MudMan

For me it got particularly bad back when I was running Manjaro and the GUI package manager showed you multiple package types for the same software all the time. Three metronomes is bad, but three differently packaged versions of Steam is worse and potentially unrecoverable.

Gonna raise the notion that a good, usable piece of software would not require much, if any level of awareness on this front, since most users aren’t willing or able to have that awareness in the first place.

The way this should work is you click on things you want in a package manager and then those are present and available transparently whether you use them or not. That goes for all OSs.

Hell, even Android’s semi-automatic hybernating of unused apps is a step too close to my face, as far as I’m concerned.

I hate modern reporting.

So, ok, here we go, fact checking dot lemmy dot com.

Tihs one seems to come from Google’s 2025 environmental report, which the article mentions but does not link despite being publicly available. The message Google would like you to take here is that while their power consumption has increased significantly their emissions have not (key chart below).

I guess that’s what you get for trying to spin these things. You get spun right back.

Anyway, Google would also like you to know that:

“However, it’s important to note that our growing electricity needs aren’t solely driven by AI. The accelerating growth of Google Cloud, continued investments in Search, the expanding reach of YouTube, and more, have also contributed to this overall growth.”

This tracks. While power consumption seems to be speeding up a bit, it’s been climbing for a while pretty consistently. I don’t know of Google’s implication that less CO2-heavy power generation is enough to not have to care about it, but I also don’t really see a way to reverse this trend. Data centers are data centers, and whether they’re crunching AI numbers or running every spreadsheet in the world, a bunch of big companies are committed to continuing to own a disproportionate chunk of the computing power of the entire planet so they can sell it to you by the minute.

Cool.

But the pitch wasn’t “everything will be interoperable unless the company doesn’t mean it or wants to make money or we aren’t “morally aligned”, whatever that means”.

I don’t understand how you can be a “walled garden” and still feature interoperability with a set of open source platforms under a pre-established set protocol. This is not an ethical problem or a problem of ideology, those two things are mutually exclusive.

This also sounds a whole lot like it disproves skrlet13’s point on the heterogeneous Fedi where everything fits under different but overlapping bubbles. Seems to me you think Fedi has the one moral and ethical position on this.

Yeah, we’re almost there. If you buy a pre-packaged box with Home Assistant you’re most of the way there. If you look under the hood most commercial NAS options and even some routers are scraping that territory as well.

I think the way it needs to work to go mainstream is you buy some box that you plug in to your router and it just sets up a handful of (what looks to you) like web services you can access from anywhere. No more steps needed.

The biggest blockers right now are that everybody in that space is too worried giving you the appearance of control and customizability to go that hard towards end-user focus… and that for some reason we as a planet are still dragging our feet on easily accessible permanent addresses for average users and still relying on hacks and workarounds.

The tech is there, though. You could be selling home server alternatives to the could leaning into enshittification annoyance with the tech we have today. There’s just nobody trying to do an iServe because everybody is chasing that subscription money instead, and those who aren’t are FOSS nerds that want their home server stuff to look weird and custom and hard.

Yeah, that sucks. I’ve had it get stuck trying to update Proton for a game that no longer existed on an external drive. Steam definitely isn’t as “works every time out of the box” as people around here like to claim, and its reliance on reproducing itself to its last state, even if that state is broken, can be super annoying.

But hey, I still think having access to all the games it can run in your system should be the default, even if it warns you when you are doing so under Proton.

As far as I understand it the option remain on the menu, they just changed the default.

I would have been less annoyed at the default being off if the client asked you if you want to switch it on when you click on a non-native game. They instead have the toggle hidden away in their already cluttered and annoying Settings menu, at least on the desktop version.

Likewise, I think the answer to your issue would be to just give you a warning splash screen when booting under Proton the first time. That’s fairly established UX language on Steam, they do the same when you hit the controller compatibility layer for the first time and when you try to play games with small UI elements on handheld.

I never encountered that, but Steam can get weirdly stuck on a Proton update or setting if you start manually messing with its library folders. For as much as people like their contributions to the ecosystem it’s still a private, for-profit storefront and they’re not particularly keen on you fiddling with it or in supporting you when/if you do.

That said, I haven’t had that issue. In theory Proton shouldn’t mess with your native software regardless of your options setting being on or off. Presumably even with it defaulted to on if you switch it off manually things would go back to showing all non-native software as “unavailable” again, right?

Oh. Well, no duh.

Did they ever explain why this wasn’t on by default before? Was there a practical reason for it at all? It’s one of those things you do once and never think about again, but it’s weird that you even had to.

I guess maybe they thought that having some games try to launch and fail by default would look bad? They’ve recently added compatibility ratings to non-SteamOS Linux systems, so maybe that’s the difference now? Still a weirdly annoying choice originally, though.

