Quoting: mZSq7Fq3qsI have no doubt that it is an awesome game... but it is quite jarring to get into :D I have no idea what I am doing. I hope that this will help with my itch to play eve online. I'd play eve online, but who has time for that?

Well developers of X4 said it loud and clear that they do not want to babysit new players and serve them everything right under their noses, but instead they want (and expect) players to explore and find out mechanics, things and places on their own.

So although it is understandable that this approach might not work for everyone, it works as designed

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Quoting: RavenWingsI´d love to get into X again, but I don´t think I´ll ever find the time other then maybe on the Deck. Anybody tried playing it there for a longer periode of time?

I´ve sank countless hours into the first two games and remember using pretty much my whole keyboard worth of hotkeys, button-combos and macro-keys to manage my trading-empire. I´m sure they´ve modernised and simplified a lot of it, but I still can´t imagine its possible to boil it down to anything handheld-friendly.

Yeah, you can/will sink countless hours into X4 too.
I have player so far one huge game, started another some months ago and not looking back.
Some game mechanics are a bit different from old X2/X3, but the graphics are better, the immersion is way more better and way more amazing and the universe is huge too, with countless opportunities to play it the way you like

Definitely recommended... 11/10

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Thanks for the news.
Instabuy

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Quoting: LoudTechieI see no hope in this.
RISC-V has an even less functional software ecosystem, so it's useless for most consumers.
Although the architecture of RISC-V is open source the firmware isn't yet and some ARM processors do offer open firmware making them more suited for tinkering, because making or manipulating your own chips requires a lot more resources than doing the same with firmware meaning its out of the range of most tinkerers.

Well, to paint a bigger picture here: majority of RISC-V CPUs, boards and complete solutions are coming from China as of now. (China designed, China manufactured)

You may ask: Why?
Well, one of the (IMHO brutally important) piece of the puzzle here is that RISC-V is an open standard, which is not and cannot be controlled by patents and/or export regulations (The RISC-V foundation moved itselt from US to Switzerland to ensure exactly that). And as a result China is investing huge amounts of money, time, know-how, and general resources, to leverage this tech to achieve at least some level of technological independence in CPU chip tech on "The West". So continuous investment into and development of RISC-V tech is of utmost strategic technological importance to China.

And so, the RISC-V tech train, with China at the wheel, has already departed, China ensures it is gaining speed, and it cannot be stopped, until China reaches it's technological CPU destination. And they don't care what The Rest of The World(tm) thinks of it, because, for once, with this 'patent&export regulation free' tech they don't have to take care of who (dis)agrees....

Thus the question now is not IF the high-performance RISC-V CPUs will arrive to the market, but WHEN. And another question is whether it will be only Chinese chips, or if e.g. US or EU (or anyone else, like e.g. India?) will be able to keep up with China and whether they too will be able to design, produce and sell their own RISC-V CPUs...

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For the Framework laptop: it uses StarFive JH7110 as CPU. That one is a bit slower - typically clocked on max 1.6GHz - and lacks support for vectoring instructions (RVV), which could/will limit it's performance. This will be used potentially only as a low-end device.

(Disclaimer: Think of RISC-V vectoring instructions specification (or RVV) to be similar to MMX/SSE/AVX instructions from Intel/AMD CPU world).

For the ROMA II laptop, the K1 has double the cores (8x), higher clocks (2GHz) and support for full vectoring instruction standard (RVV10), so it is expected to be much more performant. Still the K1 is a new CPU and I do not thing that - as of now - there are any relevant/consumer performance metrics available (remember, cache/bus/RAM latencies are currently unknown and will also affect overall performance).

Moreover, software/driver support for this brand new K1 platform is an unknown. Here they claim full Ubuntu support which sounds great. It remains to be seen, what exactly that means though...

So on one hand, there are currently lots of performance and sw/driver support unknowns, also the ROMA II laptop for that price seems to be quite overpriced. EDIT: Maybe it is not AS overpriced as I perceived it at the time of writing this. Still, they could probably do better I guess...

On the other hand, if they really manage to have full and good sw/driver support (including the GPU, HW accel of destop and full support of VPU on-chip codecs for e.g. high-performance HW decode of video streams) this really could be the first consumer-grade RISC-V machine for bigger masses.

Hopes are high

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I have RISC-V powered LicheePi4A (with 16GB LDPPR4 RAM and 128 GB eMMC storage, all integrated) from Sipeed.

The overall results are (as of now; this is a subject to change in time!): "Not great, not terrible".
Overal performance is somewhere around RPi 4B+, maybe a bit above.

My device has different CPU than ROMA II laptop; LicheePi4A uses Alibaba TH1520 RISC-V CPU:
- 4 core @1.85GHz (up to 2GHz, dependant on chip quality)
- vectoring instruction support 0.7.1 (RVV071)
- integrated 5TOPS NPU
- integrated graphics (mobile GPU from Imagination)
- integrated VPU (for hardare video coding/decoding)

These RISC-V solutions suffer from older manufacturing technology (it seems all those Chinese manufacturers are currently stuck at around 12nm manufacturing process, so somewhere at around max. 2GHz clock speeds etc). Good enough for low(er) performance applications (phones, tablets, low-perf laptop/desktops), not good enough for high-performance desktops yet. They will get there in time, though...
Some parts of platform's ISA specifications are still being worked out/added (like hardware virtualization support instruction set).

Also the software/driver support still has to mature: Majority of current RISC-V solutions (Milk-V, StarFive, Sipeed etc., with all their integrated solution boards) are still working to get their drivers to the Linux upstream progressilvely for the past two years (e.g. this LicheePi is currently still stuck on Debian kernel 5.11, kernels 6.x coming soon(tm), also Sipeed's SDK with drivers and 3rd party stuff is required to actually build a bootable kernel/system). Also, the GPU drivers from Imagination are not opensource (yet), despite Imagination's declared goal of opensourcing the drivers (realistically this will take probably years...), so limitted to none desktop/app hardware acceleration availability. Moreover, this (mobile) GPU supports only OpenGL ES, not full OpenGL. Although the GPU does support Vulkan, everything will have to wait for drivers from Imagination...

So despite the platform maturing for the past two-three years, it still has a lot of work ahead. But it will get there in time, it needs a couple of years, maybe. And I'm looking forward to the new open-spec hardware platform
(Also, I'd be very concerned about my future if I was ARM )

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Hmm.... I wonder what GPU and/or NPU capabilities this thing has?

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Happy Ubuntu user for more that a decade here
For both business (Ubuntu being my main daily workload driver) and pleasure (anything non-job related, incl. gaming of course).

I just cannot wait to get migrated to the new 24.04 LTS

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Oh my... Very nice update
Time to say goodbye to my free time again

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Quoting: kerossinOk, so what's the point of the Snap Store?

I thought the whole point of having a closed and official Canonical-controlled store was trust - you will be getting only legit apps approved by Canonical and not some wild west of community sources.

But since Canonical does no checks it's pointless.

Random user: Hey, this is PayPalV2.
Canonical: Welcome aboard! Don't reply, this was an automated message

Well, the original point of having a Snap store was to have containerized desktop apps on Linux desktop.

Anyway, is this happening on Flathub too, or snap is just more discussed with this issue?

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