MudMan

I guess I’d ask which card and with how much VRAM.

Linux has a significantly lower memory footprint and that is even more so if your Bazzite install was on game mode. For modern games that REALLY want more than 8 GB that can make a huge difference on stability, average fps or both unless you are fine tuning your setup. Most portable hardware tops out at 8GB of VRAM, and APUs tend to dedicate 3 or 4 to the GPU at best.

Balls-to-the-wall on desktop hardware, though, if you’re not constrained by memory you get more fps on Windows. Sometimes dramatically so. Not because of anything wrong with Linux, it tends to be some combination of having a conversion layer and less cherry-picked, optimized drivers. Stuff that really relies on GPU-specific features in particular, like the Spider-Man games, can grind to a halt with high end features enabled on Linux. At least that’s my experience dual-booting Linux and Windows across a bunch of laptops, desktops and handhelds for the past bunch of years.

On the flipside some games that have broken or inconsistent performance on Windows can get those same types of optimizations or fixes directly in Proton and get smoother performance (although rarely outright higer averages). Elden Ring is the one everybody knows about, but there are a few more out there.

Being very OS-agnostic, I’m actually excited for Windows’ upcoming game mode equivalent. It could be the best of both worlds. This is a big part of why you’d want Linux to do well, it pushes MS to refocus on actually useful stuff, whcih in turn has a good chance of moving Linux in the right direction.

I always make sure that I am getting the most bang for buck

So, at the average going rate for an hour of your labor, how is that working out?

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for recycling old hardware for stuff like this, but it feels a bit weird to choose a device meant for limited mainstream use and get this mad that you couldn’t easily rework it into a cheap server after explicitly dismissing multiple SBCs meant for that exact purpose.

Android should be limiting. Phone OSs should be foolproof and impossible to break for any user. That is unrelated to the ongoing enshittification of the Google and Apple ecosystems and it’s not, in itself, a bad thing.

I wouldn’t mind a reliable way to root them as a matter of course, but there are both plenty of ways to effectively upcycle an old phone or tablet and to do what you wanted to do for cheap or for no money, you just selected the wrong combination of hardware and task, seemingly on purpose.

It… would be pretty horrific if that wasn’t the case. Like, wake up tomorrow and my parents are teenagers? People I work with are babbling babies? There are people out there filing my taxes. I need them to not crawl back into their mother’s womb. Who in this scenario may as well be a toddler. No, thanks.

This is true. I had been thinking my previous post was a bit too optimistic, actually. For the sake of making a point I implied that conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers didn’t previously exist. They absolutely did. There was plenty of public conflict about masking and social distancing in the 1918 flu. The AIDS panic was horrific and obviously this isn’t the first time that hate discourse puts fascists in power in a major superpower, let alone in a country overall.

The real issue with the Internet isn’t the flexibility of truth, it’s the ease in diseminating the satisfying falsehood. With no source of authority over which truths are acceptable and what lies are shameful you end up in a worldwide radicalization engine. It’s not that the old gatekeepers told you the truth, either. They still don’t. But at least we all had some culture-wide baseline for acceptable narratives.

But hey, people can keep hating on the obvious boogeyman of AI. At least it’s a start to realizing what the pattern is. It’s still not “the end of truth”, but like I said elsewhere, if it gets people to start noticing these things we’ll be better off than when social media was doing the exact same thing to us as a global society without anybody realizing.

It does say “check the results manually”. Not that this changes anything. For the record, always double check anything any AI tells you unless you can verify the response off the top of your head. Also for the record, double check anything anybody else tells you. If you haven’t seen it from more than one source, you don’t know if it’s true.

Hell, if the thing people learn from AI summaries is to never believe anything the see on the Internet without double checking it we’ll be better off than we were before.

Also, every negative impact you assign to AI is applicable to traditional search. I was hearing communication scholars warn people of the issues with algorithmic selection and personalized search back in the 90s. They were correct.

I am endlessly fascinated by the billions of boiling frogs that hadn’t realized their perception of the world was owned by Google until Google made a noticeably change to their advertising engine. Did you think them getting to select which answers you got at the top of the page and which ones to bury past the fold was any less misleading? I am increasingly glad that AI is as unreliable as it is at this point. We definitely need a change in how people acquire information.

It doesn’t mean that they won’t deliver. People have held these in their hands, they seem to work.

But… you know, it’s a kickstarter. You never know. And the worst part with these things is that they tend to be small runs, so if you don’t risk it they can be very hard to find after.

It’s actually noticeably slower for me, but both are… not fast having to go through Grub first, since I’m dual booting.

That makes the power management issues MUCH worse in my book. Windows hibernates very reliably, so once it goes to deep sleep, even if I boot back into Linux before coming back to Windows my session is saved. Bazzite won’t do that with hibernation turned off, and if sleep is broken I end up having to do a whole bunch of manual resetting on every single session, because even with Plasma’s baby steps towards session saving it’s nowhere close to remembering what apps you had open.

