Compiled shaders are unique to every GPU model and often driver revision. The console versions don’t studder because they all have identical hardware, so compiled shaders can be shipped with the game.

Steam will eventually download a shader cache specific to your hardware, otherwise if you jump straight into a new game on PC, the game is going to have to compile them during gameplay, or make you wait 30 minutes to play while they compile (similar to how a lot of emulators for modern consoles like the Switch make you wait). And since nobody wants to launch a newly downloaded game just to sit at a boring 30 minute loading screen, they do their best on the fly.

This isn’t about defending Fromsoft, they’re just another company trying to get your money. I’m just saying that’s how PCs work, and new games with complex shaders are probably pick being accused of having performance issues at launch than hitting players who are expecting to launch a game and play right away with a long loading screen (that a patent prevents them from putting a mini game on while you wait).

From what I saw the negative reviews were split between complaints about difficulty, and performance complaints. On the performance front it looked to me to mostly be shader compilation studders, which is relatively common with most new games.

Difficulty wise, yeah, it’s hard. That’s a big part of the appeal of Fromsoft games. They have made some adjustments since launch to bring the difficulty down a bit, but it’s probably better that they launched a game that is “too hard” and patching the difficulty down, than releasing something that everyone can steamroll through in a day and getting complaints that it was too easy. The game also rewards exploration, and if you just try to rush the bosses without exploring you’ll make things much harder on yourself.

Does anyone know of Gullikit is still doing the thing where their joysticks have the square active zone as opposed to round like the stock sticks? I bought a set for my LCD SteamDeck a bit over a year ago, and after learning about the square active zone causing issues for some, I haven’t bothered to install them.

I think launchers are allowed, they just have to be usable with controller input. Hitman 3 is verified, and still shows a launcher on Deck, but when launched on Deck the launcher shows and accepts gamepad navigation.

One of the companies I frequently have to call for work gives a high volume of calls due to the storm systems moving across the United States. They added it like a year or so ago when California had all that flooding and the east coast had a couple of hurricanes. But it’s still on there as an excuse.

Eh, there are plenty of old quotes that don’t hold up, and the last 1500 years haven’t really been that peaceful. I think it’s fair to be critical of a philosophy that’s been around that long and has really just been better at marketing increased military spending than actually successful at building real peace.

Not sure exactly how good this would work for your use case of all traffic, but I use autossh and ssh reverse tunneling to forward a few local ports/services from my local machine to my VPS, where I can then proxy those ports in nginx or apache on the VPS. It might take a bit of extra configuration to go this route, but it’s been reliable for years for me. Wireguard is probably the “newer, right way” to do what I’m doing, but personally I find using ssh tunnels a bit simpler to wrap my head around and manage.

Technically wireguard would have a touch less latency, but most of the latency will be due to the round trip distance between you and your VPS and the difference in protocols is comparatively negligible.

I figured you were being genuine, but there’s usually a few people who point at Microsoft’s “embracing” of Linux as the first step in the “embrace, extend, extinguish” trope, and see any involvement by Microsoft as nefarious. When the reality is just that Microsoft’s Azure cloud services are a much larger share of their annual revenue than Windows, and Linux is a major part of their cloud offerings.

If you browse the LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List) for 5 minutes, you’ll probably see a bunch of microsoft.com email addresses, and it’s been that way for years. I understand why it bothers some people, but also Linus (and a couple others) approve everything that actually gets merged, whether it’s from a microsoft employee, or a redhat employee, or anyone else. Even if microsoft wanted to pay employees to submit patches that would hurt the kernel, the chance that they’d actually be approved is so low it wouldn’t be worth their time.

Maybe I’ll try and give it another go soon to see if things have improved for what I need since I last tried. I do have a couple aging servers that will probably need upgraded soon anyway, and I’m sure my python scripts that I’ve used in the past to help automate server migration will need updated anyway since I last used them.

I think that my skepticism and desire to have docker get out of my way, has more to do with already knowing the underlying mechanics, being used to managing services before docker was a thing, and then docker coming along and saying “just learn docker instead.” Which is fine, if it didn’t mean not only an entire shift from what I already know, but a separation from it, with extra networking and docker configuration to fuss with. If I wasn’t already used to managing servers pre-docker, then yeah, I totally get it.

I’ll probably make the jump when Plasma 6.1 releases with their “real, fake session restore” functionality, was hoping that would make it in to Plasma 6, and I am daily driving Wayland on my laptop now, but I kinda need my programs (or at least file managers and terminal windows) to re-open the way they were between reboots.

