Doesn't Windows break dual booting semi-regularly? I've always avoided it as I've had friends get burned by this in the past. I guess I just keep different OSes on different drives, but that obviously isn't feasible for everyone.

I totally pulled a LTT and removed my kernel. >_< There was a "real time" kernel listed in apt, and I installed it because I was curious if it would reduce lock latency for a project I was working on. (I wasn't trying to solve a problem, just curious) It didn't and I figured it was probably a bad idea to leave it installed. So I did an apt remove, and the rest went something like this.

Apt: Are you sure you want to remove the your kernel? Y/N

Me: Oh jeez... I don't want to do that.

Motor Memory: Y

Apt: Are you really really sure? Your computer will not boot if you do this. Y/N

Me: Oh, crap! That's not what I meant to do. Definitely not!

Motor Memory: Y

Me: No! Why would my brain betray me!?

Fortunately this was on a PopOS machine, so I booted into the recovery partition. Even if fixing it only took a minute, I still felt very very dumb. >_<

I've been using Wayland daily for a few years (2020 at least?) on intel and AMD graphics and have had few complaints:

1. Some games didn't work right a few years ago. (Under Proton or otherwise. Haven't had issues for a while)
2. RenderDoc, a vital bit of graphics debugging software, works poorly on Wayland. (Easy fix is to force X11 for QT via QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb)
3. Had some issues with mixed integrated/NVidia graphics on a laptop I was using for a demo once.
4. Covering or otherwise hiding a Wayland window blocks a program's graphics thread. This is sometimes problematic.
5. VR development had issues a while ago? (This was for work. It just... stopped working at some point. Dunno if it was a Linux, SteamVR, or Unity3D issue. My work machine mostly runs Windows 10 now as a result. Oh well.)
6. Screen recording didn't work well a while ago... (continued)

Overall, it's just worked great though!

My anti-complaints:

1. Mixed refresh rates on monitors "just works" now. (I have a 1080@144 for gaming, and a 4k@60 for work)
2. Video frames don't have half drawn content. (ex: when resizing windows), except on XWayland stuff
3. Video tearing has basically disappeared.
4. Video timing issues seem to be improved.
5. Input handling for keyboard layouts has improved.
6. Screen recording in Wayland is way better than it ever was on X11 now. I do this a lot to share gamedev stuff I'm working on.

Absolutely love it! I've donated hundreds of dollars to the Gnome foundation.

I like that practically all of the OS functionality is behind either super+seach or the quick settings menu. I love how powerful the overview is, and all hidden behind a single key press. I like that asking "Is X possible?" is immediately answerable, and 95% of the time it's right in the first place I think to look. I like the trackpad gestures and workspaces on my laptop where I don't have multiple large screens. I like that it has very little need for system tray icons which are clunky, inconsistent, and ugly. (Ex: Discord can only be quit from it's tray icon... -_-)

I'm not a DE power user apparently, but I'm certainly not the mythical "lowest common denominator" that Gnome supposedly caters to either. I do a lot of programming in C/asm/, and write plenty of code involving lots of esoteric math. I don't have much use for Python for instance, but I don't think it's "dumbed down" either. :p

KDE (and Windows to a similar extent) always has way too much "stuff" it wants to show you, 90% of it I'll never use. Every window toolbar is chock full of icons, and so many actions trigger popups, notifications, or dialogs that have little purpose. It's all terribly distracting and annoying. Still, I've donated hundreds of dollars to KDE foundation as well since it's an important part of the Linux ecosystem. I don't use it, but that doesn't mean I hate it, and I see no reason why it shouldn't flourish too. Open Source is not a competition.

Wayland is great! Except for all list of not-a-bugs that I'd like to see fixed. Still, I'm not going back to X, so take that how you will.

What are the not-a-bugs? Things like covering up a Wayland window will block it's rendering thread indefinitely with no way to detect it happens to handle it. This can lock up some games, or cause you to time out in a networked application. Some Wayland core folks don't want applications to know if their window is visible or not because it's mild information about a user's attention that should be private. Every game dev on the other hand is asking "WTF!?" as it causes their games to break randomly.

Another mild example is that windows cannot be raised except by the user or by launching them. This is supposed to be a mild security precaution so a program can't pop up a legitimate looking dialog over another application and trick the user. Realistically it means that applications can't open and focus URL in your web or file browser. Instead they have to give you a notification telling you "Firefox is Ready" and make you do it manually.

