I don't really understand the outrage. What even is the use-case for a package manager to totally uninstall essential packages upon install of an unrelated package? I can get behind being able to tell the package manager to uninstall essential packages when told to do so explicitly, but installing regular application software should never make massive alterations to the foundational parts of my system to begin with. Having especially the graphical package managers protect you from accidental system breakage is nothing but a good thing.

Honestly, some of this complaining in this thread could easily be applied to --no-preserve-root or even the concept of sudo. Why is 'rm' trying to slow me down from deleting my entire root folder? Why do I need to input my password to modify system files? They are trying to turn my OS into a padded cell! Back in the good old days I could punch in arbitrary values into arbitrary memory locations and the computer stepped out of my way!

Honestly, I am totally behind Liam on this. The complaints on this issue reek of elitism and I see no value in making desktop Linux more fragile to breakage or more obscure to make some tinkerers feel better about themselves. And I say that as a tinkerer myself: I am quite willing to bet that I run a more exotic setup than many of the people that are now up in arms about how their right to tinker is somehow being trampled on. You are still perfectly able to uninstall your display managers and bootloaders even after the apt patches if you really want, just try to realize that this is an exotic use-case and 99.9% of people would only do so by accident and thus there should be some level of safety to prevent that. Even Formula 1 cars come with safety features.

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I'll have this one too. Gotta love all of these things coming out.

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So, Nvidia's generous answer to AMD FSR is to needlessly fragment the image scaling technology landscape? Good job, I guess? Hopefully someone picks this code apart and brings FSR on par with it, I don't have high hopes for Nvidia to keep up maintenance on this.

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If they do anything close to Silverblue then it's possible they will allow package layering on top of the immutable root, so you get the base image plus packages of your choosing via the same install/update mechanism. And if that doesn't cut it, someone will probably get Toolbox running on it eventually and at that point you can just run your apps off of a pet container that runs a fully mutable OS image for you.

Basically, I wouldn't worry too much about the immutable root. It's most likely just the mechanism they use to make sure you get atomic updates with controlled and tested base images with the nice side benefit that you can run updates on the device on the background without affecting the current runtime environment at all.

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Quoting: sudoerGaming engines and technology are moving forward everyday and constantly evolving, which means libraries, APIs, GPU drivers, kernels are moving forward everyday as well to support the new software and hardware, so please go tell a Linus guy that he can't play his game because his old-ass distro you 've suggested for him does not support his new hardware, his new peripherals, the game's libraries are newer than those that he has in his system, his GPU drivers do not support the new shiny effects or are performing worse and that he has to wait some years for it or compile a new version by himself or probably destroy his OS in 10 minutes by mixing new and old libraries like in MX Linux, and nice things like that to scare him away. Valve is unquestionably the one and only leading force for Linux penetration amongst the new generation of gamers, and has wisely chosen Arch for all those reasons, transparency and simplicity (faster package-manager because it doesn't have to solve 1mil. dependencies and do 10mil checks, meaning an update wouldn't last 1 hour like in Mint for just unpacking a package), and is already advising Arch-based Manjaro to the devs, not Fedora or OpenSUSE TW, or Debian Sid... ,so you can expect new Linux users -because of Steam and the Steam Deck- going with the Arch-line and very probably staying with it, which means Manjaro will be their starting distro, then maybe they can start exploring EndeavourOS, going Garuda, SteamOS 3.0, or even later vanilla Arch. So it is actually the de facto recommendation and you can either accept it with the upcoming reality forged by Valve, or live in your own :)

You are exhibiting the worst qualities of the "I use Arch, BTW" mentality and are basically in violation of the "no disto wars" rule.

As a pseudo-Arch user, you should be technically capable enough to know that Steam ships its own runtime environment from which libraries are loaded. This runtime environment is also essentially never newer than your system libraries unless you are actually stuck on some really old Debian. You should probably also know that stable non-rolling distros still provide hardware-enablement updates and there are ways to install new drivers on them. This has been the case since 2010 and remains so until today. So, unless you happen to run a setup that requires a very specific open source driver that has just been recently released, your gaming experience is probably going to be more or less the same whether you run Pop or Arch.

Also, marching out the package manager argument is just strange. Pacman is pretty good, but honestly it's not significantly better than, say, dnf in normal use. Updates are speedy enough and while apt and dnf might be slower and broken in some ways, pacman is broken in other ways and has on occasion gotten its database mixed up on my system, which necessitated reading the wiki to figure out how to solve that. When apt breaks it usually basically tells you what you need to do to get it back in shape and I usually only manage to break it by being impatient.

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Quoting: ShmerlIsn't there gfx-rs for that? It provides a simpler API than raw Vulkan but it's built on top of Vulkan. I hope SDL won't start making a new one with the same idea.

gfx-rs went into maintenance mode and the Rust ecosystem seems to be moving towards wgpu. Either way, it's not very helpful for people that insist on writing in C or C++, and I guess for that purpose an SDL wrapper would be useful.

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The whole Steam debacle seems to indicate that maybe this type of software really should be installed through Flatpak and the like. At least that makes it harder to accidentally uninstall your entire DE and display manager.

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Might need to start a run on the Roleplay mode at some point when my Saturday stream slot opens up again. Would be nice to at least make it past Bethesda Susa one day. :D

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The specs and the price-point is a bit of a tough sale if you are willing to go for the refurb business laptop option, which should do basically whatever you'd use this for just about as well, if not better. It's not super poorly priced though, and you'd also be supporting a Linux-friendly laptop vendor, so that counts for something. It's just not amazingly impressive.

With the chip shortage, I would suggest over-speccing your laptop to make it last longer though. This laptop will do your basic stuff decently well in the short term, but web stuff will probably get heavier over time and eventually you might want to use the laptop for more than you initially intended, so putting down a bit more money to avoid one upgrade cycle down the line is probably worth it.

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Quoting: GustyGhost

Quoting: EikeOr maybe they're looking beyond their own nose. Like caring for environment.

Bitcoin is not an effective currency.
It quickly degraded into an object of speculation.

The same banking system which formulated that argument to peddle to joe normie in actuality uses much more energy.

So, what you've got there is a crypto think-tank paper with low-quality citations arguing essentially that the Bitcoin energy consumption is okay, because the entire rest of the financial sector consumes more relative power, while completely ignoring the fact that the scale of the number of transactions between these systems is so wildly different that the argument is basically nonsensical. The fact that Bitcoin consumes over a third of the estimated energy expenditure of the banking system is already a disgrace and if Bitcoin were to handle all of the transactions required of the banking system, it would a.) collapse in on itself due to technological limitations, artificial or otherwise and b.) consume an absolutely ridiculous amount of power.

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