton. For most people, the prospect of using Wine on a Steam Machine was a huge pain at best. Valve’s official position at the time was that they were helping pay for Linux ports of games.

It helps if your server can decode AV1, but you never need it to encode to AV1. Basically the main usecase for transcoding AV1 would be burning in ASS formatted subtitles, commonly used for anime. If you keep your anime in other codecs then you shouldn’t need to transcode AV1 ever unless you add more clients into the mix that can’t handle AV1 natively.

For what it’s worth, I use an Intel N100 with quicksync, and that can decode AV1 because it’s 12th gen. Works great for me.

The DLP shutter glasses are wireless, for what it’s worth. The projector inserts solid red frames to for the glasses to sync to.

Yeah. Generally for 3D you’ll want a DLP projector, plus active shutter glasses. They still make the glasses, you can pick them up on Amazon. They go for about $20 per pair.

The magic words to search for are “DLP 3D glasses” ideally you want ones that support 144Hz, but most of them do. 144Hz in 3D comes out to 3 flashes per eye, per frame, at 24fps, which generally will give you the smoothest experience. For 60fps content like video games it should go down to 120Hz, which is still one flash per eye per frame.

You’re correct. Projectors still mostly support 3D, so if you’re into 3D that’s the best way to watch stuff or game in 3D nowadays, outside of VR headsets, of course.

About 20 years ago, I wanted to add recording studio capabilities to my gaming PC but I was a broke high schooler, so I installed Ubuntu Studio as a dual boot option alongside Windows XP.

Anyway, I installed Arch on my laptop about 3 years later in college using the Arch Book, which was essentially the same as the wiki’s install guide at the time.

I had a dual boot system with Windows and Mac (it was a hackintosh) as my home recording studio Pro Tools/gaming PC for about a decade, then my Windows install had to be wiped due to an issue I had, so I decided to just wipe the whole thing and go single boot with Linux Mint, so now I use Reaper for recording and Steam + Heroic + emulators are meeting all my gaming needs. I use the Xanmod kernel and the kisak-mesa PPA, and since making the switch I’ve upgraded essentially all of the parts in my PC, which is good because I first built it in 2013

Yeah, exactly. I was trained on Pro Tools and Ardour worked OK and made sense to me, but Reaper feels more intuitive to use than either Pro Tools or Ardour.

Audio Engineer here.

You want Reaper. It’s a $60 program but you can keep it in trial mode for as long as you want till you’ve got the money. Reaper has lots of tutorials available on YouTube and can use industry-standard VST plugins, plus it has enough plugins bundled in to get you started.

Yes, hardware transcoding = using hardware acceleration for decoding/re-encoding the video files. CPUs do it pretty slowly (or they use a ton of electricity if they’re fast enough to do it quickly) but the special decoder/encoder chips on GPUs (including integrated graphics GPUs) can handle that sort of task no sweat in most cases as long as you’ve got it preperly configured.

Okay, so like a GIF Wrangler