Both. I like the customizability and power of a desktop, but I like the portability of a laptop. If you can afford both, why not have both. I often have my laptop set up next to my desktop for browsing/chatting while gaming and I also often just take my laptop to game when I go to friends’ places. Also, they’re both PCs.

I mean, if GPUs launch with perfectly optimized drivers then driver UPDATES don’t matter, but drivers literally translate foreign nonsensical (to the GPU) shader code into instructions the GPU understands. Without them, your GPU is as useful as a brick. The driver situation is not there yet especially for NVIDIA GPUs. There’s a reason I run mesa-git, driver improvements absolutely do matter.

Native in this case means processor architecture, not OS. The Linux Steam is still x86/x86_64 code and to run it on an ARM system (even running Linux) will require an emulation layer. This adds substantial amounts of overhead, much more than Wine/Proton does for Windows games on Linux.

Mixes spaces and tabs in the same line

I would love to see gas stations putting in EV chargers, especially gas stations known for their food and snacks or travel stops that have restaurants because of the additional time taken to charge an EV vs. fill a gas car. Also it would be nice to see established companies run EV chargers that just let you pay with card at the “pump” like you do for gas rather than this app and account bullshit that all the mainstream networks have.

Hopefully this knocks down Tesla’s dominance in the charger ecosystem honestly, we need competition to take over that aren’t tied to a single vehicle manufacturer. Yes Tesla was going to open their network up to third party cars but they’re taking their sweet time in doing so. I hope competitors were able to swoop in and hire talent and take over broken contracts on abandoned charging station projects.

Mozilla is a for-profit company and is bound to enshittify just like any other for-profit company. Tracking, ads, and a focus on unnecessary bullshit like Pocket and recommendations have long indicated that Mozilla doesn’t give a shit about the user. They want to shove AI in the browser just like all the others. Unfortunately, the best browser is still Firefox, but at least use a privacy focused fork like LibreWolf that also strips Mozilla’s other bullshit away rather than using Firefox straight up.

Driver installation is really only a hassle for NVIDIA users. AMD and Intel GPUs simply work out of the box on most Linux distros these days (with the main issues being related to using slow moving distros that lack support for the newest hardware). Use a fast moving distro such as Arch and you likely won’t have any issues even with recent GPUs. Hopefully NVK will make the situation for NVIDIA cards better too, been testing it on my laptop and it’s starting to be viable for gaming.

Any dating app where both people have to “like”/“swipe right” each other should allow either side to initiate tbh or at least opt out of the stupid matchmaking system and accept all incoming matches.

I was on the dating apps last summer after having been out of the dating pool for 6 years and the current crop of apps are pretty awful for men (amd probably women as well, maybe for difderent reasons). When I used dating sites in the early/mid 2010s most sites let anyone initiate a conversation so you didn’t need to worry about the (usually paywalled) “like” system. These days literally everything is a Tinder clone and the only interaction you have with the app is like or dislike. I get why they did it because women receive so much bullshit from unsolicited messages, in my experience it devolved into just mashing the Like button over and over again blindly because it’s a shitty numbers game and the odds aren’t in your favor. There’s no sense reading through detailed profiles and making thoughtful decisions when it’s rare to get a match anyways. Easier to like every single profile and then be the one to filter out matches once they come in. If the harassment is going to primarily target women and women are the ones who need to be more selective in their matches, the dating apps should let women be the ones to pick matches, or better yet give each and every user a toggle that lets them accept matches from anyone, because that makes it easier to get over the hurdle of not receiving any matches at all.

I eventually gave in and paid for the Tinder upgrade that lets you like an unlimited amount of times. I just mindlessly mashed the like button until the queue was empty every day. Before long, matches were actually happening. Two months into that nonsense I actually got a perfect match (she sent the first message) and we’ve been together for 6 months now. I absolutely love her and I’m glad it worked out, but damn was dating on Tinder, Bumble, OKCupid, and POF a horrible experience all around. All owned by the absolutely dreadful Match.com now of course. The prospect of your perfect match being hidden behind a stupid loot box RNG style gacha system is absolute insanity, because that’s what it is. You have a limited number of likes and the profiles you get to see are seemingly picked at random.

The domestic social media companies are at the whims of the billionaire class which I would argue is just as bad for voter influence. Neither side wants you to vote in your best interest.

As a user and not as a government agent, why should I care? If anything, having a foreign government hoard my data and spy on me is better than the government that actually has jurisdiction over me. If I were posting things critical of my own government I would rather have a foreign government hoard that data than my own government. There’s a lot more of a chance that US data hoarding leads to action against US citizens than Chinese data hoarding.

I don’t see how this benefits average Americans in any way. This helps the government and corporations.

Squeekboard is where it’s at. By far my favorite onscreen keyboard for Linux and mainly because you can easily create your own layouts using .yaml files. I’m tired of virtual keyboards that omit keys needed for development and terminal use or shove them off to separate tabs. My custom Squeekboard layout fits my needs exactly and I’m pretty fast at typing on it (typing this on it now). I wish it were usable outside of Phosh, though tbf I haven’t tried. Between GNOME Mobile, KDE Plasma Mobile, and Phosh (Squeekboard), I choose Phosh primarily because of how much I like Squeekboard.

Except that in the case of VGA (and DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort) the i2c interface is intended for use over the cable. All of those ports have a pair of i2c pins and corresponding wires in their cables. The i2c interface is used for DDC/EDID which is how the computer can identify the capabilities and specifications of the attached display. DDC even provides some rarely-used control functionality. Probably the most useful of which is being able to control the brightness of the display from software. I use the ddcci module on Linux and it lets me control my desktop monitor brightness the same way a laptop would, which is great. I have no idea why this isn’t widely used.

