for 4 Linux would also kind have the same problem as a 3rd party ROM, (almost) no one is making mobile apps for Linux

Sure, there are a lot of desktop apps, but most don’t have a mobile UI in mind

Samsung, Xiaomi and OnePlus have removed the option of bootloader unlocking on all of their devices.

Got me worried (bc i have a newish oneplus phone) but apparently OnePlus is only doing that in China for now. Still not a good sign for the future…

It’s not just risk, you also can’t really target a narrow audience. Indies can afford to make a game that only 1/100th of people will be interested in. Even if the AAA studio was 100% sure they would succeed and gain a loyal fanbase, they won’t do that if the potential fanbase is pulled from too small of a group.

the other thing is that you don’t actually need to rise the video game hierarchy to get an executive position like you might expect. You just need a business degree and some examples of successful leadership at other companies, even ones totally unrelated to video gaming

Yeah. AAA higher-ups are very rarely gamers or actually interested in playing video games. They’re just business people who I think mostly want to chase the profitable trends and recreate whatever successes they had in the past under projects with actually decent leadership.

Indie devs also generally aren’t concerned with stretching the runtime out over return limits or in a way that will prevent people from reselling the game.

I’ve used some slightly weird hardware but haven’t experienced anything of what you described. Across the whole range from the lab server with 3 3090s and 500gb of ram to my $40 Chromebook I got on ebay

Hmm, yea I’m on a computer the majority of most days probably but I can’t remember ever really dreaming about that

Don’t they have the whole “copilot+ ready pc” branding thing now for computers with npus? is none of it actually local yet?

I have a laptop with 4gb ram that i’ve been using kde plasma on and fairly frequently it just freezes or I have to restart because I had like 6 tabs open in firefox

Although I don’t remember having that problem as much when I was on xfce, but I also might not have been using it as heavily then

I’ve never had a similar problem with chrome on chromeos with the same amount of ram, I think chrome+chromeos might be more aggressive with unloading tabs

Sometimes it does actually kill firefox but sometimes it just becomes very slow (1-2 seconds per frame) or freezes entirely for several minutes when out of memory. Might be just because the swap is really slow, but there’s just 2gb of that, why would it freeze for several minutes? (One time this was happening was when I was trying to compile llvm on two threads, I ended up having to temporarily kill the desktop environment to save ram)

Not going to surprise anyone but Windows Mixed Reality VR headsets aren’t great on Linux, at least with controllers

Although that is improving!

I recently switched to Android. IPhones work great, the hardware is all there, the software is probably more polished, etc… but on Android you can get the phone to do basically anything with a bit of effort. There’s an app that lets you easily install most linux packages, and one that can emulate most Windows apps and games. There’s a ton of open source software, and you can actually find apps that don’t shove in-app purchases in your face (because devs don’t have to pay $100 a year just to stay on the store)

I got PrusaSlicer to work on my phone, through the Windows emulator, and sliced one relatively complex 3D model with it. For some reason it crashed every time I tried to start it after that, but it’s still pretty neat that it worked at all. PrusaSlicer has a linux build for ARM so whenever I find the time to set up one of those linux desktops on my phone I’ll probably try that.

Fedora and Arch both work pretty well on 4gb. Plasma and Gnome were surprisingly decent, and xfce was great but a little uglier. Blender, FreeCad, Minecraft (with performance mods), Celeste, for example all worked perfectly fine, with maybe a few browser tabs in the background as well. You couldn’t do anything too heavy, but it was pretty usable (I was using it as a travel laptop mostly). I’d say 2gb is where it becomes too little to live with.

I got a HDD very recently for a backup drive for my server and I’m very happy with that decision. 8 tb, lightly used but an enterprise drive, for $100.

It is pretty insane how dense storage can get. Some companies have showcased 4tb micro SD cards and you can buy a 2tb one right now.

Modern AAA games above 1440p and high settings usually can use that much VRAM.

8gb of ram is also not enough for anything particularly heavy.

The demo scene is still around, although it’s maybe less popular. That was a demo scene thing, not a commercial game.

Also, iirc, it was very heavy on performance for the time because the procedural textures were so expensive.

The chrome tab groups were what I missed the most when I switched, so I’m happy with the change. It’s a little jankier feeling as in chrome it’s harder to drag a tab out of the group, while in Firefox if you move a tab to the end it’s hard to get it to stay in the group.

It would also be nice if any of it was themeable, but themeability in Firefox is a whole other problem.

It can work in the normal tab bar at the top

It looks like the ux is very different this time tho

I love it, it was basically the only thing I missed when I switched from Chrome to Firefox. I’ve reorganized all of my tabs and everything is so much cleaner than it was a few days ago.

Now we just need jxl, webgpu, and better themes!