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.
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.
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. :)
Speaking personally. I had the same reaction. I realized I could sign in using my GitHub account for MCC, which was… weird. Since it was just their normal web/auth page you could click around and do it in that tiny little webview. -_- Ridiculous, but I wasn’t going to make a new account to play a single player game. I did nearly refund it out of spite, but didn’t.
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 <return>
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 <return>
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. >_<
Eh, guessing from a distance or playing favorites won’t be better though. Like I might get grumpy about a C-level guy or investor getting more than their “fair share”, but marketing for example is still an important job done by people that aren’t paid gobs of money. Without the ability to let the people that would buy it know about your product, it effectively doesn’t exist. We all love the story about a game that came out of nowhere, but that’s the exception, not the rule.
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.
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.
I guess by real world usage I mean what proportion of code is being made with them. You should be skeptical of their accuracy, but there are measures for that. Like there is this one: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/, but it describes it’s methodology as being about popularity based on articles, news, and other such things. Github publishes a very different chart as does RedMonk. Rust barely shows up on these charts, but Rust fans are very enthusiastic in threads like this. I like Rust well enough, but I also find the over-enthusiasm amusing.
By practical/pragmatic I mean the ability to target a lot of hardware with C. Sometimes the tooling is crap, but it’s very universal. Being built on LLVM Rust can go onto plenty of hardware too, but it’s probably not the tooling given to you by a platform vendor. It’s also been around for a long time, so using Rust would mean a rewrite. Sometimes C is simply the choice. As for ideologically: Rust solves some pretty nasty programming issues, but sometimes I think it’s fans over-estimate the percentage of real world problems it actually solves while ignoring that Rust can be more expensive to write. (shrug) Sometimes there’s no such thing as a silver bullet.
I enjoy the selection bias in the comments for these sorts of posts. >_< There’s a few people saying “I kinda like C”, a few saying “use Python instead”, and a whole lot saying “Rust is my lord and savior”. Completely disjoint from the real world usage of the languages for whatever practical, pragmatic, or ideological measures they are used for.
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:
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.
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!
Egh. I kinda sorta agree. I had a 10th gen i7 Lemur Pro. It was nice and had excellent battery life. (15 -25 hours as an average range) The screen was a perfectly nice IPS, the keyboard/trackpad were fine (maybe not great), and the speakers were… well… pretty terrible. The software/firmware support for an otherwise generic laptop was great!
The problem was that I had multiple hardware failures on mine and getting warranty repairs was painful. The 3rd time it happened took several weeks to convince my rep it was a legitimate hardware failure. When he was finally convinced, he said something like “Well, that seems pretty obvious it’s a motherboard failure. What would you like us to do?” The response was obvious. It was under warranty still. I wanted it fixed! By the time it was working again it had taken 9 weeks. (!!!) Less than a year later, it died again. Put a really bad taste in my mouth. :-\ I bought a Framework to replace it.
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.
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. -_-
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’ve been using Wayland daily for a few years (2020 at least?) on intel and AMD graphics and have had few complaints:
Overall, it’s just worked great though!
My anti-complaints:
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!)
Ooh. This one looks great. I’d parrot an excuse about how I “don’t have the time”, but that will always be true until I make the time.
A bit of a zombie thread, but I’m not making anything up here. The blocking issue gets discussed a lot in gamedev circles, and there are issue threads that have been locked by folks with the power to do so because they just said “no”. One of them (Maybe Sebastian Wick? I don’t remember… doesn’t really matter) gave verbatim that use case where a video service they use would stop playing videos when the browser was in the background, and that is why they won’t report . Maybe they weren’t a “core” developer, but they had the ability to say “no” and end the discussion thread.
As for it being not a problem anymore, it still occurs even on Fedora 39. The 1 second present timeout still only works for XWayland, and that’s… not a great solution. Also, realistically unless SDL2, GLFW or whatever engine a gamedev is using handles it for them they just don’t have the time to worry about what GTK, Qt, or XDG shell does. We are already supporting multiple rendering APIs, and combining that with multiple UI libraries just to get a window to draw a triangle into is a combinatorial explosion. Last I remember reading from the SDL folks, they were waiting for the functionality to appear in Wayland before they could implement it, and they weren’t expecting anything to change soon either. Speaking personally, my current game project is single player so I can just pave over the timing issues when they come up:
Long frame detected: 6463.731931 ms. Skipping ahead!
The most frustrating part to me is much more meta. You get discussions with other game devs that have heard about this stuff and they continue to think that supporting Linux is just way too much work. Sometimes they are right, but rarely for the right reasons it seems. I believe in the glorious Wayland future… I just wish it would get here a bit faster. ;) On the other hand, if we rushed it and botched it then it would never arrive at all I suppose. (sigh)
As for how window activation works, you got me there. I just heard other people discussing that one, but it did explain why on Wayland I would just get “Firefox is ready” notifications when opening links instead of just showing me the page like X did. Though I’m quite happy that it’s gone now in Fedora 39. Progress is good!
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.