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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I don’t understand what you mean. Why does ARM hardware become obsolete after a few years? Lacking ongoing software support and no mainline Linux?

    What does that have to do with the instruction set license? If you think RISC-V implementors who actually make the damn chips won’t ship locked hardware that only run signed and encrypted binary blobs, you are in for a disappointing ride.

    Major adopters, like WD and Nvidia didn’t pick RISC-V over arm for our freedoms. They were testing the waters to see if they could stop paying the ARM tax. All the other stuff will stay the same.





  • I have an Ryzen+Radeon Zephyrus G14 from 2022. It’s been great, battery life and performance wise. I run Linux but I’m sure Windows is no worse in this regard.

    The only thing I can say is that I misjudged the 14" form factor and regret not getting a 16" model, and the mechanism for lifting the laptop of the table with the lid works great on a table but makes the laptop largely unusable on your lap in the couch.





  • This article is trying to conflate two different things:

    • Anti trust regulation of big tech which is trying to reign in the power of these companies. This is happening everywhere - including the US, which is currently starting a big anti trust case against Alphabet. The same is happening in the EU and probably the UK.

    • The UK online safety bill trying to ban private and encrypted communication

    These are not the same. Portraying them as two branches of the same tree, and the tech companies as upset bullies because someone is standing up to them is disengenious.

    Of course they don’t particularly like either, but most of them are threatening to leave over the online safety bill and the UK trying to puff its chest and show it can regulate these forces post brexit.

    I don’t see this going well for the UK honestly.




  • I’m not convinced. I think a lot more people are susceptible to getting distracted than there are susceptible to extreme acts of violence.

    Your stated good use cases can easily be performed after/outside of classes. And I would say in this day and age should be part of assignments/homework/studying in high school level education to guide and educate young people in filtering, identifying and assessing source materials better. But that’s asking a lot from teachers, who are not experts at this, either.

    I don’t see how any of this discussion relates to funding though.



  • For many reasons. Nvidia requiring secure boot in this case, which is not available for all distros or kernels on all computers.

    The other is requiring a workable kernel module and user space component from Nvidia, which means that as soon as Nvidia deprecates your hardware, you’re stuck with legacy drivers, legacy kernels, or both.

    Nvidia also has it’s own separate userspace stack, meaning it doesn’t integrate with the whole DRM & Mesa stack everyone else uses. For the longest time that meant no Wayland support, and it still means you’re limited to Gnome only on wayland when using Nvidia AFAIK.

    Another issue is switcheable graphics. Since systems with switchable graphics typically combine a Mesa based driver stack (aka everyone but Nvidia, but typically this would be AMD or Intel integrated graphics) with an Nvidia one, it involves swapping out the entire library chain (OpenGL or Vulkan or whatever libraries). This is typically done by using ugly hacks (wrapper scripts using LD_PRELOAD for example) and are prone to failure. Symptoms can be anything as mild as everything running on the integrated graphics, the discrete graphics never sleeping causing poor battery life or high power consumption, to booting to a black screen all or some of the time.

    If these things don’t bother you or you have no idea what these things mean, or you don’t care about them or your hardware lasting more than 3-5y then it probably isn’t a big deal to you. But none of the above exist when using Intel, AMD or a mix of those two.

    In my experience the past twenty years, proprietary drivers are the root cause of I would say 90% of my issues using Linux.