I mean, I'm okay with this, in principle.

'Please sign up for our newsletter about the game you bought from us, and we'll give you a bit of free DLC for said game.'

It's a marketing thing because they want more eyeballs on their newsletter, and the DLC is the carrot. Hey, you already bought the game and maybe some other DLC for it, right? So it's at least potentially mildly interesting to hear what they're presumably wanting to get a bunch of people on said newsletter for (e.g. announcing new DLC, or Cities: Skylines 2, or whatever).

Humble does the same thing all the time with their game giveaways; you have to be subscribed to their newsletter.

Also nothing stopping you from unsubscribing right after you get your freebie (but of course, they hope you forget to). But it's definitely not a 'free thing out of the goodness of their hearts' campaign, that's for sure. ;)

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Yeah - Linux gamers need to be holding nVidia's feet to the fire, here, or voting with their wallets and going AMD.

I bought an RX 580 for my partner, and she's had basically *no* issues with it under Linux. Heck, even her old card, a Radeon HD 6950 on the old 'radeon' (pre-AMDGPU) driver, worked way way better under Linux than AMD's ancient Windows drivers - she couldn't even play Minecraft under Windows, but it worked flawlessly on Linux with the same card.

nVidia most definitely does not have anything resembling 'day one' support with their binary driver, as noted by multiple people here having to source community patches for their DKMS portion to work with kernel 5.6 - a kernel that's had multiple release candidates for weeks now, because nVidia continues to use generic-sounding global variables in their driver that conflict when the kernel itself picks up the same names for itself (i.e., 'timeval' in this case, having to be patched on the nVidia side to 'nv_timeval' to no longer conflict in 5.6).

The main reason you'd ever have a flawless kernel upgrade is because distros either hold it back for you until the relevant patches are in, they patch it themselves, or nVidia happened to not mess things up this time.

All that said, I don't have any experience yet with AMD cards newer than that RX 580, but if you're talking about brand new, just-released cards, you're probably going to have to be running the latest kernel + Mesa in a rolling-release distro to get any sort of timely support; while she's on Ubuntu, I'm on Gentoo for partly that sort of reason (at least, when I get rid of my GTX 980). Potentially even early release candidates of not-yet-fully-released kernels, 'unstable' builds of Mesa (i.e. the ~amd64 keyword in Gentoo), at least until the card's been out long enough for those versions to stabilize.

Of course, the real solution here would be fully open source hardware - I'd love me a RISC-V machine with a properly open GPU, but... one day. ;)

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Not sure if this will include fixes to get their DKMS garbage to compile right against kernel 5.6, but if not, I've had some luck with this patch someone else figured out:

NVIDIA 440.64 - Kernel 5.6

(e.g. for Gentoo users, just grab that raw and drop it in as /etc/portage/patches/x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-440.64/linux-5.6-compatibility.patch , then re-emerge x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers )

I still regret buying a GTX 980 years ago, now that AMDGPU exists, but still.

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Putting this entire thing in a spoiler tag because Purism + politics (and not good ones):

Spoiler, click me

I love the idea of what Purism does, but they milkshake ducked really hard when they announced that they were launching their own, subscription based Mastodon instance... and that they weren't going to moderate it basically at all because hey, people are paying for it.

Their front-end, of course, was just a forked + reskinned version of Tusky - fine on its own, but when Tusky lets you specify the instance URL anyway, it felt a lot like a 'no, I made this!' kind of fork than anything actually productive. Exactly the same tactic some 'well known' ultra-fascist sites use - forking both it and Mastodon and refusing to moderate in the name of 'free speech'.

Anyone on the Fediverse can probably guess what happened next - a bunch of fascists found the Purism instance, figured hey, paying a couple bucks a month/year or whatever to have access to a well known platform is great - and promptly started harassing everyone else they could find out of their usual targets, forcing pretty much everyone else to block them on a server federation level, which then solicitied cries from people along the lines of 'but what about all the other, good users on Purism's instance?', a bit of hand-wringing, and finally an ultimatum to Purism:

Moderate your instance and get rid of the abusers harassing everyone else, or we keep blocking you.

They refused and as far as I can tell, continue to refuse to moderate their users, so the rest of us continue to block them. 'Free speech' doesn't mean 'free to harass everyone else about their race/gender/skin colour/sexuality/politics/etc.', as far as the rest of us are concerned, and the way Purism kept doubling down left us all with a lot of mistrust for everything they do.

tl;dr, no to Purism - buy System76 or another Linux-focused system integrator instead.

