If it’s a SSD, it might. They are overprovisioned for wear-levelling, reducing write amplification, and remapping bad physical blocks.

I wouldn’t trust one off of Wish, but any reputable consumer brand will be overpovisioned by 2-8% of the rated capacity. For 1 TB, it would take an entire 9% to match the rated capacity in base-2 data units instead of SI units, but enterprise drives might reach or exceed that figure.

I don’t think people are upset at you calling out Nintendo for their rampant lawsuits, but instead at your dismissive reply when someone provided a list of games to answer your question.

Single-Person Identity Tokens Regulating Online Activity for Social Tradition. Along with a SSN, each American citizen will be assigned a unique token to verify their identity on the internet in accordance with the DANK Act (Digital Activities Need Knowledge).

Are you sure you saw anything? I certainly didn’t. Especially at large corporate retail stores.

Exercise 6:

set -e
f() { false; echo survived; }
if ! f; then :; fi

That one was fun to learn.

Even with all the jank and unreliability, I think set -e does still have some value as a last resort for preventing unfortunate accidents. As long as you don’t use it for implicit control flow, it usually (exercise 6 notwithstanding) does what it needs to do and fails early when some command unexpectedly returns an error.

Trump is allegedly already sick of Elon. Depending on whether Elon keeps being a sugar daddy or not, there might actually be a small chance.

to a point i feels like they’re seeing us as a lesser kind that need protection.

I think you hit the nail right on the head with that observation.

Speaking in accordance with someone’s wishes when they’re not around to advocate for themselves in a private conversation is fine. Someone publicly speaking on behalf of an entire demographic that they know little to nothing about is bigoted as hell. It shows a complete lack of respect by assuming they know what’s best for others without actually taking the time to learn about their values and culture. And it’s super condescending, treating people of the demographic as if they lacked the capacity and autonomy to speak up for themselves.

No no, we’re all misunderstanding what they mean by “free speech.” It’s not free as in “freedom”, but free as in air: you don’t directly pay them money to use their platform, much like you don’t yet have to directly pay our corporate overloads for the privilege of breathing oxygen.

If you want try to spread hate and perversion about Elon, grasp what you speak on.

Sure, here’s an idea: Elon Musk is the world’s richest man by a large margin, emotionally unstable, narcissistic, and insecure. Nothing good for society or the general public will come from giving him any position of power.

He has a lot to gain by influencing elections, and he has a proven record of supporting politicians and making them change their mind on policies in a way that benefits Elon’s companies. His trans daughter hates him for being a terrible person, but he blames her liberal-leaning views for it, calling it “the woke mind virus” and platforming selfish, anti-liberal/anti-socialist nut jobs as a “fuck you” to the threat he believed took his “son” away from him.

He has a track record of lying about his achievements, promising the future “will be ready by the end of next year” every year and only delivering something half-baked. But, that’s just his successes. He pays people to be good at things, then he claims the credit all for himself to seem cool and likeable. You know, like how he was claiming to be top 10 in Path of Exile 2, only to be caught obviously not knowing how to actually play the game he was supposedly world-class in.

Or if that’s not sad enough for you, have you heard of Adrian Dittman? If you don’t know who he is, let me tell you: he’s Elon’s alt account on Twitter… using a voice changer to pretend to be not-Elon… while acting as Elon’s number one fan.

In conclusion, fuck Elon Musk. Somebody who is that insecure, pathetic, and self-centered shouldn’t be allowed to buy his way into influencing politics.

Oh cool, I was banned from there last month.

Like “MDMA”, “WEED”, or “TUAH”?

With his lifestyle, nature will pardon him from having to pay that fine long before it gets to the point where he can’t appeal it to a higher court.

“Marginal Demographic, Mandatory Assistance” camps?
“Wage-Exempt Extradition & Deportation” camps?
“Temporary Unpaid Assistant Housing”?

Out of a cannon? The only Cannons I know of take forever and put people on pedestals instead of where they belong.

Sorry, yeah. Bookworm. I’m terrible at remembering codenames.

Schedulers really don’t matter much for gaming workloads.

sched_ext is a bit more interesting. It’s not a scheduler with a new set of knobs to turn, but actually more of a BPF-powered scheduler framework. Being able to swap out the scheduler depending on the game’s needs could be a huge win, and there’s already a couple of schedulers like LAVD (phoronix article) that are designed for improving the Linux gaming experience.

Tweaking is usually not worth it. The most I really do is up sending like the mmap limit if a game is struggling.

Trying to squeeze every bit of performance out, yeah. I don’t want to waste my time trying to get a 1 FPS improvement either.

My concerns with tweaking are more along the lines of things like this happening. User reads about how to get better FPS, sees that some system package is really old, then tries to replace it with a newer one without knowing the risks.

That guy actually asked around and was convinced to just use Flatpak instead. But, suppose they didn’t ask around and instead followed a guide or YouTube video, breaking something in the process. The typical self-proclaimed “gamer” isn’t any more technologically savy than your average consumer, and probably isn’t going to spend the time learning how to fix their mistakes. It’s a more likely that they are just going to walk away with the impression that Linux sucks, and tell everyone else about how bad it was. And unfortunately, first impressions matter a lot when convincing other people to try things like ditching Windows for Linux. Avoiding stable distros is mitigation for that. If the package is already up to date or doesn’t require going off the happy path to update, it leads to less bad choices.

