I have a Tuxedo Pulse 14 gen 3 as my personal laptop, was looking for something with a bit more display resolution than my old 1080p machine, but did not like the price of 4K laptops.

It has been superb for over a year now. Came with Tuxedo’s own Linux, which looked pretty but wasn’t for me. Installed Arch on it, has been rock solid. Is a great machine for coding on, makes a great job of running Dwarf Fortress and less stressful 3D games - Crusader Kings 3 and Disco Elysium run great, for instance. Battery life impressive too.

Been quite robust, too - heard complaints that the lid can get a bit loose but mine’s fine. All the rubber feet have come off the bottom, but that’s probably because I use mine on my lap. They prefer that you install their own fan control app rather than eg. just providing drivers so that you can set it up in CoolerControl, but it works fine.

All in all, good machine. Better than the ThinkBook that it replaced, and those are fine laptops.

I quite liked how the original Linux fix for the Spectre-style speculative execution bug on Intel processors was called “Forcefully Unmap Complete Kernel With Interrupt Trampolines”, but alas, in the interest of diplomacy it was renamed to “Kernel Page Table Isolation” (KPTI) rather than “FUCKWIT”.

Doesn’t feel like it was that long ago, but of course, all search results are dogshit in this new age: https://wccftech.com/intel-kernel-memory-leak-bug-speculative-execution-performance-hit/

Yeah, mine was similar. Had some old Win95 machines from work that were getting thrown away; scavenged as much RAM as possible into one case and left Red Hat Linux downloading overnight on the company modem. Needed two boxes of floppy disks for the installer, and I joined up a 60 MB and an 80MB hard drive using LVM to create the installation drive. It was a surprisingly functional machine - much better at networking than it was as a Win95 computer - but yeah, those days are long gone.

Yeah, Fark used to be great. That bear headline is a beast.

And then they got rid of the ‘foobies’ (ie. nudity) links off of the main page in order to appeal to advertisers, then they got rid of lots of extra stuff that upset advertisers, then they started shadow-banning paying subscribers if their posts didn’t fit the narrative. And then all the users got fed up of it all and moved ever to Reddit, where the mods were more transparent and there was more of a sense of community. How ironic.

If your core site content is users posting links and commenting on them, then there’s probably a lesson to be learned about how important it is to treat your users well and have a welcoming, inclusive community. Probably a lesson that Lemmy users have already learned, mind.

Broke my first one on the final boss of Sekiro, which can be quite intense in places. Bought another one immediately when they announced they weren’t making them any more.

Hesitation is defeat. Although, wish I’d got three as well…

CMake, which is kind of the universal standard build system for C++ now, has “fetch content” since v3.11. Put the URL of a repository (which can be remote, but also local, which is handy) and optionally the branch / commit ID that you’d like, and it will pull it into your build directory automatically. So yeah, you can pull anything nefarious that you’d like. I don’t think most people would question pulling and building a library from Github as part of the build, especially if it had a sensible name for the task at hand.

Guardian-reading lefty here. You got any links to actual transphobic articles in the Guardian itself? I’ve been reading it for years, and have never noticed anything like that, particularly it being a stance. Would be very disappointed in them if so.

That link says that there have been 1100 articles in the Guardian, and also well-known right wing rags the Times, Mail and Telegraph, “most of” which are attacks. Bizarre to group those four papers together; one of them is very much not like the others. I would believe it of the other three, of course.

Lunacid is awesome - old-school dungeon crawling with slick controls. The speed and smoothness makes fighting all the old enemies new again.

The Kings Field games are… very hard to love. They’re old-school dungeon crawlers with the most awful, clunky controls that you can imagine. They’re all “pre-Miyazaki” FromSoftware games; don’t expect many Souls-like touches. Getting killed by a skeleton because you can’t turn round to face it in time, or falling down a hole because judging how far you’ve walked forward is difficult? Far more likely.

A Lunacid follow-up with a little more Ultima / Wizardry about it would be amazing. Bit more environmental variety, a few more RPG trappings, and for the love of all that is holy, a minimap. But I can’t see how that would be better done in Sword Of Moonlight rather than just adding them to their existing engine.

Scottish Gaelic doesn’t have ‘yes’ or ‘no’ - you answer with the positive or negative form of the verb used in the question.

http://www.gaidhliggachlatha.com/blog-mios-na-gaidhlig/how-to-say-yes-and-no-in-scottish-gaelic

I think even when the companies have a bit of money, they tend to go overboard. I think eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 is actually so long that it’s problematic, I would have been quite happy with it at 2/3rds the length it is. Even worse would be something like Pillars of Eternity 2 - it’s great, but it goes on forever and didn’t make any money. There’s too much of it.

