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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • There are plenty of options for personal computers; you have to make the choice to go private and personal.

    I built my own desktop, which remains very common and is relatively easy to do. I have Linux and Windows on it, and use Linux nearly 100% as I agree I don’t like ads etc. I use a Firefox with ad blockers and don’t get ads; I use lots of open source software even to access services like Youtube (Free tube).

    There are also even linux laptops, and the Frame.Work laptop which is fully modular and bring your own OS.

    There are open source OS for phones.

    You’re right about the corporatisation of the internet and services, but it remains up to users to vote with their feet and chose to take back their privacy and person computing.

    Linux is at 4% of desktop users in recent months - that is many millions of people actively choosing to exist in a space where they control their personal computers. People don’t need to remove computers, just chose to set them up to be what they want them to be.


  • As others have said, gaming is thriving - AAA and bloated incumbants are not doing well but the indie sector is thriving.

    VR is not on the verge of collapse, but it is growing slowly as we still have not reached the right price point for a mobile high powered headset. Apple made a big play for the future of VR with its Apple Vision Pro but that was not a short term play; that was laying the ground works for trying to control or shape a market that is still probably at least 5 if not 10 years away from something that will provide high quality VR, untethefed from a. PC.

    AI meanwhile is a bubble. We are not in an age of AI, we are in an age of algorithms - they will and are useful but will not meet the hype or hyperbole being banded about. Expect that market to pop and probably with spectacular damage to some companies.

    Other computing hardware is not really stagnating - we are going through a generational transition period. AMD is pushing Zen 5 and Intel it’s 14th gen, and all the chip makers are desperately trying to get on the AI band wagon. People are not upgrading because they don’t see the need - there aren’t compelling software reasons to upgrade yet (AI is certainly not compelling consumers to buy new systems). They will emerge eventually.

    The lack of any landmark PC AAA games is likely holding back demand for consumer graphics cards, and we’re seeing similar issues with consoles. The games industry has certainly been here many times before. There is no Cyberpunk 2077 coming up - instead we’ve had flops like Star Wars Outlaws, or underperformers like Starfield. But look at the biggest game of last year - Baldurs Gate 3 came from a small studio and was a megahit.

    I don’t see doom and gloom, just the usual ups and downs of the tech industry. We happen to be in a transition period, and also being distracted by the AI bubble and people realising it is a crock of shit. But technology continues to progress.


  • As someone who drives to and around Wales multiple times a year, it’s a poorly thought out and implemented policy.

    Many people speed and break the limit, particularly on main roads, and it’s lack of popular support is an issue in itself.

    The policy could work if the speed limits was reverted to 30mph on bigger roads but local councils and the Welsh assembly blame each other for the issues.

    There is also little enforcment at present - that is changing and once people start getting fined for breaking the 20mph limit it’s likely to become much more unpopular.

    It could have probably been implemented successfully and with popular support with more careful designation of 30mph roads. It’s a failure of politicians rather than the idea itself.




  • Just another example of how broken the premium end of the gaming industry is. Ubisoft is an old fashioned publisher, trying to churn out big hit AAA games based on big IP but producing poor quality buggy games, which don’t turn a profit.

    We keep hearing how the games industry is “in trouble” but its actually thriving with loads of smaller devs and publishers doing well. The problem is the behemoth publishers like Ubisoft who release games based on financials timelines rather than the games being finished or high quality.

    Its not like Ubisoft are short of good IP. What they’re lacking is good quality control and an environment to foster high quality creativity. When you treat gaming like its just a production line to generate money this is what you get. Making AAA games is expensive for sure, but its pointless if you don’t get the quality and the creativity right too - they’re just making expensice games.

    We’re seeing the same in the movie industry - big studios producing franchise movies on a financially driven schedule with poor quality and lack of creativity.



  • Its not about memory size its about the asymmetric sticks. It was a classic problem with OS memory management in the past. Modern OS are better at dealing with it but it is not the optimal set up.

    You’re running windows game which use proton/wine that manage memory for the game and use linux for access to RAM. The asymmetry could conceivably cause issues you wouldn’t notice with native apps.

    I’d try removing the 16gb stick (or the two 8gb sticks and keeo the 16gb stick; all that matters is whatever ram isnleft is the uniform) and see what happens with the games you’ve been trying. It might not he the issue but the only way to know is to test it, rather than dismiss it because its not what you expected.


  • The common denominator in your issues would be your PC. If games are working according to protonDB and you’re unable to get them to work on multiple distros that suggests its your PC.

    There are two candidates in your specs - your RAM and your Graphics card.

    As others have said, asymmetric RAM is unusual and it certainly was warned against in the past as it caused system issues. While OSs may be much better at managing RAM now, that doesn’t mean all scenarios can tolerate it. Given what Proton is doing is complex (running Wine, which is essentially a windows layer) I would not be surprised if the memory configuration is just a step too far - you have windows software using a windows compatibility layer for memory asking a linuxn system for memory access.

    An obvious way to test this is to remove the 16gb stick from your machine and see what happens.

    The other side is your graphics card - are you using the latest nvidia drivers?


  • The other problem with the “good guy with a gun” is how many people does an attacker need to kill before you are the good guy killing the bad guy? One? And what if you didn’t witness it? The “good guy” with the gun attacking another guy with a gun without knowing what’s going on, are they still the “good guy” in that scenario? It’s a mess.

    The whole thing stems from fallacious logic. Arming everyone doesn’t stop bad guys murdering people, at best it might curtail the length of some attacks and at worst it causes innocents to die as so-called “good guys” try to save the day and make it worse.