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OpenTTD is great - I'm actually really pleasantly surprised by the fact that the Android version(s) out there are fully cross-platform compatible, network wise, for multiplayer. Not too long ago I had a quick test game between my desktop (running Gentoo), and my smartphone. One version even has UI adjustments to make it easier for touch screens, but I hooked up a USB mouse + keyboard and it worked fine that way, too.

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I actually have a Core2Duo system with a 9800 in it that occasionally gets used as an HTPC in the living room, or as a spare machine for when friends are over and want to game with some classics or lightweight stuff.

...but Nouveau is more than adequate for everything I've thrown at it. Sure, it's great that nVidia's still supporting their binary blob drivers, but y'know, maybe open sourcing it or starting over open source like AMD did would be better? ;)

Since the open source AMDGPU drivers in mainline became a thing, I've vowed that every gaming machine I buy or build will have an AMD GPU in it. nVidia had withheld the firmware piece to get reclocking support for the GTX980-era cards now for *how* long? They're 'open source friendly' as long as you're fine with only having support on their terms, with their binary blob doing who-knows-what, tainting the kernel. No thanks.

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Quoting: Mountain ManI'll stick with Firefox, partly because I don't trust Microsoft, but mainly because it's the only browser for Android that supports extensions, and I consider at least uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and HTTPS Everywhere to be indispensable for privacy and security.

Pretty much exactly this - uBlock Origin, regardless of Chrome or Firefox or whatever, is the first thing anyone should be installing into their browser, these days.

The related uMatrix or something like NoScript if you're OK with manually whitelisting JS for your favourite sites.

But yeah, on Android, get F-Droid, get Fennec (Firefox) from it, put uBlock Origin in, and don't ever use the built-in Chromium-based stuff ever again. When Google lets you install extensions on Chrome for Android, then maybe that'll at least get a pass, but despite their corporate flaws, Mozilla's still the way to go, IMO. Even if you'd rather a spinoff/de-branded/sanitized version.

But hey, if you can install Chrome versions of extensions in Edge, even on Android? Then maybe it's even a better option than stock Chrome. ;)

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Completely off-topic silliness, but this is the first thing that jumped into my mind reading this headline. ^_^

Look at this graph

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I'm honestly still waiting to see more mobile Radeon GPUs for Linux laptops, at least for gaming and even workstation purposes. The iGPU stuff is decent enough, and all, but everyone's still putting nVidia chips in for their 'high end' lineup.

nVidia, the one damned-near actively hostile company to proper Linux driver adoption, withholding the what... keys, firmware, whatever it was for the GTX 980 and newer for how long now? Still offering proprietary binary-blob drivers, etc.

Nah, I want all my future systems to have AMD GPUs because of the much better, new open source driver (we don't talk about fglrx), which coincidentally, isn't the one Valve has been helping them optimize and such, too?

CPUs, yeah, Ryzen has issues with the PSP, just like Intel's 'Management Engine'. Honestly, I can't wait for "x86" (or the weird bastardization of what's left of it as a mess of decoder logic taking up wayyy too much space in modern CPUs) to die and be superceded by a much more open RISC-V implementation anyhow. One day. ;)

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Quoting: Doc AngeloDo leaders of countries have to be almost silent about almost anything, then? Of course not. Because then they would just be mouth pieces of the public opinion because they want to get re-elected.

... my sarcasm detector is beeping. :D

Kind of off-topic here, but I mean, 'mouth pieces of the public opinion because they want to get re-elected' is pretty much modus operandi for politics, isn't it?

Also, I'm a bit confused here, on 'shitty social rules'. The social rules that say it's okay for men in power to make sexist, homophobic, etc. jokes while at the office, surrounded not only by their straight male peers, but women, etc. who are supposed to smile and nod lest they lose their jobs for speaking out? 'Cause I'm totally fine with getting rid of those - those have held us back ever since men took over 'computer programming' and turned it into 'software engineering' and pushed women (perfectly smart, trained, capable women!) out of the field in droves. And we wonder why it's so hard to get women back into STEM - it's certainly not a lack of interest in the subject fields...

If you're the spokesperson for an organization, be it a non-profit or a C-level exec of a megacorporation, the opinions you air in public reflect on that organization, no matter how much you try to qualify it as personal vs. professional. That's part of being a public figure and spokesperson. Yeah, it sucks, and you should be able to have a private forum to discuss things. A mailing list to a large chunk of staff isn't that private forum.

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