A lot of this is slowly (painfully?) changing, and the adversarial nature is a bit frustrating. Wayland fixes so many little things that I find it well worth it though, and I say that as a game developer frustrated by many of the core design decisions.

I've been using it for a few years now, and it fixes a lot of little issues I have with X11, and at this point brings very few of its own. ALTHOUGH, I don't have any Nvidia GPUs, and people seem to think it works for crap on them. I keep hearing "Ah, this will finally fix it!", but I don't know what the actual status is. You have the hardware you have, so unless you are going to buy something different to try Wayland... eh... I guess it never hurts to try. It's pretty trivial to toggle on and off.

Hmmm. So I think I posted on Reddit maybe a half dozen times ever? I didn't get the appeal. It kinda felt like shouting into a thunderstorm... I'm not sure I "get" Lemmy either, though it feels more like talking in a crowded room than everyone shouting at a cloud. :p More seriously though, I've had a few interesting conversations here, but miss the feel of forums of the 2000's where people just talked about stuff that they were making. Lemmy feels like everyone is striking up a conversation, but still trying to be careful about talking about their own interests because that's "self promotion". :-\ I dunno, maybe I'm looking for something that just doesn't exist anymore.

Vanilla Gnome. It's simple/boring, and I like that. It seems like most people that like Gnome don't care that it's not a poweruser DE, and aren't excited to talk about it either.

RC stuff, but only kinda? My dad got me into micro helicopters about a decade ago. I now have several dozen planes, drones, helis, etc. Not to mention multiple RC radios, batteries, chargers, and FPV goggles. Absolutely love it, though. To be fair, it's been a few thousand dollars over a decade. It ads up sure... but quite a bit less than I spend on video games, and more satisfying. :)

I really like plain "boring" vanilla Gnome. It's straightforward, I like it's workflow, it does everything I need it too, and looks nice too. I'm not a fan of "power user" UIs as I feel like they have too many features I'll never use filling them up. You can always get more programs to do more things anyway. Like I use compilers and disassemblers all the time, but I'm not upset that Gnome doesn't ship with those features built in when I'm in some weird 1% of users that need them. On the other hand, I think KDE is important to the ecosystem too, and I donate $100 a year to both the Gnome and KDE projects.

There are a few directory structures I have memorized, like my programming projects for instance. For everything else, I use the GUI. That's what it's there for. Mixing and match to get the best of both worlds. Some handy tips:

• xdg-open will act like clicking on a file in the GUI, and is an easy way to open folders from the terminal when you want to browse them.
• Use sshfs or even just whatever is built into your desktop environment to connect to remote servers and browse them
• Most terminals let you drag files or folders into them to paste their paths

I bought a System76 Lemur a few years ago. It has a pretty standard ultra-book form factor, but is pretty light, and the battery life was phenomonal. I regularly got 20+ hours on a single charge when doing light development work. The IPS screen was good, the trackpad was nice, the keyboard was ok, and the speakers are... well, completely terrible. I never really had any software issues on it running Pop. Maybe it would get stuck coming out of suspend every few months or so? I liked it a lot as an upgrade from my 2013 MacBook Air.

BUT....

Support was pretty awful, and I'm not sure I'd recommend getting one because of it unfortunately. :( Out of the box, the ctrl key was bad and would unclip with a nasty "crunch" noise. I had to send it in to get that fixed, though it was pretty painless. Then a few months later the wifi card died, and I had to send it in again. There was a lot of back and forth to get it fixed that time. Then as it was about to got out of warranty it died again. This time was like pulling teeth. I had to triple check things and send them logs multiple times, each time with a turnaround of several days. It took weeks for them to finally say "sounds like a hardware issue, what would you like us to do?". I was flabergasted. It was still in warranty, why would you even ask that?! I spent several weeks trying to convince them my in warranty device needed repairs and they wanted to know if I wanted it fixed?! It took 6 weeks in total to get it fixed, and it turned out that it was a bad connector on the motherboard causing the issues the whole time. When I got it back it was missing a couple screws and the power supply. They basically called me a liar. -_- A couple weeks ago it died completely and won't power on anymore. I chatted with support again, but they just started giving me the same run-around. I gave up.

I pre-ordered an AMD Framework back in March. Now I'm kinda grumpy because I have no laptop and I bought one that might not ship for another month or two. I wasn't too worried if the AMD Framework had some early adopter issues as the Lemur still worked when I put in the pre-order. Grrr. -_- My old 2013 MacBook Air is still in pristine condition though... Considering just putting Linux on that to use for a few months.

