”On a scale of 1 to 10, how often do you think about killing yourself?”

“Uhhh… 3?”

”That’ll be $40”

It seems silly to be distrustful of proprietary BIOS firmware without having the same skepticism of the actual hardware.

I had a linux 5520 and it was terrible. Standby and bluetooth never worked properly. Are the new models any better?

I think it’s more like “snuck up on us” than any kind of nefarious connotation. Kind of like “how did a niche game like BG3 sneak into the top ten games list”?

This map is completely meaningless. The local value of “one money” in each country’s currency varies massively. A Coke might cost 1 dollar in Australia but cost 1000 won in South Korea, but Australians make 50,000 dollars per year while South Koreans make 3,500,000 won per year.

That’s why your phone has a brightness slider, or better yet an ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts brightness. DE will need something similar.

I blame Linux distros for being too complicated and unintuitive for 95% of the population, which in turn gives it a negligible market share from a game development perspective.

Or just sync before pulling it.

The problem is that only half of the chiplets have access to the large cache. If the scheduler isn’t aware of that and a lot of data is shared across cores (as in the case for many games), you’ll miss out on most of that performance. AMD wrote a driver for Windows to help optimally schedule threads with high cache intensity to the expanded cache chiplets, but they didn’t do it for Linux. If your workload is not very chatty between cores, and threads don’t need to synchronize at 60Hz, it won’t matter as much. But for game workloads, it makes a big difference, and can actually result in worse performance than the homogenous chiplet design of the mid-tier 7800X3D if you get it wrong.

That’s kind of my point. Linux supports it, but Windows doesn’t anymore. Why? Money - OEMs aren’t selling them anymore, so why spend time to support new features on them? On the flip side, the heterogeneous chiplet structure of the 7950X3D was supported on Windows from day 1, while on Linux the scheduler is still unaware of the different perf characteristics to this day. Why? Same answer - money. AMD doesn’t make money selling 7950X3D on Linux, so they’re not going to spend time writing a kernel driver to optimize perf on it.

I hate to break it to you but 4 years old is nowhere close to “bleeding edge” when it comes to PC hardware.

Linux has better support for the long tail of hardware. Windows has better support for bleeding-edge hardware. The main reason for this is money.

I game … regularly and have never had a driver bug

Presses X to doubt…

it made overpriced monitors look discounted

Although sleazy, what about this is illegal? This happens all the time in retail. If you watch the price history on Amazon or other retailers leading up to Prime Day or Black Friday, you’ll often see the list price adjusted upwards in the days leading up to the event, only for them to be published as “discounted” during it. For example, most of the year a coffee maker will be listed as $30. A few days before Prime Day, they’ll update the listing to be $60. Then on Prime Day they’ll list it for a “flash deal” costing $30 (“50% off!”). After Prime Day, they’ll change the price back to $30 base. Is what Dell did fundamentally different, or were they just unlucky enough to get sued for it?

Dell fined $6.5M

Or about 0.11% of their FY22 net income.

Figure 1: Human discovers that hosting a web service for hundreds of thousands of users is expensive.

If the client is blocking OS fingerprinting by returning generic navigator.appVersion and userAgent values you should probably just assume Linux in the first place.

Science fiction spacecraft - Enterprise, Nostromo, Tardis, Falcon, etc.

I love it because “it just works” (or rather, you have full control to make it work)

This is such a perfect microcosm of the hilarious irony of Linux fanatics.

Way back in 1993

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