Patch @ Patch @feddit.uk

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2 yr. ago

The Intel HD Graphics block inside a Core i5 is very architecturally different from an Intel Arc GPU.

Both Intel Arc and the integrated SOC GPUs use Intel's Xe architecture. There are obviously big differences between integrated and discrete GPUs, but they're largely implementation rather than base architecture. Implementing something on-die is a different task than implementing something on its own wafer, but that's not where the serious design legwork goes.

I don't know about Proton, but Crossover for Mac still exists, and according to the programme database on their website seems to have a decent hit rate for games.

Crossover is made by Codeweavers, who are the main contractor for Proton and the biggest contributor to Wine.

I bet it's arch (btw).

If you count integrated GPUs (which still absolutely dominate the non-specialist PC and laptop market), Intel are hardly a newcomer. Their foray into discrete GPUs is new, but the distinction is fairly arbitrary from a technical perspective.

Part of the great Linux experience is the ability to have competing projects with differing philosophies. Part of infinite configuration choices includes the choice of installing GNOME instead of KDE (or one of the dozens of other DEs and WMs).

Personally I much prefer the GNOME design ethos over KDE; I am not one of life's desktop tweakers, and my Linux experience would be much diminished if that's all there was. But I'm glad KDE exists for those users who like that sort of thing.

You don't really need the majority of the market to have moved before things start to get tricky for Intel. They're a very much non-diversified company; the entire house is bet on x86. They've only just started dabbling in discrete GPUs, despite having made integrated GPU SOCs for years. Other than a bit of contract fabbing, almost every penny they make is from x86.

If ARM starts to make inroads into the laptop/desktop space and RISC-V starts to take a chunk of the server market, the bottom could fall out of Intel's business model fast.

Most operating systems, excluding Windows, are shipping with decent native and fast email client.

Even Windows ships with one ("Mail"). I don't have any real experience using it (on my Windows work laptop I have Outlook, and on everything else I use Thunderbird), but it looks fine to me.

I have no idea what the pricing scheme is for Outlook these days, but Outlook does remain genuinely excellent too.

XFree86 and various window managers (back in the early 90s there were no free/open source desktop environments yet; KDE (1996) was the first I think, or at the very least earlier than Gnome.

As a point of historical interest, XFCE actually holds the title of the oldest extant DE project; it beat KDE to first release by about a year.

KDE was also famously not entirely open source when it was founded (Qt was closed until v2), which is why GNOME was founded (initially by the GNU Project) exactly for this reason.

Sold on his very own special X boxes.

I don't think there are many "compositors from scratch" are there? GNOME and KDE both have their own, Cinnamon uses a GNOME fork, and almost everything else I can think of is wlroots based. The only other one I can think of which isn't is Mir, which has been around almost as long as Wayland has.

No, MATE announced Wayland support a while back.

I know progress on that has been slow, but I look in on it every now and again and work does seem to be steady in porting their core components.

I'm not sure if they're settled on a compositor yet. There was talk (from the Ubuntu MATE devs) about using Mir, but I haven't heard anything about it in ages, and the Mir suggestion was at a time when wlroots was in a much less mature position. With XFCE, Budgie and Raspberry Pi OS all now going the wlroots direction, it's not inconceivable that MATE will go the same way.

I have 4 email addresses in regular use (excluding my work one, which is deliberately kept entirely off my personal devices). They are from several different providers. Checking 4 different inboxes in 4 different browser windows is an awful lot less convenient than having them all in one application. Thunderbird also lets these inboxes throw system notifications when the application is running in the background, which wouldn't happen if I'm just relying on the webmail interfaces.

Thunderbird also gives me an offline local backup of my emails, which is useful if I find myself in a connection blackspot and in desperate need to find an email. As my main personal laptop also regularly backs up data to an external storage device, it also means these local mail copies are backed up too; not sure when that's ever going to be vitally useful, but it's an nice thing all the same.

Ultimately, why not? I find the Thunderbird interface easy to use (not least because I've been using it forever), and the webmail interfaces are simple and intuitive too, so it's not like there's any intellectual strain on using multiple clients.

I'm not really sure I understand this post.

I use Thunderbird on several machines, and I use broadly the default config (no fancy business). I also have the same email accounts set up on my Android phone (Gmail ones on the native Gmail client app, an Outlook one on the Outlook app). When accessing my email on a machine which doesn't have Thunderbird set up for me (such as my corporate laptop), I just use the webmail interfaces.

And it all works...fine. why wouldn't it? Thunderbird and the Android apps just send their service calls off via IMAP and it all sorts itself out without any fuss from me. All the data lives off in the cloud anyway; it's just a different way to interact with it other than the web interface.

I just happen to like having all my email accounts in one combined place, running in the background and throwing system notifications.

I use and enjoy Joplin. It's much less feature-rich than OneNote, but if you're predominantly using it to make text-based notes it does that with aplomb. I enjoy the cloud syncing, which is very useful combined with the fact that there's an Android app (so I can access my notes on the go).

ICE cars are being banned entirely in lots of jurisdictions; they're not going to be coming back into fashion again. And hydrogen is a completely unworkable dead-end technology.

So what technology is going to power the cars of the future?

In my view, it'll be battery-electric all the way, but with the battery cell technology changing over time as replacements for li-ion are gradually developed.

Ubuntu releases an official RPI image, and Ubuntu Server is a major contender for any serious production server work.

Obviously that's not the right answer for the OP (who specifically says that they want to try something more "off the beaten track"), but it's a solid recommendation in general.

The Prius was the first mass market car in the entire world that could drive on battery power.

Firstly, no it wasn't. There were many attempts at pure BEV in the twentieth century, including several "mass market" models in the 90s. None were particularly successful, but that doesn't make Prius the first.

Secondly, that was more than quarter of a century ago. The first Prius came out as many years before today as the Apollo 15 moon landing was before the Prius. The market has moved on. Toyota can't dine out on Prius forever.

Arguably their biggest cockup was betting the house on hydrogen while the rest of the market realised battery-electric was the way to go. Hydrogen is a dead end technology for private cars, and Toyota was pretty much alone in not realising this.

If you find something that looks like human remains hidden in a shallow grave, you really shouldn't go poking around at it and disturbing it. If it is real, the forensic people will be pissed if you've been down there giving it a good fondle before they get there.

Tolkien: Writes a complex, multifaceted story set in a rich universe in a single elegant novel across three volumes.

Martin: Is five books into his trilogy with at least two more to go and still has no idea where the story is going.

I think I know which approach I respect more...

Honestly, literally anything with a server image will do.

Debian with minimal install. Ubuntu Server. Arch. Fedora Server. Anything.

Unless you're intending to do something very niche or are using some very specific hardware, you'll have very little difference using any mainstream distro.

If you currently use Linux as a desktop OS, sticking with a server OS from the same distribution or a closely related one will mean that you'll find it much easier to manage than learning something new for marginal benefits.

I use Ubuntu for my desktop, so I stick with Ubuntu Server or Debian for servers. Keeps things simple.