Yeah, I make a comfortable living doing software, and having kids didn't work out. So I give out a few hundred bucks a year spread across the likes of Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, and some one off donations to smaller projects that end up saving me some time. Free software costs me more than proprietary software. Haha. (Well, unless I factor in the software I use for work... Then not even close O_o)

I get the impression that maybe the money sent to Mozilla might be a waste though. :-\

People keep saying this, but X forwarding seems to work just fine with XWayland. I just tried a handfull of X programs between my machines, and neither are running X11. I don't use it everyday to know the gotchas, but there you go. Programs that use shared memory pixel buffers (everything that isn't xeyes realistically) even run better than I remember now that I have gigabit. >_< It's still a way worse experience than VNC or RDP though.

OBS Studio mostly. It's not the most convenient for a quick screencap, but I can record 720p@60 fps video downscaled and resampled from my 1080p@144hz monitor and it just kinda works fine. The other nice feature of OBS is that you can have it recording all the time and then press a button to dump the last few seconds when something interesting happens. Handy when trying to get interesting clips of my game. For quick recording I usually just use Kooha or the built in Gnome one.

I was certainly behind the curve here, but Horizon Zero Dawn! I was expecting some vagely Zelda like adventure RPG (and it was), but the story was so much more compelling than I expected. What a memorable game! I even got a second hand PS4 to play the sequel on... which I haven't for like 6 months now. >_< (Too many other things to do!)

Well... they don't like the design of a "system tray". To be fair, it's a very Windows centric idea, and the notion that they must provide one because Windows has one seems... similarly questionable to me too. Speaking personally I hate the idea, and always have. It's a real dumpster fire because:

• Lots of drivers (on Windows) assume you don't know how to launch programs, and force a permanent launch shortcut on you.
• Programs assume you don't understand how to minimize or hide a window, and put themselves in the tray instead. (launchers, chat programs, etc)
• Some programs seem to use them just to put their logo on the screen. You can't really do anything with the tray icon.
• Few icons match stylistically, and even on Windows, they don't match the system style. (White icons on a white taskbar? FFS)
• Programs often don't provide an option to disable their tray icons, and it's rare that I want them.

I guess I found the lack of them to be a breath of fresh air when I first tried Gnome 3 a few years ago. The current iteration doesn't quite work though... 99% of the time I just want an option to kill the damn things, but I've have had some programs that only provide functions through the system tray. It's dumb, and I hate it, but it is what it is.

Hmm. So as a different perspective, I joined because people were talking about it as a Reddit alternative. Reddit never clicked with me as it just felt like a whirlpool feeding into a meat-grinder. I figured I'd give this other thing a try, and it's has felt more like a ye-olde forum where I can actually say things and get responses back. Though discussions still don't seem to have a lot of longevity. Still, it's kinda nice, and I'll stick around for a bit. :)

I'm not here for the memes or news though... So I don't really have any experience with the issues the OP says, and I'm probably some weird minority?

Hmm. I still have my old 2013 MBA that I've used with Fedora, but it's an HD 4000 IIRC. I feel you on Apple's locked down stance to repairs. It was ultimately what pushed me off of OS X. I needed a newer laptop in 2020, and they only sold hardware with non-upgradable RAM and SSDs. So long and thanks for all the fish... I had already replaced my desktop machine with Linux a few years earlier. I used the Mac 70% as a Unix machine anyway, so it was a pretty comfortable transition.

My Air worked great as a stand-in laptop when my System76 Lemur died last summer. Honestly I was blown away by how perfectly usable it still was for basic tasks. Parallel stuff like compiling was slow, but single threaded stuff still ran just great. Heck, I was even using it again yesterday to test OS X builds of my game on older hardware and it ran like a champ.

Hrm... I suppose I spent 15 years making other people's games first. >_< More seriously, just start with small stuff. Make a simple 2D game with a something like the Love framework or Pico8. Then try to scale up a bit or use something a bit more powerful. If you are really want to make a game solo, then the best thing you can do is learn to control your scope. You'll never be able to be good at every part of making games, so figure out what parts you want to work on and figure out how to make a game around those skills.

You also don't have to make do it alone. You can hire out art, programming, sound, music, writing... really anything. Most "solo" devs do that to some extent. Also try and seek out your local gamedev community. Asking online is fine, but you'll get more out of an in person conversation with someone who's done it before.

