Jesus_666

In addition to what Wolf told you, here's a few little extra tidbits:

Some games have native Linux versions. If they don't, you typically play them through Proton, a gaming-ready version of the Wine compatibility layer. Steam directly supports this through compatibility settings (Steam -> Settings -> Compatibility for default settings or Game properties -> Compatibility for per-game settings). Sometimes specific Proton versions will be better for specific games but usually you don't need to worry about it much.

Proton is damn good. Expect performance for most games to be within ± 5% of the performance you'd get on Windows. Yes, some games run better on Proton than on native DirectX.

Valve recently decided to enable Proton by default for games that don't have a Linux version. You can enable it yourself in the settings if it isn't enabled yet.

You can even force games with a native Linux version to use Proton by setting it in the game's compatibility settings. In that case Steam will download the Windows version.

Seconded, with caveats. Garuda is basically a gaming-ready Arch with a few of the rough edges filed off (and a 1337 G4M3R desktop theme preinstalled). I quite like their convenience stuff but in the end it's still Arch.

Pros: It's easy to set up and conveniently comes with everything you need to start gaming. It defaults to the KDE desktop, which will feel fairly familiar to Windows expats. It allows you to do whatever you want to do, in true Linux fashion. Cons: It's still Arch-based so you will be living at the bleeding edge. A certain amount of occasional instability is to be expected. The default theme might put you off if you're not into the whole gamer aesthetic but it's easy to change.

I also see people recommending Bazzite and similar immutable distros and honestly, I can see the appeal. They're harder to break and Discover (or whichever Flathub frontend you use) is very welcoming and convenient for managing your installed apps.

Pros: You're less involved with the OS's technical underpinnings than with an Arch-based distro. Immutables are designed to be robust. The Flatpak-centric workflow feels slicker than a traditional package manager. Cons: The design restricts your freedom to a certain degree. Flatpak has a few caveats compared to native software packages.

In the end I'd say that Garuda is great if you're interested in learning more about how Linux works and want to be able to tinker with the system. There's a ton of resources on technical stuff in Arch and all of them apply to Garuda as well. On the other hand, an immutable like Bazzite is great if you'Re not interested in Linux internals and just want something that works and is hard to break.

To quote that same document:

Figure 5 looks at the average temperatures for different age groups. The distributions are in sync with Figure 4 showing a mostly flat failure rate at mid-range temperatures and a modest increase at the low end of the temperature distribution. What stands out are the 3 and 4-year old drives, where the trend for higher failures with higher temperature is much more constant and also more pronounced.

That's what I referred to. I don't see a total age distribution for their HDDs so I have no idea if they simply didn't have many HDDs in the three-to-four-years range, which would explain how they didn't see a correlation in the total population. However, they do show a correlation between high temperatures and AFR for drives after more than three years of usage.

My best guess is that HDDs wear out slightly faster at temperatures above 35-40 °C so if your HDD is going to die of an age-related problem it's going to die a bit sooner if it's hot. (Also notice that we're talking average temperature so the peak temperatures might have been much higher).

In a home server where the HDDs spend most of their time idling (probably even below Google's "low" usage bracket) you probably won't see a difference within the expected lifespan of the HDD. Still, a correlation does exist and it might be prudent to have some HDD cooling if temps exceed 40 °C regularly.

Hard drives don't really like high temperatures for extended periods of time. Google did some research on this way back when. Failure rates start going up at an average temperature of 35 °C and become significantly higher if the HDD is operated beyond 40°C for much of its life. That's HDD temperature, not ambient.

The same applies to low temperatures. The ideal temperature range seems to be between 20 °C and 35 °C.

Mind you, we're talking "going from a 5% AFR to a 15% AFR for drives that saw constant heavy use in a datacenter for three years". Your regular home server with a modest I/O load is probably going to see much less in terms of HDD wear. Still, heat amplifies that wear.

I'm not too concerned myself despite the fact that my server's HDD temps are all somewhere between 41 and 44. At 30 °C ambient there's not much better I can do and the HDDs spend most of their time idling anyway.

Entra isn't Azure. Entra ID is what they renamed Azure Active Directory to. But not always; there's also Azure Active Directory B2C (yes, that's the fully expanded name). And various other Azure-branded things that may or may not belong together.

