Installing GOG games (without Galaxy) is about the same as what you're describing. The easiest way is with a game manager like Lutris, because it offers patched versions of Wine (like GloriousEggroll's builds), DXVK, vkd3d-proton, and various Windows libraries that the game or its launcher might need. Manually discovering and installing all that stuff is harder, but it can be done.
Yeah, they did. I wasn't a fan of every part of Cyberpunk 2077, but I have to hand it to them: the gameplay was pretty solid compared to the mess I read about at launch. They even made the player controls responsive and reasonably nice to use. That alone was a huge improvement over The Witcher 3.
(Geralt, I'll never forgive you for all the times you stepped forward into danger when I pressed back to avoid it, or decided to fiddle about with a candle when there was something more important for your hands to do, or moved like a lumbering sloth instead of... well... a witcher.)
Why would they do that? They are probably american feds.
Maybe, but I can think of another possibility:
There is a certain personality type that loves to feel like an authority in whatever community they frequent, and will jump at the chance to criticize someone whose concerns, experiences, or approach to solving a problem differs from their own. It has been very common in tech support forums for ages, and I think it's becoming common in privacy forums as the topic becomes important to more people.
So, while it's possible that some of what you are describing comes from government agency-sponsored influence campaigns (this would not surprise me), I strongly suspect that at least some of it is just mundane egotism. There are a lot of jerks on the internet. Many of them even believe they're being helpful.
Whatever the reason for it, I agree with you: Those people should be told to knock it off, and if they don't, then they should be shown to the door.
I assume they mean this Piper: "A fast, local neural text to speech system that sounds great and is optimized for the Raspberry Pi 4." A recent Proton Experimental changelog entry seems to suggest that it is.
For those unfamiliar with it, Piper does some of the best speech synthesis I've ever heard. You can listen to samples here, and if you're willing to install 60+ MiB voice data files into your browser, you can try it here.
I don't know how many games use speech synth, but I often use game-related tools that would benefit from this. For example, my Mumble client tells me when someone joins voice chat, and reads me any text that they write, so I don't have to take my eyes off the game. Having a human-sounding voice instead of a robot voice would be nice.
any instance a user federates with gets a gigantic copy of all of their metadata,
No, it does not. Instances get metadata only for the chat rooms in which they participate, not all of a user's metadata.
When chatting with someone on Matrix like you would with text messaging, only your instance and your contact's instance are involved. Because they have to be, in order to exchange messages. Just like every other chat protocol that uses servers, including XMPP.
I generally find Linus Sebastian's judgment and analysis to be of low quality, but Battlemage could still be good. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Intel does seem to be catching up. The Arc B580 performance:price ratio is already competitive, and Intel is apparently not done improving their driver.
In my area, the Arc B580 is roughly the same price as an RX 7600, but with 50% more RAM. That's likely to keep it useful for longer.
In OP's position, I think I might buy the Intel model, try it with the games I wanted to play, and return it if I couldn't get it working with them. (New kernel, firmware, and Mesa drivers would likely be important for such a new GPU.)
It is true. I said can retain data indefinitely, not will retain data forever.
(And in any case, being pedantic here misses the point.)