    Prevention is the way forward, as then 0 people die. And the best way to do that is no one has guns (not even most police; just a small subset of specialist police). That is an anathema or sacrilegious to Americans, but it’s the approach taken in many democratic and free countries in the world.

    If the chart is trying to make a point, it’s making the wrong one anyway.


  • Maybe he broke terms of service with the streaming companies but they should be pursuing him in civil courts. This feels like abuse of the criminal justice system to retrieve money for companies that were negligent in how they were running their streaming businesses.

    This guy produced music and he alsp streamed the music even if it was bots at industrial scale. He seemingly met the criteria needed to get money from the streamers. I’m not a lawyer at all but on cursory look at the definition and elements of wire fraud, I guessing this will hinge on whether this was a “material deception” - but he produced actual music and he streamed it, so is it?

    Also i wonder whether it can be proven that the intent was to “defraud” rather than take advantage / game a system.

    It feels like the tax payer is bearing the cost of prosecuting someone for a dispute between a person and the multi billion dollar music industry.

    Also the music industry trying to paint this as theft of money from other artists is a bullshit - the streaming fees are supposedly divided out proportionately from overall streaming. He caused more streaming so the pot was bigger, and he took a proportionate share of that bigger pot. And any disproportionate sharing reflects the shitty practice’s of the streamers and the big music rights holders who are essentially monopolies squeezing out the smaller competitors from the system.


  • No I thinks is basically right although could be better worded maybe

    /sys is virtual file structure for kernel system info

    /proc is virtual file structure of kernel process info

    My understanding is /proc came first but was abused/free for all and started being used for all sorts of non standard/process kernel access. So /sys was created with stricter rules to make it more standardised.


  • The US healthcare system is built around money and profit. A cheaper procedure which does not require general anaesthetic costs less, and reduces profit. That can be beneficial to the providers but bloat is incentivised in the US healthcare system as providers battle with insurance companies for money. Crudely healthcare providers don’t care about saving you money; they want to take as much money as they can get.

    Meanwhile, countries with tax funded health care opt for the most cost effective procedures, investigations and treatments. The incentive is to reduce costs and offer the most effective things to the most people possible. That can also sometimes have negative side effects if not carefully regulated but in such systems generally Doctors advocate for the best procedure and best medical practice, as they themselves do not directly benefit financially from which procedure is pushed. The downside is you do get the opposite side of things where patients are dissuaded from things as they’re not deemed cost effective by those who control the spending.


  • Yea it is user friendly. If you’re using your computer once a week presumably its for things like web browsing or working with documents - these are very easy and straight forward to do in linux.

    The other big benefit is the cost - linux is free and you’ll save £120 on a basic version of Windows which can be used to get get a better PC or just saved.

    Add to that no advertising, much more private and entirely yours to do what you like with. And if you don’t like it you can easily install Windows instead, so its zero risk to try Linux.




  • The article is a bit vague on the pros and cons of reflective LCD screens.

    It seems to be pros that it has a good refresh rate, can be used without a backlight so is good outdoors and indoors in a bright room, and maybe better for your eyes due to the lack of the backlight/blue spectrum light. It also may offer better colour depth than e-ink currently.

    The cons are not clearly addressed but presumably battery life is worse than e-ink but better than a backlit display such as OLED or AMOLED, that colours are still not as good as other LCDs even if better than e-ink, and it seems cost (although that may be due to the small market at present).

    Also there is no obvious innovation noted in the article so its not clear what has changed about these displays? It sounds more like some small companies are just using the displays in a new way to try and mimick paper. But maybe thats wrong or will change?

    Maybe this would compete with e-ink if cost comes down. The battery benefit of e-ink with a static image is one of its big benefits, to the point that its being used for shelf labels in supermarkets. E-ink isn’t going anywhere but good to have more choices in the tablet space.



  • You can add games to Steam to use proton so where they came from doesn’t matter. You can also use Proton forks and bypass steam altogether - much of the underlying tech is Wine; proton is a patched and optimised version of Wine not a stand alone Valve product. Its great what they’ve done but it is still a collaborative open source effort.

    As for which store, I go on price and sometimes go with GOG even if more expensive because of DRM, and sometimes Steam because of the convenience of the workshop.

    I don’t think it needs to be any more complex than that - these are company’s taking your money for the same product. Its kinda pointless being “loyal” to a retailer - its more important to focus on value for money and quality of service for each purchase.


  • What you’re asking is if you can run the existing Linux Mint on your drive within Windows running on the same drive?

    It may be feasible if VirtualBox or VMWare are able to access/mount the existing Linux partition as if its a virtual drive, and boot the OS but its likely to be difficult. The main issue is that windows does not easily mount Linux partitions. It is also an edge case use for most users so there will likely not be much guidance on how to achieve this easily.

    It might work more easily the opposite way round - boot Linux and mount Windows within Virtualbox but is not likely to be straightforward. Windows may be less flexible about being booted into a virtual machine with totally different hardware.

    All this may be overkill to the problems you’re trying to solve. You can mount the existing NTFS Windows drive within Linux Mint to access all your windows files without any virtualization. But I’m not clear what “settings” you’re looking at when you boot back in to windows? That seems to be the stumbling block. Is is specific software / tools you’re trying to migrate settings for?

    Another approach may be to launch windows, create a new linux Mint VM in Virtualbox, share a folder between Linux VM and Windows host, create whatever settings you’re trying to migrate in your VM Linux Mint, and when happy copy the home folder / settings folders into the shared folder. Then boot your PC into linux, mount the windows drive and pick up the settings files from the shared folder to migrate into your main Mint system. But whether that is even worth doing depends on what you’re trying to migrate.