It was, in many ways, all the worst parts of their previous games compiled in to one, with none of the redeeming elements. Like, it seems the internal decision makers have an extremely distorted view of why they have been successful in the past, and the actual production line seemed completely disorganized and dysfunctional. The design and goals were bad, and the execution was bad.

They should have learned from the criticism of oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, 4 and 76, but it seems like they discarded all criticism(genuine or otherwise) on the grounds that the games were successful. And only listened to praise (whether it was wide spread, or from a narrow audience).

Maybe because it wasn’t a success they’ll actually listen to criticism and take the time to sort through it, or maybe they’ll just assume the issue was the space theme and will continue down the procedural shooter looter slop path.

Yah there is a lot of nonsensical compression artifacts, and they’re of wildly varying scales.

Really we’ve been gradually approaching a convergence for a while, really we passed it a while ago, where smart phones are indistinguishable in terms of meaningful capability.

Intialy the barrier was memory and processing power, but really, we crossed that bridge a decade ago, if you count the really low end net books. For a while the main gap was in the fact that one set ran on ARM and the other X86, so there was just a gap in what software that could be run on ether. But these days that’s hardly significant issue with the myriad translation layers.

Hell, you’ve been able to plug a keyboard and mouse in to android and IOS for a while now, and external monitors are also workable. So input and form factor aren’t a huge issue. Really the limitation is that most people who want a laptop or desktop form factor… will just buy one of those and people who want a mobile will get one of those. Most people will just get both.

Honestly I think most people buying laptops for work would be better served by adding a mouse keyboard and external monitor to their phone (ideally in some sort of laptop shaped phone dock with an extra battery), but mobile OSs are cludgy with that kind of set up. Maybe android merging chrome OS in to it will bridge that issue.

But really I don’t think Google, Microsoft or Apple really want to do something like that because it might cause mobile sales to cannibalize thin and light laptop sales. I mean, maybe Google would because they don’t really have much skin in the laptop game.

“I’m helping development of a foss project!”

doesn’t write a single line of code, just submits claude code without reviewing it or even testing

Comparing brave and fire fox is like comparing librewolf and chrome. When people suggest using a privacy browser other than brave, they’re not saying “just use fire fox”.

KDE is avalible for most distros. It being just a desktop environment. It’s well supported on Fedora, openSUSE, Debian and Arch. As well as many of the various distros based on those. Ubuntu, a Debian derivative, and fedora both have a version that installs with KDE out of the box, and the arch install script has it as one of the main options. You could also install it on mint, but, like, half the point of mint is the cinnamon desktop.

If you’re interested in customizability, are willing to read some wiki pages, and never want to wait for support for some new feature, arch is great.

If you want a system that’s incredibly stable, will run on basically any computer made after 1995, and is generally just very reliable. Debian can’t be beat.

Fedora and Ubuntu are both fairly easy to use, new versions are released fairly often. If you don’t want to think much about it, they’re good options.

As for game compatibility, most will work without any effort, some stuff will need a bit of puttzing with settings. The only situations where you may need a VM or duel boot would be certain competitive multiplayer games that specifically use kernel level anti cheat. If you play one of those, check it on ProtonDB . Notionally Proton DB is for the steam deck and steam games run through proton, but generally what’s on there also applies to any other game run through wine.

You shouldn’t need to replace any hardware. If you have an Nvidia graphics card you will need to install the drivers as they don’t come with the kernel, but it will run just fine. I’ve heard of some issues regarding specific brands of headphones, and I had to fuss a bit to get my microphone and it’s audio interfacing working.

Adobe products, a lot of popular music production software and a few popular CAD programs will have issues. Most of them can be run on Linux, but they don’t like it, and finding an alternative would be better.

So, it could be. Like, there’s no reason that the program its self couldn’t run through a comparability layer like wine or proton.

It’s just that it, like many other big multi-player live service shooters, it requires kernel level “anti cheat” programs. Basically programs that run at the lowest level of your system and check what’s running on the system, making sure the user isn’t running any cheats or altering how the game runs to cheat. They need to be at the lowest layer to prevent programs below them spoofing the checks they are running. So if they detect that they’re not running at the lowest level, they tell the game not to run, or at least, not to allow the player to join online matches.

These could theoretically could run through a compatibility layer, but then they wouldn’t be running at the lowest layer of the system, defeating the point of them. They would have to run natively on Linux, and the companies that make them have not made versions that run natively on Linux.

The actual efficacy of these anti cheat systems is dubious, as there is still cheating in games that use them, and they’re super invasive, being basically spywear. But they’re required by a handful of major games.

It’s so weird to see a company with such strong and straightforward brand chasing trends in such a sloppy manner.

If you want a serious answer ask a serious question. Not an absurd and ghoulish hypothetical.

We don’t need to. We just need to stop letting business interests direct economic priority.

I really do want to see risc V succeed in the desk top and laptop space. The fact that there are only two major architectures and both are owned by companies is a serious potential issue. Especially if they both ended up being owned by one company somehow.

For all the not super technically inclined people out there, I would recommend Linux mint with cinnamon, you’ll feel right at home and won’t face any real issues so long as you don’t want to play LoL, a few other big multiplayer games have anti cheat systems that don’t like Linux.

As I understand it, there have been issues with distributing Nvidia drivers in a Linux distro. Some do do it, but it’s kind of a legal grey area due to potential conflicts with the license of the Linux kernel.

I don’t really understand it fully, but it’s been an issue for a while. Apparently it’s less of an issue now because Nvidia partially open sourced its drivers. AMD’s GPU drivers apparently don’t have these issues.

Wonder what the situation with intel’s new GPUs and its drivers is.

For oil and gas producers, plastic is a very important part of the industrial system. Significant amounts of what is extracted is not usable as fuel after refining. It would just have to be dumped or burned off, which would hurt margins, just throwing away 1/3rd of what you pull out of the ground.

The profitability and market viability of fossil fuels depends pretty heavily on plastics production as a way of profitably disposing of byproducts. Take that away and they’re much less competitive with other energy sources.

The trick is that china is a very large country and some part of it is always collapsing while some other part is advancing.

passing the market share of windows

…well windows 7 at least.

Yah, I don’t live in a big place, nor do we turn the house in to a refrigerator, but our power bill was 200+ $ last month when normally it is closer to 50 due to the heat wave.

It’s wild.

I’m excited to hear they’re making a sequel. I hope they will project manage this one better, match the ambition to the reality, give it the resources it needs when it needs them and not rush it out the gate.

“The Death of Stalin” is perhaps similar to what you’re thinking of, basically about the shenanigans with in the Kremlin fallowing Stalin’s death.

I mean, I guess the term might just be “historical comedy”

So, AMD has started slapping the AI branding on to some of their products, but they haven’t leaned in to it quite as hard as Nvidia has. They’re still focusing on their core product line up and developing the actual advancements in chip design.