I agree. There is literally 0 reason to buy anything from Apple when there are much better and much cheaper options that are already well supported by GNU/Linux. I will never understand people who will go out of their way to waste money on the next big thing from Apple only to get Linux on it.

It doesn’t help that they keep deprecating and changing standard stuff every other version. It’s like they can’t make up their mind and everything may be subject to change. Updating to the most recent release can suddenly cause 10s or 100s of compiler warnings/errors and things may no longer behave the same. Then you look up the new documentation and realize that you have to refactor a large part of the codebase because the “new way” is for whatever reason vastly different.

On distros w/o systemd there is always syslog-ng. s6 also has its own log system.

It’s not necessary, but a good thing to have if something goes wrong and you want to debug/monitor something. It’s really up to you and your needs.

https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker

Gallium-Nine also tends to be buggy if used with 32-bit software in particular. All the 32-bit games I’ve tried have problems with it. They usually work fine for the first 30-60 minutes and after that the framerate becomes unstable to the point where the game becomes unplayable. It happens consistently with Gallium-nine but not at all with DXVK.

I’ve seen some that try to tell people that we currently have “chrony-capitalism” (or some other prefix that some “expert” came up with) perpetuated by a few bad apples up at top. Those are my personal favorite.

Westmere Xeon processors are still quite OK imo. I have an old enterprise machine with one. 12 Threads, 2.6 GHz is still quite usable for many things. I mostly use it to compile larger software. But personally I’d argue that Longsoon is already far better than Intel/AMD since Longsoon is based on MIPS, which is based on RISC, while Intel/AMD still clings to their bloated and way too power hungry CISC crap. Plus today most performance comes from parallelism and cache size rather than core frequency and Longsoon does already have 128 and 256-bit vector instructions in their ISA, which is pretty decent. Maybe they can figure out a 512-bit vector extension that doesn’t severely throttle the CPU when using it before Intel can, lol.

I have the same experience. I wrote a simple program with SDL2 to test a software renderer. All it does is create a window then go into an event loop and after each iteration it streams a framebuffer to a texture that gets displayed in the window. In the default mode (X11) my frame timings fluctuate a lot and for a while I tried to massage the code to get it stable because I was convinced that it was just my draw code. Then I eventually forced SDL2 to use Wayland and not only did the draw time per frame go down by 2ms but the fluctuations went away completely.

It’s depressing to see so many AI powered FOSS projects that are basically just a chatbot/autocomplete or something that can spit out some images, when there are so many cool things you could use Neural nets for. For instance, as a FLOSS enthusiast a tool to help with reverse engineering proprietary binaries, specifically firmware and driver blobs would be awesome and could permanently change computing for the better. But everyone in the west seems to be more concerned with how they can use Neural nets to reduce production costs and increase profits.

Kepler cards work “OK” with nouveau. What sucks is that reclocking has to be done manually, video decoding/encoding requires firmware blobs and OpenGL support tends to be meh. Overall it’s an unstable experience. I have a stack of Kepler based cards that would still be usable if Linux/mesa had a decent driver.

Or the buggy Bloom effect in Cities Skylines, Stellaris and Surviving Mars that would cause flicker and a weird black screen. Pretty sure they never bothered to fix that.

I agree. This thread has some high levels of reaction. It’s disappointing to see.

Exactly. Also someone can only release parts of the source code of their software and still license it under a permissive license like MIT, BSD, Apache, CDDL, etc. enabling them to claim that their software is “open source”. And usually in that case the released source code just so happens to mostly be wrapper/glue code that calls out into closed source binaries which is where the actual magic happens.

start writing actually efficient software

We should be writing efficient software regardless.

I want an AI, for example, to analyze the material conditions of a country and plan a Communist revolution for me. Can I have that? Will capitalism produce this for me?

Unironically, I think what’s more likely to happen is that once the compute resources become affordable to the average working class people then someone will inevitably start a FOSS project like that. I have the feeling even if some private company manages to make an AI that could be used for things like planning revolution they will probably train it in ways to make it incapable of doing these things.

I wouldn’t even call it half of an AGI. AGI is comparable to a CPU; It’s a general purpose machine that is designed to run general purpose programs. But LLMs, Txt2Img Models, Img2Img Models, etc. are like ASICs: They’re specifically designed to do exactly one thing and do it very well. Claiming that any of the current AI technology is anywhere near general purpose is laughable. It’s nothing more than an attempt to build hype, to attract investors and gain market share.

Documentation on loongson processors is still pretty sparse. So far they’ve only published a volume 1 which covers the basics. All the interesting stuff is still to be documented but for some reason they archived the repository a few months ago: https://github.com/loongson/LoongArch-Documentation/

I’m curious how a loongson SIMD optimized program would compare to the x86 equivalent.

From what I understand it’s basically like a “thin client” type of thing where the client loads the Kernel from local storage up to a certain point and then boots into a rootfs that is somewhere else on a remote server.

Non-American here. No. I didn’t even know school shootings are a thing until I learned about the Empire. When I was in school all we did was fire drills.