Right. GCC -f optimizations are basically like “how hard are we going to try to be clever” and are, I believe, orthogonal to the actual instructions used. Machine dependent args start with -m, like -march or -mavx etc.

I feel guilty about it, but I appreciate the monthly pass. I played EUIV for exactly one month, at a total cost of like $7 (got the base game for free at some point) with all the bells and whistles. It seemed like a good compromise because you’d have to pay it for years at this point to cover the DLC out right, but it is a disgusting level of rent seeking behavior.

Now it bothers me that I’d need to put another $7-$10 into the machine to access those saves, but not as much as if I’d throw down hundreds of dollars on it to own the content for a 10 year old game.

For XP, the machine KVM presents as may be too new, but that isn’t an issue with non-virtualized QEMU.

TIOBE is weighted toward languages that have existed for a long time by virtue of counting lines written / skilled engineers etc. but the speed at which Rust is climbing that list is a better indicator. Also, a lot of the languages above it wouldn’t be appropriate for anything like a DE.

But you’re right, it’s hyped, I just think the hype is real.

This is a weird take. Rust is very popular and is the current heir apparent to C for systems level stuff. It’s a great choice to start a new DE/toolkit.

As for the rest, you’re right the end user doesn’t care about the language their graphical app is in, but the developers fielding their bug reports and making fixes/features sure do.

That trackpad was a game changer for playing KB+M games with a controller, but to be honest sometimes I really miss the right joystick. The trackpad can fake it, but it’s not the same.

If they ever do another standalone controller I’d want it to be like a screen-less Deck. Both joysticks and trackpads and a couple more grips.

Sims 3 was my favorite for the open world and freelance jobs too. Was nice to be able to secure an income without disappearing off the map for 8 hours a day. Was surprised 4 didn’t follow through on that as much but I only played it a little.

My wife plays Sims with cheats all the time and I get that it becomes a fancy interactive dollhouse in that case, but to me the game is all about that progression from bachelor in a one room box to old family man in a mansion.

John Carmack, author of the Doom engine, is a long time Linux user and for a while the policy was to open source the idTech engines once they had moved on.

However, Doom was hugely popular on its own before this, and was actually more pivotal for making Windows a gaming platform (over DOS).

The reason it runs everywhere is a combination of it’s huge popularity, it’s (now) open source and it’s generally low system requirements.

It does that everywhere, even on non .deb distros.

One thing I’d like to suggest is get most of their forward facing apps as Flatpak and let them install software that way instead of using the system package manager (even if it has a GUI). This jibes with others suggesting an immutable base system.

Obviously this may be more of a concern for older kids, but my kid started with Linux and it did fine… Right up until Discord started breaking because it was too old and they didn’t want to tangle with the terminal. Same thing when Minecraft started updating Java versions. Discord and Prismlauncher from Flatpak (along with Proton and Steam now) would have kept them happier with Linux.

As for internet, routers come with parental controls these days too, which have the added advantage of being able to cover phones (at least while not on mobile data). Setting the Internet to be unavailable for certain devices after a certain time on school nights may be a more straightforward route than DE tools.

This isn’t a benchmark of those systems, it’s showing that the code didn’t regress on either hardware set with some anecdotal data. It makes sense they’re not like for like.

I used (u)xterm for like 20 years before discovering that Konsole is solid and beautiful. My whole tiling setup is backed up with KDE apps now.

I’m also glad to see Wayland tools maturing. The hand wringing about lack of X forwarding was always FUD and a nonsense reason to cling to the fiction that X works well over a socket and justify all the shitty compromises X made to remain compatible with it.

The Windows scheduler is so stupid chip manufacturers manipulate the BIOS/ACPI tables to force it to make better decisions (particularly with SMT) rather than wait on MS to fix it.

Linux just shrugs, figures out the thread topology anyway and makes the right decisions regardless.

Nobody running a FOSS third party launcher is an average end user. Also, people routinely add flags to typical games even on Windows (e.g. -skiplauncher)… It’s really not that big a deal.

Really? I use Arch native Steam and Proton no problem. You either use steam-runtime (uses built in Ubuntu runtime) or steam-native (expects Arch packages) but there is a meta package for pulling the runtime deps. Both have worked for me.

That said, Flatpak has come in clutch for me as well on the Steam Deck, and for things like Prism Launcher (modded Minecraft launcher) where you want to juggle multiple Java versions without needing to run archlinux-java between switching packs.

I dunno about ethos, but I do know Pine can also make false claims. I bought a Rock64 years back and they touted it as 4k60 video capable with an integrated GPU and that wasn’t realistic at all. The software stack was still very immature on release. From their own wiki, years later, it still doesn’t work and key parts still haven’t been upstreamed.

High five, I also drove a manual '98 Civic that was my dad’s. Put another 150k miles on it, drove it longer than he did and, up until it’s transmission died, I never spent more than a couple hundred on repairs at a time. Ended up donating it a couple years ago, but damn good car indeed.

Honestly, I use Arch (btw) but after living on Fedora for a while, when I returned I started using podman over AUR for some stuff. If a package is going to pull a bunch of weird dependencies, or I want to easily migrate it later, it’s just so much easier to keep it containerized.