QuoteI've always said hardware is what we need. Hardware on shelves in stores and in more well-known online shops, it is the missing key.

Not just hardware in shops, although that is very important. Getting prospective customers to already have familiarity with the product so that they'll want to buy it is also very useful. Microsoft did it with business machines, so people bought the same thing to use at home. Apple and Microsoft have both tried to get a stranglehold on the education market at various times and, at the moment, Chromebooks are dominant there. With more other reasons to use them it's more likely that the cheap Chromebook they got from school could translate into a more premium Chromebook model, or a Chromebook as their own first computer, later. Google doesn't really care if it's a premium model or a cheapie, but the manufacturers will be after the higher margins and more sales. If Chromebooks expose sufficient Linuxness then the users might not be scared away from upgrading to a full Linux machine in those circumstances, since they'll already be familiar with it.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeIf you have to use a third party repository for something, make sure it is for new packages that don't replace things in your distribution.

Out of interest, does Debian have ppa-purge? It tracks which versions of packages come from a PPA rather than repositories so that if you want to stop using a PPA it can automatically switch you back to the repository version. Much cleaner than the can't-downgrade dependency issues from the before times when people would add full repositories to their sources.list.

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Quoting: denyasisVery cool. I didn't know it existed in the animal kingdom.

It happens in people, too. It comes up every now and then with questions of maternity, organ donation, and things like that, or if there's mosaic skin colouration or differently-coloured eyes. Otherwise no one notices. It's become more common since the invention of fertility treatment, since you're then more likely to be carrying more than one embryo.

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Quoting: denyasisThere are real Chimeras. Not fantastical at all. It's just... They're plants. There might be others but that's all I can remember from school 20 years ago.

Not just plants. It's an organism that contains more than one distinct genotype (the set of genetic material). Most marmosets are chimeras.

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Quoting: jensDo you have a specific example?

Not a specific example, I'm just going from the description from here

QuoteSome of the features that programmers can access using NVAPI include:

Driver Management: Initialization and driver version controls.
GPU Management: Enumeration of physical and logical GPUs. Thermal and Cooling controls.
Display Management: Enumeration of NVDIA displays, display postion and timings controls.
System Management: Ability to query chipset and system specific information.
Connecting and Configuring Monitors: Ability to set views on multiple target monitors.

and the stuff on assigning handles for GPUs and the like.

Maybe the thermal management stuff is too hardware specific, but being able to find GPUs and what they can do, how to address them, how to allocate memory, and things like that, are things that Vulkan covers. Being able to map those functions from NVAPI, that people are already using, to Vulkan, that people might want to use in the future, seems like it might be handy. There may well be other functions in there that Vulkan could do, but doesn't yet do, that would just be a good idea. NVAPI seems to me like Nvidia's grab-bag of handy things that they couldn't get done another way (pre-Vulkan) and Vulkan so far has worked well as a means of standardising everyone's good ideas so that more people can benefit.

I have no idea if Nvidia, Khronos, or anyone else, would actually do it, but it seems to me to be something that could be done.

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A lot of the stuff that's in NVAPI, which people have been using and wasn't included in OpenGL or DirectX, is in scope for Vulkan. Things like device discovery and capability enumeration. With Nvidia being more open about it, especially if there are alternative implementations, there might be room to start having those functions as part of Vulkan for everyone to use. Maybe as Nvidia extensions, or maybe add as part of the core specification.

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Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: KimyrielleDell has been offering a few more reasonably priced options with preinstalled Linux for a while here. Not sure if that offer is available in Europe, though.

Dell's offerings are usually US only.

Obviously you should tie some string around something before venturing into the Dell website, but I've had no other trouble getting Dell stuff (including a Dell Linux laptop) in the UK. They do have different inventory for different regions, but it's not the US gets one thing and everywhere else gets something different, it's that everywhere gets some haphazard selection. Don't forget the string.

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Quoting: Mal

Quoting: CatKillerA game that isn't native and accidentally works in Proton is worth maybe 10%. It could stop working at any time.

I also believe that buy a "new" game because it works well on proton is nuts. It works today, it's easy anti cheat tomorrow. Eventually though new games become old games. Old games -> no more development cycles. No dev cycles -> no (or close to null) risk of proton breaking.

Yep. By the time a game gets to 90% off, devs are unlikely to still be making breaking changes.

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QuoteBefore getting too excited, keep in mind it's yet another high-end gamer and high performance workstation model. We have something of a lack of low-mid end devices since these high-end options seem to be what gets people talking, even though we would love to see more low end stuff too.

It's not marketing, it's economies of scale. Cheap things can only be cheap if you can sell a lot of them, and the Linux laptop market just isn't that big even if you could capture all of it. Which means that high end boutique models are the only ones worth making unless you can sell a shedload of the same machine with Windows on, like Dell or Lenovo. When the market is bigger, or if it's supplemented by another income stream, it can sustain low margin devices like Chromebooks.

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Quoting: axredneckWhat about a native game that works better in Proton?

What about it? Assuming it's not the fraudulent case, where they sell you a Linux game but don't actually test or support it (which you shouldn't buy), but a standard fully-tested and fully-supported native product (which is worth full price) then your choosing to run it in Proton is no one else's business.

What one needs, as the buyer of a product, is to know that the supplier is going to try their hardest to make sure that the product is fit for purpose, and to have recourse if it isn't. If a dev never tests on the platform you're using they can't do the former, and if they can shrug off complaints because your platform is unsupported you don't get the latter. Which makes their product not worth as much.

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