Lastly, game jams. There are smaller game jams going on all the time, but the big one is the global game jam in January. I've always liked that one because there are always new people. In my experience, fresh gamedevs are always perfectly welcome. You'll have someone else on the team that can rough out the structure for you, then you just need to apply what you already know as a software developer to fill in some blanks. People also like to do role bending at jams too. Programmers will try making art, artists will try making music, and sound people will try programming. Jam games are usually bad, so nobody will expect anything you make to be any good, but people generally have a blast doing it anyway. :) I like to rope people into making NES games every year because even as experienced game devs they are so sure they can't write C code, let alone for something 40 years old, certainly not in 48 hours! They do just fine once they dig in. :D -> https://www.slembcke.net/nes/

Anecdotally Windows is the only platform I've used where printing (and scanning) didn't tend to "just work". The only issue I've had printing under Linux was with a second hand printer my dad got that we couldn't get to print from any computer. (shrug)

Oooh. So I keep a Dell Mini 10 (1GB RAM, ~1GHz Atom) around with Haiku on it. It's brilliant! The UI is super snappy even on such an old machine, and I can even run pretty modern software on it. I used it yesterday to work on my website a bit. :)

The way Unity announced such a big hostile change was executed unimaginably poorly. I'm not even going to say you are incorrect as they clarified it to include reinstalls, then reclarified it to be just the initial install. At the same time, they announced that the way they would bill it is by guessing how many installs you have using a "proprietary algorithm" and charging you based on that. So... everybody is wrong because they don't intend to tell people how they actually count anything. The details seem really important, and they still don't seem to know what they are. (eyeroll)

I do game dev, and I've been loving VSCode. I used to use a mishmash of stuff, but VSCode can do kinda everything. Working on retro-dev C/asm for NES or Genesis? Lua projects? Shaders? Debugging a native Linux/SDL game? Doing some math in a Julia notebook? Unity3D development? Working on Windows/Mac? The answer is VSCode to all! I still use vim for some light stuff or working on remote machines, but meh... VSCode has nice defaults for me without having to fiddle.

For my native Linux gamedev, I've just been using the MS Cmake and Cpp-tools extensions. They work great, and you can script up the rest with actions. The debugger isn't great, but it's convenient and good enough for simple crashes. I switch to GDB when things get interesting though. I suppose I have an extension for shaders too, but it's just syntax highlighting.

Looking forward to giving VRR a shot again. Last time I tried a couple years ago was pretty underwhelming on a couple different machines. Some games worked well with it, but a lot of software felt subtly broken. A lot of weird micro-stuttering and stuff just not feeling smooth even when the average framerate was high compared to boring synced 144 hz.

Hrm. Skim ahead if you already know some of this... So say you have a running program XYZ that loads libUseful.so to do useful things. Now you run some updates and libUseful.so gets replaced with the new version. Because of how files on Unix work, the old version still exists on the disk until XYZ closes it, but any new program will load the new version. So things generally "just work" when the system is updated in place, but on the rare occasion causes weird problems. Fedora (from the GUI) chooses to run updates during reboot to prevent the rare, weird problems. If you update from the command line, it just does them in place. Kernel updates always require a reboot to apply though.

Sounds neat story summary anyway. :)

How is your experience with UE on Linux? I do a lot of Unity stuff (VR) for work, and it's basically been in limbo for what seems like a decade now. Performance in the editor is awful, there's still a bunch of missing functionality like the graphics debugger, and VR support comes and goes (that's not to surprising... a niche of a niche). At the moment my work machine is back on Windows because of it. :( Extra annoying when all my data analysis tools are on Linux. -_-

I've been building a game on Linux too, but I've just been writing it in C. >_< I really dislike working with Unity...

Huh, that's good if surprising. My problem with UE has always been that I'm curious, but have no projects I'd want to use it for. All my work stuff is Unity, and unlikely to change, and all my personal projects are too small. Good to know if I come across another UE opportunity though.

I've been running Pop since 2018 (I think?) and have had few issues. It currently pinned to the LTS of Ubuntu while they focus on their home grown Cosmic DE. They still update Kernel/Mesa versions though. Having never really "distro hopped" I put Fedora on a couple of machines when upgrading a couple months ago. I 90% can't tell the difference. The new Gnome stuff is nice, and Wayland by default is nice. I'd say it's hard to go wrong with either. Though Arch is more of an "enthusiast" Linux in my mind. Like something you'd have strong opinions about. Any particular reason to move away from it?