And there are the usual issues. Gaming performance is worse on most desktops with dedicated GPUs (don’t believe the hype, you’ll only get better performance in heavily memory-limited systems like handhelds, and definitely not with Nvidia cards). Software compatibility is still spotty and stuff breaks more often and is fiddlier to fix, as shown in this whole conversation.

So am I happy with it? There are things where it’s mostly on par, it feels snappier on the UX side and it’s good to have an alternative. In practice there are still more downsides than upsides, I’d say, so it strongly depends on how actively you want to enforce change in this space.

It’s… viable. Is that fair? Viable is better than whatever it was a decade ago, so… progress?

Are you kidding me, that worked?!

I mean, there’s no color profile option in the current KDE Plasma display config for HDR on Wayland, but just for the crap of it I flipped their “efficient color precision” to the “accurate” setting, which gives you a performance warning and it went to deep sleep for several hours and recoverd once successfully.

I hate it here. I’m going to choose to believe this was a fluke and when I leave this thing on overnight it’ll die in its sleep as it’s been doing for a while.

Here.

They seem to have missed their first deadline and they’re now saying they’ll be shipping before end of year, so trust in that at your peril.

Are you kidding me, that worked?!

I mean, there’s no color profile option in the current KDE Plasma display config for HDR on Wayland, but just for the crap of it I flipped their “efficient color precision” to the “accurate” setting, which gives you a performance warning and this thing went to deep sleep for several hours and recoverd once successfully.

I hate it here. I’m going to choose to believe this was a fluke and when I leave this thing on overnight it’ll die in its sleep as it’s been doing for a while.

That looks way less practical than that flip-up prototype they were kickstarting a while ago that was clearly inspired by the Xperia Play. The dpad looks way too close to the bottom, and the slider sticks don’t look like they have enough room to move around in this one.

That’s… random.

But hey, I’ve tried a bunch of the logical, actually-sound setup tweaks unsuccessfully, who knows what dark rituals the proprietary Nvidia drivers demand to come back from the dead at this point. I’ll give it a shot next time.

Yep, related root causes.

You can set Bazzite to use a swap file instead and turn on traditional hibernate, there’s a tutorial in their documentation. It did not work for me, and it sure didn’t fix my dedicated GPU refusing to wake up from sleep, but you could give it a try.

But in general Bazzite wants to do power management like it’s on a handheld with an APU and limited performance, and it has been a bit of a mess to try to use it on a desktop. I really don’t want to go distro hopping again, but it honestly may be required. Despite all the hype this stuff isn’t Windows yet.

Gaming is a powerful force.

Unfortunately, Bazzite has been crapping out for me when entering and exiting sleep, so I may have to give it up. Which sucks, because there’s a fair bit of customization and another shortcoming is no easy portability outside of rebasing.

No, it isn’t.

I’m so mad about people buying into the fake hype.

The death of truth was social media. Or squishy human brains on social media, I suppose. We just came from a massive argument about whether vaccines work, whether masks are useful in the middle of a respiratory virus pandemic and a bunch of Americans believed there was a pizzeria pedophilia vampire ring so much they elected a fascist turd president. Twice.

What the hell is marginally better photo doctoring going to do in that context? Who gives an actual crap?

The only real concern you should have is you now shouldn’t trust phone calls that sound vaguely like someone you know from a phone number you don’t recognize. And maybe if you get a video call from a celebrity standing suspiciously still don’t wire them all your money.

Otherwise we’re just as boned as we were five years ago.

Nah.

See? It took me two posts and a depressing dive into this guy’s posts this time.

There’s definitely room for tool assistance here.

Hah.

Steam has always been an anti-piracy tool. Gabe Newell is very much on the record about convenience (and inconvenience) being the key to the problem.

People were mad at them for a while, then they proved him wrong by forgetting that had ever happened.

I don’t know that you can accuse a volunteer of laziness, just on principle.

I’ll say that moderation is the single hardest problem of the Internet. Corporations being lazy and cheap about it, plus deliberately neglecting it because lack of moderation drives engagement, has led to… let me check my notes… ah, yes, the end of democracy and civil society as we understand it.

So… you know. There’s that part.

I don’t know that AI is a silver bullet for it, you get lots of problems if you cut humans off that loop, and a lot of the issues are deliberate corporate choices. But, you know, we hadn’t already messed this up beyond repair, any tool in that toolbox would have been welcomed.

Huh. That’s actually not a terrible idea.

I wouldn’t automate moderation attached to that (yet), but to give people a tool to gauge if a responder is just disagreeing or is a frequent troll? Yeah, that could work. Better than having to dig through the literary works of some rando stuck in an argument with you when deciding whether to block or report them.

Worst case the summary isn’t particularly accurate, but for the reasons you’d be digging through someone’s post backlog that’s not that big of a deal anyway.