Here’s a made up example. Suppose you have a choice between compressing a game:

• to 10 GiB, and it takes 2min to unpack it in a certain machine
• to 3 GiB, and it takes 8min to unpack it in a certain machine

The download size difference of 7 GiB only costs me another 60-80s to download as long as the Steam servers are serving well. So funny enough the first option would be better for me.

some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales

Name and shame:

• Superdata Research founder and SuperJoost newsletter author Joost Van Dreunen
• Pitchbook‘s Eric Bellomo

What a stupid idea. These forced comparisons to consoles lead people way astray.

Obviously the strategy of a closed ecosystem vendor who can expect to sell new software for each generation of hardware wont at all work for the vendor of a device in an open ecosystem who must expect people to play their pre-existing libraries, and who must expect that people could buy their hardware for literally any other computer use than the software they sell.

Since you mentioned GOG, another relevant thing about them is their game preservation initiatives. Games that get the Good Old Game stamp from them get some engineering effort to be packaged in a runnable way.

That reminds me of something similar my ISP said. “Don’t be afraid of the bandwidth”, if you give your customers more bandwidth they aren’t actually going to fill it, they’ll still run roughly the same downloads just more quickly.

Here it’s at 12:10 in this video archive of their talk at RIPE: https://ripe84.ripe.net/archives/video/797/

And here when they gave the same talk at SwiNOG they also mentioned how their network ring in Wintherthur is still pretty much equally loaded after 10G and 25G home connections became available: https://youtu.be/wXmJCzMeIBo?t=1195

That was actually preinstalled by IT at my workplace! It’s a pretty nice little archiver. Seconded.

To make the desktop experience bearable: AltTab, Forklift, Rectangle, Ukelele, MonitorControl, Amphetamine, Firefox, Thunderbird, qView and duti to set the latter three up as the defaults.

As a package manager I’m pretty happy with nix-darwin, now I get all the CLI tools there, and what isn’t packaged, like wireshark for example, I get through my nix-controlled homebrew.

Coming from a Linux userland you might want to replace some coreutil packages with their GNU variants. I ran into one case where the GNU grep was much faster than the BSD version preinstalled in macOS for example.

What I haven’t found a good solution to yet is Filesystem support. Both NTFS and ext4 are missing. I currently have a Linux VM just for that. I think Paragon sells a driver, have been meaning to look into it more, but haven’t.

Edit: To be fair to macOS the App called Preview is a pretty good PDF reader in my view.

PS: If you ever need to use dd on macOS, be aware that there are /dev/rdisk handles instead of /dev/disk for the un-buffered access. Its significantly faster for dd shoveling.

PPS: You will probably have to turn off what they call “natural” scroll. macOS inverts the default for some reason.

when I look at Gnome I don’t doubt for a second where I want to be

Yeah me neither, from the other side, lol

I’m also not familiar with how these things work. But it looks like the problematic commit was reverted:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?id=765f253e28909f161b0211f85cf0431cfee7d6df

All these naysaysers in the comments here… It’s obvious you have to keep the development pipeline moving. Just because we have one free codec at the stage of hardware support now does not mean the world can stop. There are always multiple codecs out there at various stages of adoption, that’s just normal.

Not sure about the enconding

Right click on video -> Stats for Nerds

Did you misread? They wrote “the only reason left to boot from a DVD”, so the use case you replied with has nothing to do with the topic.

ORB: Off-World Resource Base https://www.gog.com/en/game/orb_offworld_resource_base

I assembled the links for OPs entries:

ORB: Off-World Resource Base https://store.steampowered.com/app/281390/ORB/
Ookibloks https://store.steampowered.com/app/399910/Ookibloks/
Paper Monsters Recut https://store.steampowered.com/app/314540/Paper_Monsters_Recut/
Curse of the Crescent Isle DX https://store.steampowered.com/app/365120/Curse_of_the_Crescent_Isle_DX/
Space Moth DX https://store.steampowered.com/app/425340/Space_Moth_DX/
Z.A.R. https://store.steampowered.com/app/351820/ZAR/
Demon’s Crystals https://store.steampowered.com/app/454610/Demons_Crystals/
Hyper Sentinel https://store.steampowered.com/app/640880/Hyper_Sentinel/
Katana Soul https://store.steampowered.com/app/1028300/Katana_Soul/
Timberman: The Big Adventure https://store.steampowered.com/app/2589910/Timberman_The_Big_Adventure/

For me things actually became easier when I got myself a native Linux install instead of Windows. But I guess it depends on your college.

The size difference is not significant. This is about the maintenance burden. When you need to change some of the code where CPU architecture specific things happen you always have to consider what to do with the code path or the compiler flags that concern 486 CPUs.

Here is the announcement by the maintainer Ingo Molnar where he lists some of the things he can now remove and stop worrying about: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250425084216.3913608-1-mingo@kernel.org/

Wow Nvidia, it’s really that bad? You didn’t have to shout it from the rooftops with your actions like that!

It’s quite cruel of that compiler not being happy until you’re exhausted.

Or they could just have been infected. Especially the ones on Windows 8, which has been EoL for over a year.

Hey OP, regarding Minecraft: It’s a Java program that uses OpenGL for rendering. Therefore it’s not a Windows game, but inherently cross platform. Here’s the official .deb package https://launcher.mojang.com/download/Minecraft.deb

the school’s IT

I wonder if that even exists. A mix of Windows 8 (EoL) and 10 (almost EoL) running on Haswells with students freely installing Roblox… all gives an unmaintained vibe.