CalcProgrammer1

Installing postmarketOS on it to turn it into a full fledged pocket PC. It now runs all your favorite Linux-compatible desktop applications except for those that don't have ARM64 versions, and even then emulation layers can fix this. It's not 100% as I haven't been able to get Steam working (it starts but errors out before the login screen) though I have seen some people have success on other distros so maybe it's a pmOS/Alpine/musl specific issue even though I was using distrobox with Debian to actually run it.

The best one right now is the OnePlus 6/6T, which has a relatively modern SoC.

The only mistake Billy made is giving anything to AdBlock Plus, the people who have sided WITH the ads, instead of uBlock Origin, the true MVPs of the ad blocking world. I guess uBlock doesn't accept donations unfortunately, but still, ABP is shady and I would not support them.

Honestly, Mozilla has been peddling adware for a long time now. The writing has been on the wall. It started with putting sponsored links to Amazon on the Firefox home screen, then the shitty Pocket acquisition and the stupid featured stories/recommendations garbage, then the full screen Mozilla VPN ads...Firefox has been adware for a while. Use a fork that removes the bullshit. Switch to LibreWolf.

I use Fennec F-Droid on Android and LibreWolf on Linux/Mac/Windows.

Amazon and eBay are my primary places to get electronics/maker parts. I don't buy them for cosplay, but I expect the things you're looking for are available from either and likely for a better price than Adafruit. If you can tolerate the wait, AliExpress.

I don't use AliExpress often but for the commodities you want to stock your workshop with, it's often cheaper per unit with cheap shipping so if you want to order a bunch of something it's usually the way to go. Pre-COVID, clone Arduino Nanos were like $2 each on eBay but now they're like $5 at minimum. On AliExpress you can still ocasionally get them cheaper. I needed a bunch of them for a project and had exhausted my pre-COVID stash so I got a bunch on AliExpress and they work fine. For the less common stuff I'd not waste the time and just get it from somewhere with faster shipping. eBay often has free shipping on stuff while Amazon needs a $35 minimum if you don't have Prime, though I do make use of the free Prime trials and stock up when I get the offer.

I just donate by whatever means the project offers. Sometimes it's paypal, sometimes patreon, sometimes GitHub sponsorship, sometimes something else like OpenCollective. Read the readme or homepage of the project to see what options they take.

Unlockable bootloader, removable battery, headphone jack, being assembled with SCREWS rather than GLUE.

Why support closed source software that hassles you when 7-zip is open source and works great?

Recommendations and App Promotions sound an awful lot like ads to me. Showing me things I didn't ask for that you wish to sell me....that's called advertising and I don't care what dumb name you call it, they're still ads. Show me only what I actually want to see - the stuff I explicitly choose to pin to my personalized Start menu.

By that logic pencils are banned since you can plagiarize copyrighted text with them. Can't teach kids to write, because writing is a tool of piracy.

I have a ROG Ally and a Steam Deck. The Steam Deck experience is miles ahead. Windows is such a limitation on these handheld devices (and dare I say PC gaming in general). SteamOS is the real MVP behind the Steam Deck, it makes everything feel seamless.

The Ally feels like a crappy ASUS launcher stapled on top of an unoptimized Windows desktop, since that's exactly what it is.

Also, the ASUS ROG Ally controls are nowhere near as nice as the Deck's. The Deck sticks feel better. The touchpads allow for mouse control.

Get the Deck.

I have both, mainly got the Ally as an experiment. The Deck is absolutely the way to go. Windows is a dreadful experience in general, but especially so on a handheld. No touchpads means awful mouse control, but Windows means an OS designed around mouse control. Asus' software feels like a big hack (because it is) haphazardly glued on top of a stock Windows desktop. Steam Big Picture works OK but the Steam menus are limited in functionality compared to using them on SteamOS and the Deck. Meanwhile, the Deck is an incredibly polished product and the SteamOS interface is controller-first. You can still go to the desktop and use it as a PC, but you won't wind up there accidentally like you will on the Ally. The SteamOS gaming mode is built around operating with a controller and everything works well.

As for running Linux on the Ally? It is doable, but the experience is nowhere as good as the Deck. No seamless sleep and resume< issues with button mapping, limited tweaking of power limits, and more. Just get a Deck OLED and be happy.