Edit:

This i2c interface is widely used to control the lighting on modern graphics cards that have RGB lighting. We’ve spent a lot of time reverse engineering these chips and their i2c protocols for OpenRGB. GPU chips usually have more i2c buses than the cards have display connectors, so the RGB chip is wired to one of the unused buses. I think AMD GPUs tend to have 8 separate i2c buses but most cards only use 4 or 5 of them for display connectors. There is also an i2c interface present on RAM slots normally used for reading the SPD chip that stores RAM module specifications, timings, etc. This interface is also used for RAM modules with controllable RGB lighting.

Yeah, the lack of proper discoverability on i2c truly sucks. You have to just poke random addresses and hope for the best to see if an i2c device exists on the bus. It’s a great standard but I wish it would get updated with some sort of plug and play autodetection feature. Standardized device PID/VID system like USB and PCI would be acceptable or a standardized register that returns a part string. Anything other than blindly poking registers and hoping you’re not accidentally overvolting the CPU or whatever because the register on your expected device overlaps with the overvolt the CPU register on the same address of a different device.

Watched this the other day, great documentary! I played Oregon Trail 2 in school in the 90’s and we ended up getting it for our home PC. Nice to learn the history behind the game in such detail.

I mean, the open source driver already is out. The nouveau driver has been in the kernel for like a decade now. The userspace part has been in Mesa for just as long, though largely was unused due to nouveau not being able to use high clock speeds. That isn’t the case anymore, and since the beginning of the year you’ve been able to test drive the new NVK Vulkan driver on nouveau with GSP enabled to get actually reasonable performance in several select games. NVIDIA isn’t creating a new driver, they’re contributing to one that already exists. Since this particular patch set is so huge I don’t know it will make it into the next kernel release right away but this guy was the former nouveau maintainer, I expect he knows the necessary standards to get his code accepted.

I don’t really see why they would hire him to achieve this goal. He had already quit as maintainer. He was out of the picture unless he resigned specifically due to accepting an offer from NVIDIA, but if that was the case and they wanted Nouveau stopped then why is he now contributing a huge patchset? If they hired him and he quit nouveau they could’ve had him work on the proprietary driver or their own open out of tree kernel driver, but they specifically had him (or at least allowed him) to keep working on nouveau.

Also, if they really wanted to EEE nouveau into oblivion, they would need to get every single prominent nouveau, nova, and NVK developer on payroll simultaneously before they silence them all because once one gets silenced why would any of the others even consider an NVIDIA offer? Especially those already employed at Red Hat? It doesn’t really make sense to me as an EEE tactic.

What has been apparent over the past few years is that NVIDIA seems to be relaxing their iron grip on their hardware. They were the only ones who could enable reclocking in such a way that it would be available to a theoretical open source driver and they did exactly that. They moved the functionality they wanted to keep hidden into firmware. They had to have known that doing this would enable nouveau to use it too.

Also, they’re hopping on this bandwagon now that NVK is showing promise of being a truly viable gaming and general purpose use driver. Looking at the AMD side of things, they did the same thing back when they first started supporting Mesa directly. They released some documentation, let the community get a minimally viable driver working, and then poured official resources into making it better. I believe the same situation happened with the Freedreno driver, with Qualcomm eventually contributing patches officially. ARM also announced their support of the Panfrost driver for non-Android Linux use cases only after it had been functionally viable for some time. Maybe it’s a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them” but we’ve seen companies eventually start helping out on open drivers only after dragging their feet for years several times before.

I’m cautiously optimistic. While I could see NVIDIA hiring him to stifle nouveau development, it doesn’t really seem worth it when he already quit as maintainer and Red Hat is already working on nova, a replacement for nouveau. I got into Linux with Ubuntu 6.06 and remember the situation then. NVIDIA and ATI both had proprietary drivers and little open source support, at least for their most recent chipsets of the time. I was planning on building a new PC and going with an NVIDIA card because ATI’s drivers were the hottest of garbage and I had a dreadful experience going from a GeForce 4 MX420 to a Radeon X1600Pro. However, when AMD acquired ATI they released a bunch of documentation. They didn’t immediately start paying people to write FOSS Radeon drivers, but the community (including third party commercial contributors) started writing drivers from these documents. Radeon support quickly got way better. Only after there was a good foundation in place do I remember seeing news about official AMD funded contributors to the Mesa drivers. I hope that’s what we’re now seeing with NVIDIA. They released “documentation” in the form of their open kernel modules for their proprietary userspace as well as reworking features into GSP to make them easier to access, and now that the community supported driver is maturing the see it viable enough to directly contribute to.

I think the same may have happened with Freedreno and Panfrost projects too.

This is my cautious optimism here. I hope they follow this path like the others and not use this to stifle the nouveau project. Besides, stifling one nouveau dev would mean no other nouveau/nova/mesa devs would accept future offers from them. They can’t shut down the open driver at this point, and the GSP changes seem like they purposely enabled this work to begin with. They could’ve just kept the firmware locked down and nouveau would’ve stayed essentially dead indefinitely.

Cloud gaming is a plague. More fuel for the “you will own nothing and be happy” camp. Let it die. GeForce Now was at least one of the better options since you just use their servers to play games from your owned library, but the whole concept is a plague nonetheless. Let streaming nonsense die. Streaming from your own PC is the only streaming solution that doesn’t exist to weaken consumer ownership of their gaming experience.

Also fork the repos. Git makes duplicating a repository simple, and preserving history with a fork is way better than uploading a zip snapshot. For best results fork to GitLab, Bitbucket, Codeberg, etc. as well.