• 4 Posts
  • 681 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2024

help-circle
  • Yeah but it’s priced the same as a cheap laptop and/or desktop, which of course doesn’t then require you to pay monthly to actually use the stupid thing.

    It feels like another ‘Microsoft asked Microsoft what Microsoft management would buy, and came up with this’ product, and less one that actually has a substantial market, especially when you’re trying to sell a $350 box that costs you $x a month to actually use as a ‘business solution’.

    This would probably be a cool product at $0 with-a-required-contract-with-Azure, but at $350… meh, I suspect it’s a hard sale given the VDI stuff on Azure isn’t cheap.




  • really effects performance that much

    Depending on the exact flags, some workloads will be faster, some will be identical, and some will be slower. Compilier optimization is some dark magic that relies on a ton of factors, but you can’t just assume that going from like -O2 to -O3 will provide better performance, since the optimizations also rely on the underlying code as to what they’ll actually make happen… and is why, for the most part, everyone suggests you stop at -O2 since you can start getting unexpected behavior the further up the curve you go.

    And we’re talking low single digit performance improvements at best, not anything that anyone who is doing anything that’s not running benchmarks 24/7 would ever even notice in real world performance.

    Disclaimer: there are workloads that are going to show different performance uplifts, but we’re talking Firefox and KDE and games here, per the OP’s comments.

    Also they do default to a different scheduler, which is almost certainly why anyone using it will notice it feels “faster”, but it’s mainlined in the kernel so it’s not like you can’t use that anywhere else.







  • makes you dizzy

    Fun story about VR and being dizzy.

    I had huge problems with VR dizziness and blurriness and it turned out I had strabismus which was not normally noticeable as it was mitigated by my glasses and by being only a modest amount of cross-eyed-ness, but would absolutely make itself known after about 20 minutes of playing VR, to the point I was absolutely certain I was just getting motion sick.

    Might be worth talking to your optometrist the next time you’re there, since boy, it’s shocking how much better my eyes got after dealing with it.


  • Fallout and Skyrim VR

    takes a lot of modding

    To be fair, so do the 2D versions. VR Skyrim, at least, is super fun once you get the modding done.

    As for general value: it depends.

    I mostly play various “exercise” games like Beat Saber, Synth Riders, Pistol Whip and Thrill of the Fight. The Quest is fantastic for those, because you can untether and go stand outside in a nice open surface and whilst you look like an absolute idiot, it can be a hell of a workout if you put in the effort.

    As for like, traditional games, it’s less rosy: there’s very little market, thus very little software support, thus very little market, which means there’s very little software, which means…

    There’s a ton of gems all over the place if you’re after slightly more social activities, but I’d say for single-player game experiences you’re going to be limited for good options that run exclusively on the headset.

    That said, there’s a LOT of options in PC-tethered VR that are fantastic, assuming you can/want to tether to a PC. If you don’t, that’s fair, but all the really really in-depth experiences require a pretty beefy gaming pc. Stuff like HL: Alyx, because it’s (still) probably the best VR-native game that’s been released so far.

    There’s also the VR-versions-of-PC-games like Flight Simulator and various racing and space games that are worth checking out if you’re interested in them, and VR adds a lot to those experiences, if you can run the VR versions with sufficient performance which eh, is a whole different ball of problem.





  • I’m going to roll my eyes: if you read the change it’s literally ‘Instead of cmd-clicking, you need to hit ‘okay cool’ in the control panel’, not YOU CANT RUN UNSIGNED SOFTWAER!!@11!!111

    The reason for this change was, shockingly, because malicious asshats were putting up malware pages telling people ‘oh you have to cmd-click to install totally legit thing here!’ and this puts a nice warning up in front of less-educated people in the hopes of preventing the spread of malware.

    I’m 100% for this change since it literally adds 3 seconds of clicking a single time for an app, and makes it where my family members are less likely to get totally screwed over.