Yeah. I would massively emphasize this too.
Don’t mess around.
Especially don’t mess around with AUR. Discrete apps and such are fine, but AUR ‘tweaks’ that mess with the system are asking for trouble, as they have no guarantee of staying in sync with base Arch packages.
Ease of use.
I’ve run the same CachyOS partition for 2 (3?) years, and I don’t do a freaking thing to it anymore. No fixes, no tweaking. It just works.
…Because the tweaks and rapid updates are constantly coming down the pipe for me. I pay attention to them and any errors, but it’s all just done for me! Whenever I run into an issue, a system update fixes it 90% of the time, and if it doesn’t it’s either coming or my own stupid mistake.
On Ubuntu and some other “slow” distros I was constantly:
Fighting bugs in old packages
Fighting and maintaining all the manual fixes for them
Fighting the system which does not like me rolling packages forward.
And breaking all that for a major system update, instead of incremental ones where breakage is (as it turns out) more manageable.
I’d often be consulting the Arch wiki, but it wasn’t really applicable to my system.
I could go on and on, but it was miserable and high maintenance.
I avoided Fedora because of the 3rd party Nvidia support, given how much trouble I already had with Nvidia.
…It seems like a misconception that it’s always “a la carte” too. The big distros like Endeavor and Cachy and such pick the subsystems for you. And there are big application groups like KDE that install a bunch of stuff at once.
Hence, Zuckerberg has just recently fired most of the LLAMA staff, the lab’s leader is rumored to be leaving for their own startup, and the new lab where all the funding’s going is a bunch of tech bro egos that are pro-closed models.
…And I suspect PyTorch is too “utilitarian” for Facebook’s leadership to draw enshittification attention.
Llama was an anomaly, and it seems they’re done with that. Which is quite sad. But on the plus side, it could be a death knell for Meta (as all that ego in the new lab will be a catastrophe).
Baloo can be disabled, it’s just the background search indexer. So can kaccess (the accessibility service) and kde wallet (the secrets manager).
A lot of the widgets, effects and stuff take up RAM too.
I mean…
You are looking at this the wrong way. If you post stuff on the open web, it’s out there. It’s been scraped for years, and will get scraped. The Fediverse is as low profile a place as any, but its no different.
If you don’t like that, keep it in private chats, like Signal or text chains or whatever.
This is like mod makers who release Apache/MIT licensed stuff, but get frustrated over what others do with their mods. That’s what releasing content into public means: others may do stuff with it you don’t like, and you have to live with it, unfortunately. And honestly, I think it’d be tragic if they didn’t publish mods over that fear.
Look up RAM usage in btop, sort processes by memory usage. A lot it is random services you can disable in the system setting or uninstall with a package manager.
And yeah… it even matters on a higher RAM setup. Sometimes I have most of mine filled with a background thing, and 1GB vs 2 or 3 can make a big difference.
Yes. 74% is the “average” point of diminishing returns to preserve the battery, according to Accubattery’s data. It tracks charging cycles and battery wear across many thousands of smartphones.
In fact, the reason many phones/gadgets don’t offer this feature (and that Apple sometimes charges to 100% in spite of the toggle) is likely planned obsolescence.
…To add to this, the actual charging threshold of the battery is a bit arbitrary and set by the manufacturer, as a tradeoff of capacity vs life. Fast charging is the same; charging quickly is hard on the battery, and the limits at different charge levels are configured as a “balance” between convenience and life.
…And sometimes they get those thresholds wrong.
Like Samsung rather infamously did for the exploding Galaxy Notes. Google did for the Nexus 6P. They pushed the batteries too hard and borked the phones.
Except maybe for the cinematic part.
I mean… The rendered cutscenes? The emotive facial expressions synced to dialogue and music? Just to start?
because I don’t know what makes a game cinematic.
…Look. I’ve played text-only RPGs and 2000s top down explorers that would fit in the cache of my CPU now, and they’re great! But you can’t tell me the visual gulf between BG1 and BG3 isn’t blindingly obvious. It’s almost a different medium!
or why you’d want a CRPG to be cinematic.
…Because I like seeing the emotions of my party and my character? And the visuals details of exploration?
Again, interpoliating all that in one’s head like a novel is fine, but I like an interactive movie, too!
That’s what sold me. I’m not a fan of the pen-and-paper mechanics so directly translated, TBH, but the sheer depth of presentation and the party characters are what kept me hooked.
Oblivion’s side quests (and into) had charm though. Especially the Shivering Isles, that was great.
The real problem is social media, and how feeds are structured now.
The ‘few trustworthy institutions’ model has been utterly obliterated because a few tech companies figured out a sea of influencers is more profitable/exploitable. Not to minimize some of the great creators out there, but one’s daily news shouldn’t come from Joe Rogan + your Facebook uncle’s reshares.
And KDE’s RAM usage is very reasonable these days, especially if you opt out of some of the bells and whistles.
Honestly I don’t even like fantasy CRPGs (hence I don’t have the reference of 1/2), but BG3 kinda blew me away.
It’s incredibly cinematic. The world design is tight and reasonably interconnected, voice acting great, and I thought the script was fine.
UI and build choice was… alright? I can see room for improvement there. A lot of mods seem to be going for that.
That’s kind of the game’s theme, ironically. Meditative peace.
To be fair, the gameplay loop isn’t the most fun for me either, but I got really hooked by the ambience and characters.
There’s definitely some nostalgia glasses.
And I dunno where you started, but I’ve been playing BGS since Oblivion, and couldn’t even get through an hour of Starfield. It played like a upscaled Xbox 360 game, with all the jank, yet none of the charm, more filler, all the loading screens, yet somehow ran like molasses. I have no idea what folks see in that game, despite the premise basically being made for me.
I use KDE with Krohnkite.
E.g. I have my cake and eat it, as windows can get dragged around if I want. Anything weird is just windowed like normal KDE.
Works with mice, and works good OOTB!
Hard disagree.
Installing Debian on Nvidia means you are maintaining Nvidia yourself, and you are just holding your hands together hoping the 3rd party repo’s don’t fall out out of sync and you don’t have to troubleshoot some Nvidia conflict yourself. This is the whole reason I left that ecosystem behind, it was a huge waste of my time…
…Maybe you got lucky and just didn’t run into any Nvidia bugs? But that was not my experience.
(And to be clear this is different if you’re using it headless or something).
What’s your exact watching setup? Like TV, room, player, source?
There are likely ways to mitigate this, but it all depends on your setup.
JC2 multiplayer was tons of fun.
They could make a mod for a newer game to drive up sales. Not like a hardcore game mode, but a big sandbox to mess around in.
Well Mint is technically fine, right? Their Nvidia support is 1st party, so it should work out of the box.
Pretty sure Ubuntu does too.
Debian, specifically, does not though. And I’m not sure how ‘behind’ Mint and Ubuntu are on their DE and Nvidia driver packages these days, which could be an issue sometimes. But I think many remember Ubuntu/Mint from older days when they were worse in this regard.
Could it perhaps be, I don’t know, the entire rest of the world calling out China’s own genocides?
And no, the US has no leg to stand on when it comes to stamping out ethnic groups, especially Muslims. So?