This...actually seems like a good use of AI? I generally think AI is being shoehorned into a lot of use cases where it doesn't belong but this seems like a proper place to use it. It's serving a specific and defined purpose rather than trying to handle unfiltered customer input or do overly generic tasks,

Hopefully they can find a new home. I am ashamed of GitLab. I used to love it but they get worse and worse by the day. Maybe Codeberg would be a better home. Nintendo can't kill this, there will always be new places to host software and it's open source.

It's absolutely ridiculous they took it down even though Nintendo didn't DMCA the Suyu project directly. Shitty corporate cover-our-ass behavior at its finest.

GitLab used to be awesome when it was the place to go after MS bought out GitHub. They had premium access for all public projects under a FOSS license and top-tier CI. Then as time went on, they began pulling support for various functions in a very Microsoftian EEE sort of way. First requiring credit cards fir new users to access the CI, then taking away the CI almost entirely except for a practically useless monthly allotment, then taking away the premium access for public FOSS licensed projects. If I were migrating today I would not have chosen GitLab, but it is where I settled after leaving GitHub and my projects have grown to depend on GitLab CI even if I'm now forced to run my own runners due to the extreme nerfs they've done to the hosted CI. I mirrored OpenRGB to Codeberg, but since the CI pipelines depend on GitLab I don't see Codeberg becoming the main hub anytime soon unless they can execute GL CI configs. Sad to see how far GitLab has fallen though, it is unrecognizable from what it used to be as far as support for FOSS prohects goes, especially given how GitLab itself started as a FOSS project.

Is it so hard to just pay using credit cards? Why do we need dystopian biometric nonsense feeding the data mines in order to pay for food? Paying for stuff is a solved problem. Fuck everything about this.

If you have to panic because a competitor makes a good game maybe you should reconsider why you're a game developer in the first place. If it's not to make the best games you can make, you shouldn't be a game developer. I'm guessing the developers panicking aren't the ones who pour their heart and soul into every game they make.

AMD's integrated GPUs have been getting really good lately. I'm impressed at what they are capable of with gaming handhelds and it only makes sense to put the same extra GPU power into desktop APUs. This hopefully will lead to true gaming laptops that don't require power hungry discrete GPUs and workarounds/render offloading for hybrid graphics. That said, to truly be a gaming laptop replacement I want to see a solid 60fps minimum at at least 1080p, but the fact that we're seeing numbers close to this is impressive nonetheless.

Ubuntu - It was my first distro and I loved it for many years after 6.06. However, it slowly shifted from a very community focused distro ("Linux for human beings" was the original slogan) to a very corporate distro with lots of in-house bullshit, CLAs, and partially-closed projects that seems to focus on profit and business over actual human beings. I correlate this move to around the time when it became purple rather than brown. Snap sucks, Mir sucks, Unity sucks, integrating Amazon and music store paid bullshit sucks. Just no. Move to Debian.

Manjaro - It's Arch, but with incompetence!

Red Hat - Do you enjoy paying licensing fees for a Linux distro that very likely violates the open source licenses it uses? RHEL is for you! Just remember not to share the code! Sharing is most certainly NOT caring!

RGB software is such garbage. Aura sucks, Synapse sucks, iCue sucks, Polychrome really really really sucks, RGB Fusion sucks, they're all bloated garbage designed to lock you into an ecosystem and produced by the lowest tier of programmers around apparently as they are unstable and usually incredibly bloated messes.

This nonsense is why I started working on what eventually became OpenRGB.

Mixes spaces and tabs in the same line

Honestly, I don't need my FOSS stuff from Steam. Steam is a great platform, but I'd rather get open software from an open platform (meaning my distro's package manager, or flathub as a fallback). Let FOSS support FOSS. Let Steam be a way to keep the proprietary stuff contained in its own walled garden (even if the walls on said garden aren't very high).

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.

I can understand a box with DisplayPort, USB, and power inputs as very few desktop PCs actually have a video- and power delivery-capable USB C port. I cannot understand the lack of controller features and HDR.

The death if the tower/server/workstation/supercomputer/etc. is a pretty bad take. Computers have been getting better for over half a century and these big machines still exist. As computing power grows, so do software demands. If we make a phone with the power of today's gaming PC we could make a gaming PC with the same technology many times more powerful, and games will take advantage of that. A modern smartphone of today can run PC games of the 2000's and maybe early 2010's with proper emulation. The Steam Deck can run most games released today. That doesn't mean demand for high end systems disappears.