Yeah, that’s exactly where it comes from. And it fits just fine for people like you, doing it for a living. It’s just a bit obnoxious when us normies dabbling with what is now fairly approachable hobbyist home networking try to cosplay as that. I mean, come on, Brad, you’re not unwinding after work with more server stuff, you just have a Plex and a Pi-hole you mess around with while avoiding having actual face time with your family.

And that’s alright, by the way. I think part of why the nomenclature makes me snarky is that I actually think we’re on the cusp of this stuff being very doable by everybody at scale. People are still running small services in dedicated Raspberry Pis and buying proprietary NASs that can do a bunch of one-button self-hosting. If you gave it a good push you could start marketing self-contained home server boxes as a mainstream product, it’s just that the people doing that are more concerned with selling you a bunch of hard drives and the current batch of midcore users like me are more than happy to go on about their “homelab” and pretend they’re doing a lot more work than they actually are to keep their couple of docker containers running.

Yeah, well, don’t tell them. The fields of Mastodon are still full of the debris of the Great Threads Arguments. Seemed to me everybody thought they had the correct and only Fedi.

I am remarkably annoyed by this guy making predictions on measurable things that he then entirely vibe-checks.

I am more surprised than I should be at how quickly the Fedi pitch went from “we want a future where everything is interoperable everywhere” to “we don’t want any interaction with for profit companies”.

I don’t mind either way, it’s all bad and I shouldn’t be here in the first place, but… you know, it’s weird seeing social patterns develop in real time.

Yeeeeah, I have less of a problem for that, because… well yeah, people host stuff for you all the time, right? Any time you’re a client the host is someone else. Self-hosting makes some sense for services where you’re both the host and the client.

Technically you’re not self hosting anything for your family in that case, you’re just… hosting it, but I can live with it.

I do think this would all go down easier if we had a nice marketable name for it. I don’t know, power-internetting, or “the information superdriveway”. This was all easier in the 90s, I guess is what I’m accidentally saying.

This is a me thing and not related to this video specifically, but I absolutely hate that we’ve settled on “homelab” as a term for “I have software in some computer I expose to my home network”.

It makes sense if you are also a system administrator of an online service and you’re testing stuff before you deploy it, but a home server isn’t a “lab” for anything, it’s the final server you’re using and don’t plan to do anything else with. Your kitchen isn’t a “test kitchen” just because you’re serving food to your family.

Sorry, pet peeve over. The video is actually ok.

OK, let me fix that for you permanently.

This is Retroachievements.org.

Not only does it do what it says on the tin, but it’s, for my money, the best discoverability tool out there for old games. The most obvious way to use it for that is to check the new games they’ve added achievements to, but they also have book club-style events (they’re revisiting F1 games this month to go with the movie currently in theatres), challenges, seasonal achievements, leaderboards and all sorts of the types of metagaming stats tools you’ve seen in modern platforms to point you in the rigth direction.

You can start by selecting “all games” and sorting them all by players to see what’s popular. Or, hell, reverse sort by players and see what weird crap is in there. Once you start down that rabbit hole you’re more likely to have too much in your retro backlog than you are to ask this question again.

And nothing has replaced it.

That’s what I was saying, it’s all shaky right now. Wilds runs about as well on both, but it’s noticeably less stuttery for me under Linux. Other stuff, particularly when leaning hard into Nvidia features, is either performing poorly or has features disabled on Linux. Plus the compatibility issues.

There is just no one-size-fits-all solution on PCs thede days, even before you start considering the weirdness of running the same games in ridiculous 1000W powerhouses and 15W handhelds at the same time.

PC gaming has become a LOT less plug-and-play this last decade, and I don’t know that it’ll go back to where it was any time soon.

Either different SKUs per territory or one of the sites is straight up wrong. FWIW, cross checking with Amazon shows the Z2 versions of the Go S having 16 GB and the Z1 Extreme versions with 32 GB for my territory.

All else aside, man, is the world of PC handhelds the wild west right now. Everything is on effectively the same two or three pieces of hardware, but somehow nothing is consistent.

That depends. In this case, where the Lenovo drivers are clearly outdated and kinda broken, definitely they’re the bottleneck for at least some games. That much they’ve shown, by installing newer drivers and showing a massive performance upgrade.

Although I’d caveat that by saying that their flashier results with big updates across OSs and driver variants are running at outright unplayable settings. They are benchmarking on settings resulting on framerates in the teens. When they say they saw 12% performance increases on the newer drivers they mean going from 14 to 16 fps in some cases.

Benchmarking properly is hard, I guess is my point.

I mean… you can turn it off. I wouldn’t, but you can.

I just haven’t heard it referred to as “antivirus programs” in ages, it sounds so 20th century to me. Say what you will about MS’s monopolistic tendencies, but at least they killed the parasitic “antivirus” industry with that one.