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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • For context: Ross Scott made a video explaining the situation. The Commission has been meeting with lobbyists frequently and had been essentially stonewalling the initiative for some time now. This was the expected outcome.

    However, he still has the support of the European parliament, so they will seek to amend an existing law (which can be done through the Parliament), rather than create a new law (which must be done through the Commission). There is high confidence that this will happen, this path will just take longer



  • It seems that the lag period (pre-Steam Deck) is causing the exponential fit to not be that good. Can you try fitting only to data from the past 4 years to see if the fit is better?

    Edit: Was easy enough for me to do, and I had the software to do it, so I did it.

    Details:

    Fitted entire dataset with a non-linear regression (minimizing sum of squares), with the given model:

    Y = baseline + Y0 * exp(k*t)

    Fitted equation was determined to be Y=0.7717 + 0.04451 * exp(0.04677 * t)

    With this fit, doubling time is 14.82 months.

    R^2 is 0.8851

    95% CI:

    baseline = 0.6029-0.9093

    Y0 = 0.01744-0.1023

    k = 0.03749-0.05734

    Doubling time = 12.09-18.49

    Edit 2: if we do a bit of the statistical funny, we can plug the equation into Desmos and try to extrapolate:

    With this data, we can estimate that Linux usage will hit a solid 5% on Steam after ~97 months (most recent datapoint is month 91 in my dataset), which should correspond to ~November 2026. If we extrapolate farther into the future, we can estimate that Linux will hit 10% at ~114 months, which corresponds to ~March 2028






  • Depends on how you loosely you feel about “why”. Was battery life a consideration? Sure. But it wasn’t really the primary consideration. Valve’s current track record is that they are masters at making a product that’s surprisingly workable out of scrapyard parts that they got for cheap.

    Valve didn’t design the Steam Deck’s chip - AMD designed it for Microsoft initially before the deal fell through. Then AMD offered the chips to Valve for cheap to recoup the costs.

    Likewise, Valve didn’t intentionally choose the parts in the upcoming Steam Machine. Valve just bought AMD’s excess stock. That’s why the Steam Machine uses such an unusual and unbalanced CPU/GPU combo.

    I honestly think SD2 is going to use x86, not for any particular reason, but because AMD is most likely going to have excess stock that’s x86 at the time that Valve designs it


  • I think it really depends on your definition of what counts as year of Linux. Will Linux usage ever beat Windows or Mac? Of course not. But it can definitely get popular enough that companies have to think really hard about whether they need to support Linux or not. And meanwhile, Linux isn’t going to get popular overnight (or in a year, for that matter). So do you consider the year of the Linux to be the end of growth? Middle of growth? Or beginning of growth?

    For me, I think year of the Linux desktop already passed in 2021, with the launch of the steam deck (where I’m defining year of Linux to be the point where Linux usage picks up and will hopefully end at a point where companies have to take Linux seriously)




  • My understanding is that automount is different from what you’ll need. The automount that you’re using is probably mounting when you log in, but you’ll probably want to mount when you turn on the computer.

    For that, you’ll want to edit fstab. That’s a file that tells the system that you need to mount this drive during boot-up. On KDE, there’s a partition manager software that can edit fstab through a GUI, but I’m not sure if there’s something similar in Mint. If not, the file is in /etc/fstab. Make sure to double check for typos when you edit fstab because errors can prevent your computer from booting up properly. Or just be proficient at terminal so that you can undo the changes when you make an error.

    Word of advice: use the nofail option for secondary/storage drives


  • Not finicky and Arch-based don’t really go together well.

    Just go with Bazzite or something, the exact distribution doesn’t matter (as long as it’s not Arch). The more important choice is the desktop environment, which is the user experience and looks of the distro. If you’re moving from Windows, I assume you’ll like KDE Plasma. It’s basically Windows 10 but modernized, with a more aesthetic and clean look. (It’s also paralyzingly hypercustomizable, so I would recommend using the default settings initially and slowly learning the settings, rather than diving into the settings headfirst the moment you install)

    I personally use Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE Plasma), but it’s slightly more annoying to set up than something like Bazzite



  • KDE Plasma’s default monitor is quite good, but you’ll need to edit the page to reveal all the hidden trackers that aren’t shown by default. Great if you already use Plasma.

    I also tend to use CoreCtrl and Steam’s inbuilt monitor (which I think is based off Mangohud?). CoreCtrl has a nice UI (much better than LACT, IMO), but it’s no longer receiving active development, so it doesn’t support the current generation of GPU’s. Meanwhile, Steam’s monitor is convenient but, well, it only works on Steam


  • Kubuntu 25.04 here. Did you edit the audio quantum setting? If not, you should. It may or may not be the same issue, but I would get occasional buzzing when playing games. It turns out the default audio buffer time is really small, so when you’re doing something CPU intensive (such as playing games), the CPU can’t consistently fill out the buffer on time, leading to occasional audio hiccups. Increasing the audio buffer time will slightly (ie, imperceptibly) increase audio delay and will give the CPU more time to fill out the audio buffer, which solved the audio issue for me. Try putting this line:

    context.properties = {default.clock.min-quantum} = 1024
    

    into /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/pipewire.conf

    (you may have to create some folders and files).

    Then restart and see if that fixes anything


  • Manjaro vs. SteamOS, likely no benefit. My speculation is that the company probably wanted to develop their own software but didn’t have the technical expertise to develop for Linux. Hence, they partnered with Manjaro. As for why they went with Linux in the first place, it’s likely because Windows is a mess and they likely considered that Linux would be a more marketable (and cheaper) operating system.

    And yes, these products aren’t particularly expanding the market, but it seems that companies would still like to throw their hat into the ring, if only because getting in early means that they’ll have a more dedicated fanbase for their later handheld products


  • You can blindly download and install things from the internet on Windows, you can’t in Linux. If you try, it’ll be confusing at best, destructive at worst. If you want to install something, best to look for it in your GUI software manager (the “app store”)

    If you’re up for the challenge (it’s extremely tedious to set up, partially thanks to its horrid instructions), you can try installing winapps. It’ll save you a lot of time with running Windows programs