Microsoft are spectacularly bad at naming things.

It's a miracle they haven't renamed Windows 11 to "360 365" or "Live 6.5" or "Active-DOS Series X" or something.

And Windows 10 was clearly faster.

Than Windows 11, that is.

"Legally required", so they're seeing it in the local laws. Some countries require websites to disclose who operates them.

For example, in Germany, websites are subject to the DDG (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, "digital services law"). Under this law they are subject to the same disclosure requirements as print media. At a minimum, this includes the full name, address, and email address. Websites ~~updated~~ operated by companies or for certain purposes can need much more stuff in there.

Your website must have a complete imprint that can easily and obviously be reached from any part of the website and is explicitly called "imprint".

These rules are meaningless to someone hosting a website in Kenya, Australia, or Canada. But if you run a website in Germany you'd better familiarize yourself with them.

There's a reason why oldschool X-Com players kept coming back to the games despite technical issues like the Groundhog Day bug. (Thank all applicable deities for OpenXcom solving those issues, though.)

They're probably not pivoting but in FY2023 Azure made up 38% of their revenue, followed by Office 365 at 23%. That's a lot of cloud service revenue.

Is it sustainable? Honestly, it might. They sell a lot of stuff under the Azure umbrella and corporations lap that shit up. (Seriously; my employer is about ready to hire consultants to come up with additional eggs they can put in that particular basket.)

Here's my source; I couldn't be arsed to look it up in MSFT's statements directly.

My most used features so far are vertical splitters, vertical nudging, and the new placement modes for conveyors and pipes. With an honorable mention going to conveyor wall holes, which also free up a lot of design options.

Honestly, though, just about everything in this update has been a godsend. Priority splitters are the only thing I haven't really used yet. Even the elevators rock; being able to zoop up to 200 meters up or down in one go can make them useful even as a temporary yardstick for tall structures. (Also, I did end up needing to go 150 meters straight down to get at some resources and can confirm that elevators handle their intended purpose very well.)

Do you want a prediction? The current cost of graphic cards will crash the classic PC gaming market. There are some enthusiasts who are buying cards for thousands of dollars or building 4.000€ computers. But the majority of gamers will stay on their laptops or might go for cheaper devices like the SteamDeck. But if your game needs more power, needs a modern graphic card and a beefier PC, there are fewer and fewer people who can run it and many people can’t afford it. So devs will target lower system specs with to reach the bigger audience

Also, there's not as much value in high-powered GPUs right now because these days high-end graphics often mean Unreal Engine 5. UE5 is excellent for static and slow-moving graphics but has a tendency towards visible artifacts in situations where the picture and especially the camera position changes quickly (especially since it's heavily reliant on TAA). These artifacts are largely independent of how good your GPU is.

Unlike in previous generations, going for high-end graphics doesn't necessarily mean you get a great visual experience – your games might look like smeary messes no matter what kind of GPU you use because that's how modern engines work. Smeary messes with beautiful lighting, sure, but smeary messes nonetheless.

My last GPU upgrade was from a Vega 56 to a 4080 (and then an XTX when the 4080 turned out to be a diva) and while the newer cards are nice I wouldn't exactly call them 1000 bucks nice given that most modern games look pretty bad in motion and most older ones did 4K@60 on the Vega already. Given that I jumped three generations forward from a mid-tier product to a fairly high-end one, the actual benefit in terms of gaming was very modest.

The fact that Nvidia are now selling fancy upscaling and frame interpolation as killer features also doesn't inspire confidence. Picture quality in motion is already compromised; I don't want to pay big money to compromise it even further.

If someone asked me about what GPU to get I'd tell them to get whatever they can find for a couple hundred bucks because, quite frankly, the performance difference isn't worth the price difference. RT is cool for a couple of days but I wouldn't spend much on it either, not as long as the combination of TAA and upscaling will hide half of the details behind dithered motion trails and time-delayed shadows.

230 bucks? I usually paid twice that. Then I spent 7000 bucks on getting ICLs implanted. The years later my eyes got worse again so now I'm wearing glasses again plus I'm a bit farsighted from the ICLs.

But those glasses are only at -2 dpt and are so comparatively cheap that I'm still saving money over my expected lifespan.

So. Fucking. Worth. It.