It's more of "NVIDIA bad" than "AMD good". AMD does what is expected in the Linux world, to make open source drivers that are part of the Mesa project. That shouldn't be an amazing feat of awesomeness, that should just be standard procedure. However, when the competition is so horrifically bad at drivers on Linux, following the standard makes AMD look amazing. For what it's worth, I have an Intel Arc A770 on my Linux setup and it works great. Intel also follows the standard procedure of making their drivers open and part of the Mesa project. However, AMD has been in the graphics card (and driver) game for much longer and their drivers have a lot more optimization, plus Valve has put work into making AMD's drivers better for gaming workloads over the past several years (especially given the Steam Deck runs an AMD GPU). Hopefully Intel gets more performance parity with AMD in the Linux driver world as time goes on. It's definitely gotten much better since launch already.

As for NVIDIA, maybe NVK can make them even sort of useful without the nasty proprietary drivers but reverse engineered drivers are always going to take longer to get anywhere near the same performance of ones written based on actual official documentation.

There's always the "I'm not signing any NDA, fuck you" answer. The fact that he went along with their NDA says something. He could have said no. Open source thrives on openness, and NDAs are the complete and polar opposite of openness.

Make them play on your own field. If they're the ones coming to you, it's because they see value in what you offer so you have leverage. The fact that they have money is irrelevant.

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.

This should allow nouveau to reclock NVIDIA 2xxx and newer GPUs. Huge step forward for open source NVIDIA drovers and I've been testing this on my laptop for a few weeks now woth the rc kernels and the NVK driver and it's pretty impressive so far.

Sucks for the low level employees losing their jobs, but I can't possibly feel bad about Epic losing money. Garbage company that needs to lose their grip on the industry after the shit they pulled with Epic Game Store and buying up games/studios just to delist their games from Steam, axe the Linux support, and make them exclusives on the worst platform in gaming.

Only buy routers that have OpenWRT support, problem solved. Why trust your entire network and all of the data transferred over it to proprietary garbage?

The project maintainers repeatedly forget to renew their certificates, causing package upgrades to fail.

The project maintainers, in multiple past instances, have misconfigured their package manager resulting in essentially a DDoS of the AUR.

The packages are out of date vs. the upstream Arch ones, which often causes AUR packages intended for upstream Arch to break on Manjaro. Yet they consider the AUR a supported resource.

Project has had problems with mismanagement of funds in the past.

Despite all this, they seem to heavily focus on marketing, merch, and trying to sell preinstalled systems. Manjaro is in it for profit, not to make an awesome distro.

Doesn't really matter as long as the jack exists in the first place.

Youtube doesn't care about the collective "you" that is its namesake. It hasn't for over a decade. Itps all about the big studio level productions. It's no better than the mainstream television networks at this point.

Liking the new functionality so far! The spinner when clicking the upvote button is a huge improvement and lets you know that your upvote was actually received. I have noticed that some posts on my homepage show as expanded by default which is annoying (full size image/video instead of thumbnail) and this wasn't happening before.

Most gaming laptops these days don't do GPU switching anyways. They do render offloading, where the laptop display is permanently connected to the integrated GPU only. When you want to use the discrete GPU to play a game, it renders the game frames into a framebuffer on the discrete GPU and then copies the completed frame over PCIe into a framebuffer on the iGPU to then output it to the display. On Linux (Mesa), this feature is known as PRIME. If you have two GPUs and you do DRI_PRIME=1 , it will run the command on the second GPU, at least for OpenGL applications. Vulkan seems to default to the discrete GPU no matter what. My laptop has an AMD iGPU and an NVIDIA dGPU and I've been testing the new NVK Mesa driver. Render offloading seems to work as expected. I would assume the AMD Mesa driver would work just as well for render offloading in a dual AMD situation.

There's never a bad time to switch to Linux! The best time may have already passed, but the second best time is now!

tl;dr Alyssa Rosenzweig. Amazing news, she's been a driving force behind reverse engineered GPU driver project Panfrost as well as had part in the Apple M1 GPU driver. I was surprised to hear that she was leaving Collabora but it makes sense that she'd end up at Valve. Hoping for great things in the PC GPU space from her!