Thanks to kscreen-doctor, I’ve been able to port most of my desktop scripts that I use for managing my multiple monitors to work on Wayland, and krdc/krfb have been a decent enough replacement for x11vnc or x2go for accessing the desktop on my home server/NAS remotely (I know, desktops on servers are considered sacrilege, but for me it’s been useful too many times to get rid of at this point).

Where Wayland currently shines for me is VR, Steam VR works better, and more consistently on Plasma Wayland than X11 at this point, which is probably more of a Valve thing than a Wayland thing. When I first got my Index, X11 worked fine, but there have been times when Steam VR on Linux being “broken” has made the news on Phoronix/Gaming on Linux, but still worked fine on Plasma Wayland (which seems to be where Valve is doing most of their SteamVR Linux testing as of late).

As an end user, I do wish that the Wayland specification was organized better, because as an outsider, it seems a lot of the bickering that goes on has more to do with everyone having different end goals. I think if they would split out the different styles of window management to have their own sub-specs or extensions and then figure out what of that could be moved into the core after everyone has built what they need would be better than their current approach of compromising their way through every little decision that doesn’t always make sense for every use case. Work together when it makes sense, but understand that there are times when that doesn’t make sense, and sometimes you can’t please every stick in the mud, and are going to have to do your own thing without them. I do get the appeal of doing things right the first time too though, even if it takes more time. But it seems like usability is always the thing that gets sacrificed when compromises are made.

That’s a big reason I actively avoid docker on my servers, I don’t like running a dozen instances of my database software, and considering how much work it would take to go through and configure each docker container to use an external database, to me it’s just as easy to learn to configure each piece of software for yourself and know what’s going on under the hood, rather than relying on a bunch of defaults made by whoever made the docker image.

I hope a good amount of my issues with docker have been solved since I last seriously tried to use docker (which was back when they were literally giving away free tee shirts to get people to try it). But the times I’ve peeked at it since, to me it seems that docker gets in the way more often than it solves problems.

I don’t mean to yuck other people’s yum though, so if you like docker, and it works for you, don’t let me stop you from enjoying it. I just can’t justify the overhead for myself (both at the system resource level, and personal time level of inserting an additional layer of configuration between me and my software).

There is still a desktop overview that allows dragging windows between virtual desktops (Meta+G) unfortunately when they removed the old overview, they forgot to fully integrate the new overview, so it can’t be activated by screen edges (which is how I used to access the old desktop overview).

I have a similar setup. Even for hard drives and slower SSDs on a NAS, 10g has been beneficial. 2.5 gig would probably be sufficient for most of what I do, but even a few years ago when I bought my used mellanox sfp+ cards on eBay it was basically just as cheap to go full 10g (although 2.5 gig Ethernet ports are a bit more common to find built-in these days, so depending on your hardware, that might be a cheaper place to start). But even from a network congestion standpoint, having my own private link to my NAS is really nice.

I’ve dabbled with some monitoring tools in the past, but never really stuck with anything proper for very long. I usually notice issues myself. I self-host my own custom new-tab page that I use across all my devices and between that, Nextcloud clients, and my home-assistant reverse proxy on the same vps, when I do have unexpected downtime, I usually notice within a few minutes.

Other than that I run fail2ban, and have my vps configured to send me a text message/notification whenever someone successfully logs in to a shell via ssh, just in case.

Based on the logs over the years, most bots that try to login try with usernames like admin or root, I have root login disabled for ssh, and the one account that can be used over ssh has a non-obvious username that would also have to be guessed before an attacker could even try passwords, and fail2ban does a good job of blocking ips that fail after a few tries.

If I used containers, I would probably want a way to monitor them, but I personally dislike containers (for myself, I’m not here to “yuck” anyone’s “yum”) and deliberately avoid them.

Just doing a single pass all the same like zeroes, often still leaves the original data recoverable. Doing passes of random data and then zeroing it lowers the chance that the original data can be recovered.

Italy and most of France are sexually repressed? Aren’t they kinda the most famous countries for the opposite?

Yeah, unless you need the GPIO or the lower power consumption of a Pi, mini PCs are better for 90% of the projects people use single board computers for. Plus you usually get upgradable ram, and more-resilient storage.

Apparently Samsung and LG have started supporting it on their new smart TVs. Although, replacing perfectly good, older TVs just for a new codec seems a bit wasteful, so getting AV1 support in Chromecasts, fire sticks, and Rokus will probably make more of a difference in the short term.