Give us more games like Disco Elysium. Not that long, tonnes of replayability, and more importantly, it’s different. Really different. And the “moral choices” actually mean something.

Kind of. It’s the Linux kernel that manages all of the controller drivers and makes them available to userspace, mostly via the evdev interface. SDL is a library for managing graphics, sounds and events in a generic way on multiple platforms and devices. It’s overwhelmingly the most common library used for Linux games - Steam used it for all of their Linux-native ports of Source engine games, for instance. But it also presents all gamepad events in a consistent way regardless of their “true source”, so generic devices tend to work with every game.

SDL3 mostly clears out all the clutter from the previous versions of SDL. It’s a mature library and gamedev has come a long way in that time. Getting rid of all the weird stuff that the API accumulated makes it easier to use and maintain. Plus there were things like managing audio generally, and pen-and-touch gestures mobile phones and tablets, that were quite the head-scratchers before. That’s all a bit easier now.

Programming a robust global date-time system and having a transparent conversation between metric and *imperial/traditional" units is just a warm-up to show that you can work with the truly demented currency system. Make sure everything is rounded off to the nearest whole ha’penny.

Well, we’ve a minimum pricing per unit on alcohol, any kind of multipack deal is forbidden, and the licensing hours are such that it’s easier to get yourself some bennies than it is to get a drink before lunchtime; need to plan your day around getting some booze in the house.

National drug policy should really be about minimising harm, with treatment and rehabilitation for addicts, but any kind of talk that isn’t about stringing them all up is anathema to our circus of bawbags in Westminster.

You can only store rational numbers as a ratio of two numbers, and there’s infinitely times more irrational numbers than rational ones - as soon as you took (almost any) root or did (most) trigonometry, then your accurate ratio would count for nothing. Hardcore maths libraries get around this by keeping the “value in progress” as an expression for as long as possible, but working with expressions is exceptionally slow by computer standards - takes quite a long time to keep them in their simplest form whenever you manipulate them.

Assuming you had a pretty decent monitor and graphics output in the 90s, it may have been 800x600, but more likely 640x480, and you’d have been using the standard issue bitmap font with no anti-aliasing, blitted to screen using software rendering. Probably in a single colour, too.

Alas, the problem with that is that it doesn’t scale. On xterm a 4K monitor, I can watch Vim redrawing the screen, paging through logs is painful. Use Kitty for the same, it’s instant, I can flip through tabs and split screens too, and have niceties like anti-aliased fonts and transparency if I want them.

Some people spend a lot of time in the terminal, so I can’t fault them for taking the time to make a nice working environment and sharing that work with others.

I’d probably go with a “kitchen” metaphor here.

The executable for a program is a list of instructions for the CPU to execute. Windows and Linux gaming machines will usually use x64. Most of the instructions are logic eg. how to add numbers together, what comparisons to make, what to copy from one place to another; and they’re exactly the same on both Windows and Linux, you can run them as-is.

Some instructions ask the operating system to do things, like open a file to read. Windows and Linux do these quite differently, but you know how one works then you can change it to the equivalent ask for the other machine. Making the translation takes a moment, but some things are faster on Linux than Windows, so it’s not very easy to generalise as to whether it’ll be faster overall to do certain things. The really important operating system calls for games tend to be messages to pass to the GPU, and the Proton team have put a lot of work into making these as fast as possible.

If you think of it like following a food recipe, then given the ingredients you’d expect that most people would produce exactly the same meal by following it. Most of the steps will be exactly the same for everyone. However, if a step requires a piece of equipment that you don’t have, then it might take longer to follow the recipe if you’ve got to make do with different stuff. Similarly, you might be able to prepare things quicker if you’ve got a whole pile of restaurant-level gear and can do some of the steps differently.

Flightless Mango used to have some good comparisons, but they’re about four years out-of-date, now. Even then, you’d expect between 10% worse and 5% better on Linux. https://flightlessmango.com/benchmarks/

Forbes article here is from this year; expect between 5% worse and 25% better when running on Linux. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2024/08/21/linux-scores-a-surprising-gaming-victory-against-windows-11/

General experience is that generally there’s no noticeable difference at all; some games that use new features might have bad performance until the new features are implemented. Last game I really had a problem with was Horizon Zero Dawn. Elden Ring had bad performance on launch day, but was fixed the next day I think.

IVEBEENUSINGTHISKEYBORDFORWHOLEMONTHNDMMOREEFFICIENTTHNIVEEVERBEENBEFORE

No ‘a’, so it’s perfect for ordering some piss.

Yeah. Doesn’t take much optimising of disk writes to make things run much better on a Pi; they’re quite capable machines as long as disk i/o isn’t your limiting factor. Presumably the devs have been doing some tidying up.