Yeah... I'm really conflicted about it. I think my Lemur was a lemon, and I'd be perfectly happy with it if I never had to deal with support. It's not secret that the hardware is rebranded, and what they do is to make the firmware/software work well. That part was honestly great! Their also pretty RTR friendly and publish a lot of information about taking things apart and whatnot. On the other hand... I'm not equipped to fix a motherboard, and why would I want to when it's still in warranty? Spending weeks to convince them that the hardware did in fact fail was... Augh! Having it returned without the power supply and missing screws, then being told I was mistaken was straight up insulting. :(

For as grumpy about RTR as Apple is today, in the past at least I found their service to be pretty excellent. On multiple occasions I got free repairs or battery replacements on machines that were out of warranty and frankly just... worn out. The one time I actually had to send one off for repair it was back on my desk in a matter of days. I haven't been their customer in 10 years, and it sounds like it's probably changed though. (shrug)

I pre-ordered the 13" AMD, and here's my 2 cents: In 2013 I bought a MacBook Air. The i7 version was pretty decent for dev, and it had all the other ultrabook niceties (small, light, all day battery, etc). I was still happily using it in 2020, though it was starting to show it's age. In 2023, Apple still makes MacBook Airs in the same form factor. They look almost identical. Several thousand days of active use mine is practically still in mint condition too. If I could pay 2/3rds the price of a new one to upgrade the internals+screen I would totally have done that! I don't expect to change out the modular IO much, but it is nice that I have the option to get an SD card reader or to choose the port layout to match my desk. I've also got what I need to make a magnetic charging adapter for it, so that's awfully nice. So is it worth the extra cost? Maybe not, but I'm an idealist sometimes, and I like their ideals.

I have, but it doesn't show the MS extensions like the C or CMake tools which is kind of a dealbreaker. None of the alternatives really work well enough in my experience. I'm fine with opting out of the telemetry.

I'm pretty happy with "Console" myself. It works exactly like I expect it to, and it's new look is pretty clean. I thought "Terminal" was fine too. I use dozens of terminals a day when working, but I suppose I'm not enough of a power user to care to configure them. :)

Depends on what you want to get and how you use them. I have racing drones with batteries that only last 4 minutes, and a few planes that last 30-60 minutes. Lipos haven't improved radically in the last decade, but they are a lot better than nickel batteries from a few decades ago though.

Ah racing yeah. I had a friend that was into that, and it seems to get pretty spendy. I do a lot of scratch built planes, so it's quite a bit cheaper I think. Even a "spendy" store bought plane tends to only be $200 - $300. Racing drones cost about as much, but I don't really race them, and rarely break them anymore.

Yup, don't. People already covered why. I will add that I tried learning dvorak for quite a while and it didn't stick until I went cold turkey. It was very frustrating hunting and pecking for a couple days, but I made pretty quick progress. IIRC I was back up to 20-30 wpm after a week which was "usable" at least, and back to 60-70 wpm after a month. I had regular wrist pain before switching, and it was basically gone after. I don't think it helped my typing speed. Like I can do 90 in bursts for a bit longer, but generally I "cruise" much slower than that. ;)

More or less yeah. My PS5 controller has stopped working via bluetooth (on basically all my machines) until I applied a firmware patch using a Windows only tool. Other than that, it's been my preferred controller, and the PS4 controller was before that. I don't like the internal lithium ion batteries in them though. I've had to replace 3 of them between the 2 controllers in the ~8 years I've had them. Xbox controllers just take regular batteries with is pretty handy. Though I've had the same suddenly-stopped-working-on-bluetooth-until-you-update-the-firmware issue on those as well. -_-

I had a 10th gen S76 Lemur. The hardware was a mixed bag. Chassis was nice and light (compared to Apple), but enameled so the edges eventually chipped. Keyboard/trackpad were average. Speakers were awful... Battery life was excellent like usually got around 20 hours on a charge (and often more with a little effort!). I also had a number of hardware failures and dealing with their support was pretty terrible... Broken control key out of the box, Wifi died twice, second time they replaced the motherboard (and that took like... 9 weeks), then it completely died a year later when it was finally out of warranty. A real mixed bag of Pop OS being nice, and having great software/firmware support, but also multiple hardware failures coupled with terrible warranty support.

I use Lua for this sort of thing. Not my favorite language, but it works well for it. Easy to build for any system in the last 20-30 years, and probably the next 20 too. The executable is small so you can just redistribute it or stick it in version control.

Yeah, IIRC the 16 doesn't have a significantly faster CPU than the 7840U in the 13. If you want a gaming laptop it sounds neat though!