My overall perspective is that if you give gamers a gift-wrapped install that immediately just works, they won’t have a reason to improve or fix things until they’re actually ready to. If 19/20 of their games work out of the box, they’ll play those 19 games until they find the courage to try and learn how to make game #20 work. Or, maybe someone else will fix it for them first.

If 0 out of 20 games work and they need to follow a guide telling them to run various commands to install stuff and get started, they’re going to be overconfident and underprepared when they step outside of the guardrails and do at-your-own-risk stuff they find online.

Either you’ll have OS questions, in which case the generic help is ideal, or you’ll have game specific issues, in which case most distros will be extremely similar (e.g. proton db for game specific workarounds).

I meant game-specific issues, yeah.

Even with ProtonDB, I don’t think the typical coming-from-Windows gamer is going to end up having a simple experience.

With Windows, practically everyone is running the same system software. If some game is broken, they Google “windows 11 Cyberpunk crash” and get a bunch of suggestions and solutions relevant to them. I don’t like Windows, but it does have the fact that there’s a massive community of gamers running the same “distro” (or in this case, Windows version) going for it.

Even with ProtonDB, you have a bunch of people running different distros, different graphics driver implementations for a single graphics card vendor, and just a bunch of software fragmentation… A stable distro would probably be fine for newcomers if was tailored for gaming and had a critical mass of users, I’m sure. But in the current landscape, and for the reasons I listed in rant above, I simply don’t think it would be a good idea to put someone on a stable distro when they’re going to be surrounded with solutions from people on other distros describing how they fixed the problem by updating something or another.

For people coming to Linux, I’ll usually recommend sticking with Steam verified or playable games as well, since those should largely just work.

Absolutely. If it Just Works™, it leads to a better first impressions.

I see your point, but i don’t really agree that it doesn’t benefit gamers. In the 10 versions of kernels released since Bullseye released, we’ve seen improvements like the EEVDF allocator, sched_ext, the beginnings of ntsync, and an optimization to MDS mitigations for Intel processors. In a gaming-oriented distro, these would (ideally) be configured out of the box for the best gaming experience. Using a stable LTS distro, in contrast, would require manual tweaking and experimentation to achieve the same result.

But my understanding is that people (esp gamers) get annoyed more by stuff changing than missing out on new stuff.

They get annoyed when stuff visibly changes, like the desktop UI, userspace GUI programs, or noticable performance regressions.

Anecdotally, I have rarely seen the typical gamer complaining about or even noticing when something changes in technical stuff that they aren’t directly interacting with. Nintendo actually does a good job creating situations where you can observe that behavior, funnily enough. When they release a new console with a different UI, non-casual gamers vocally bitch about it being worse than the previous generation. But when it comes to updates, the complaints are pretty much all about how it only changes the bad word list, doesn’t have x in 2024, or how every update is just more “stability.” Meanwhile, they have successfully done major rewrites and changes behind the scenes without anyone but the CFW and modding scene actually noticing it.

The whole point of recommending a stable distro is to give the best chance of the person finding the help they need, as well as things not breaking randomly, and you get that with stable release distros.

I agree that a stable distro will be more stable, but I don’t agree that a stable distro is the best chance to get them help as a gaming newcomer. For newcomers in general, sure. But for gaming, it would be better to direct them towards a distro primarily focused on gaming, where they’ll have a likeminded community. A popular stable distro will have more community resources available overall, but most of that is just going to end up becoming noise that makes it harder for them to find a solution for game-related problems.

An important thing to consider: Mastodon doesn’t have an “algorithm” for presenting posts in your subscription feed.

That doesn’t mean it “does not have an algorithm” entirely, though. There’s a couple of non-trivial ones being used to recommend friends and calculate the trending posts and tags that show up on the front page, and they do actually consider likes/shares as part of scoring.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/54e20301462b381f27c50ed305abeedde1ace878/app/models/trends/statuses.rb#L98

It’s not so much the lack of a rapid update cycle as much as it’s the pinned kernel version alongside the years-long pace of Debian’s stable upgrade cycle.

That would be fine if the kernel didn’t see much improvement over ~2 years of development, but there’s constantly new stuff being added or optimized with every kernel release. It’s just not much of a friendly introduction to Linux gaming for a newcomer to either have to pick between missing out on recent improvements, or diving into the intimidating realm of fiddling with packages and backported kernels—especially if they’re not coming from a tech savvy background.

Also, kernel upgrades. Unless the user knows about and specifically opts to use Debian backports, they’re going to be on the same kernel version until the next stable Debian release. It’s not the end of the world to leave performance on the table, but some people are picky about getting their money out of their hardware.

Using backports and upgrading to a newer kernel is fine for someone familiar with Linux and confident enough to tinker and make at-your-own-risk changes. Having to do that can be offputting for newcomers, coming across as intimidating or unnecessarily complicated.

I agree with your sentiment, but I disagree with your conclusion of using any major distro. If you’ve ever had to fix a corrupted package manager database caused by an in-place distro upgrade or had to install third-party package repositories to get access to up-to-date software, you’ll understand where I’m coming from.

Beginners should start with something that either has bells and whistles included for out-of-the-box gaming, or comes with an easy way to un-fuck itself when you end up breaking something. It doesn’t need to be Nix, but it probably shouldn’t be Debian (which has a slow release cadence) or Ubuntu (because fuck Canonical and their “my way or the highway” approach to doing desktop OSes).