In the past few years, I’ve started to develop a form of “upgrade dread” when it comes to OS upgrades. What are they going to enshittify now? What are they going to drop support for now?
This somehow excluded Linux and its DEs, and I eagerly read any news, changelogs, and announcements in this space. They’re still not perfect in every aspect, but at least I see things improving instead of public turf wars between departments trying to improve their KPIs.
Why is there an extra URL handler for MS Edge that bypasses the default browser config? Why is the search bar this wide in the default taskbar config instead of showing a simple button? Why are local searches always sent to Bing with no easy way to switch it off or change the search provider?
> I’ve started to develop a form of “upgrade dread” when it comes to OS upgrades.
I've been going the other way on Linux.
I used to think it might be wise to postpone updates if you were traveling, especially using a rolling distro. Today, I would be quite confident running the updates 10 minutes before leaving.
Granted, this is also because I'm more confident than ever that I could fix most breakages, and worst case the smartphone is there, but I've also not seen big breakages for years.
I have a somewhat opposite experience. I also use a rolling distro, and in the past six months, I've seen wine break, and I've also seen Citrix Workspace break due to a dependency problem (perhaps Mesa?). Granted, these two cases are somewhat unusual because Citrix Workspace is closed source and the software I'm running with wine is also closed source. I rarely experience breakages of open source software other than GNOME extensions.
Yep. I run NixOS unstable-small on my ThinkPad and there is rarely breakage in daily updates. If it ever happens while on the go, I can just boot into a previous generation. The immutable OSTree/bootc distros are similar, as well as openSUSE, which uses btrfs snapshots on updates.
Because it just searches Google and HN is indexed regularly, nothing really noteworthy. If you copy paste the same quote into Google you get the same thing.
Even modern low-end GPUs should have more than enough fill rate for high-res textures. The texture quality setting in games is usually not affecting performance at all until VRAM runs out.
Part of that is that the texture detail scales to the point where on a low end card at low resolutions you aren’t seeing any difference between high and low detail textures.
Not sure how heavy SteamOS is, but wouldn't modern games actually prefer a flipped memory configuration? So, 8 GB RAM and 16 GB VRAM would make this a more 'balanced' gaming appliance. But it is advertised as a general purpose PC, so 8 GB RAM wouldn't be enough.
8GB just isn't enough for modern AAA games. Battlefield 6, probably the most highly optimized AAA game to have come out in the past few years, still has a 16GB RAM minimum and Arc Raiders, which is also incredibly optimized, still has a 12GB minimum. Games are only going to become more resource hungry from here, so 8GB in early 2026 would be a terrible idea.
I was replying to a comment saying it would be better if the Steam Machine had 8GB of RAM and 16GB of VRAM. My point being that 8GB of RAM, not VRAM, would not be sufficient.
I'm talking about RAM. Otherwise I would've written VRAM. I was replying to a comment saying it would be better if the Steam Machine had 8GB of RAM and 16GB of VRAM.
Sorry, no. You're wrong. It's extremely optimized. I get 60-100 FPS on a 3060. It's ridiculously optimized. If you're having issues, it's particular to your system for some reason.
I remember 2042 being significantly worse when it launched. I've also played almost every other AAA launch of recent years from Elden Ring to Borderlands 4. They all run worse than BF6, even now.
No final decision, but possibly not. Given Apple are dropping support for x86 Macs next year, it's unlikely to be something we could support for the long term.
Are there any desktop apps that support Fastmail's label implementation? Also, a Fastmail web app bundled in Electron would still be MUCH faster than Thunderbird with its bundled Mozilla components.
Evolution added some nifty features lately (Markdown integration). And allows to use Client-Side-Decoration annd classic menus - usability wise awesome. Thunderbird got this year a complete redesign.
I loved ME1 and was disappointed by ME2 because I loved ME1 so much. I devoured the lore, every codex entry, and even the long elevator rides where you had to listen to news reports about your earlier actions. The world-building was so much better, and all of this was reduced to a minimum in ME2.
ME1 was an epic space RPG with action elements, while ME2 was an action game built around a collection of crew side stories with lighter RPG elements.
Recently, I had issues with Obsidian running out of memory and closing while in the foreground on my 6 GB iPhone, and the culprit turned out to be this add-on. Removing it reduced idle RAM usage on the desktop from ~1.1 GB to ~600 MB.
Just a warning for people like me who tend to collect nice-sounding extensions and then forget to actually use them.
The changelog states: "Added support for “differential” uploads. When large files are edited, Drive for desktop will now upload only the parts of the file that changed."
This somehow excluded Linux and its DEs, and I eagerly read any news, changelogs, and announcements in this space. They’re still not perfect in every aspect, but at least I see things improving instead of public turf wars between departments trying to improve their KPIs.
Why is there an extra URL handler for MS Edge that bypasses the default browser config? Why is the search bar this wide in the default taskbar config instead of showing a simple button? Why are local searches always sent to Bing with no easy way to switch it off or change the search provider?