“But Apple did it with absolutely 0 consequences”

I don’t think it’s a super common sentiment across all crowds, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some groups see the benefits Apple got by switching and wanted that for themselves.

One of the benefits is only needing to have 64 bit libraries. With this change most people can drop their 32 bit stuff.

Bits are literally “binary digits”. So more bits means bigger numbers. The reason you get more memory, is because when the code says “put this data in memory spot (number bigger than 32 bits)” … you cant with only 32 bits. How do you represent that number.

Imagine that you want to put something in memory spot 150, but you only have 2 digits. You cant. Bumping it up to 4 digits, you can say “put this data in memory address 0150” and its fine. “bigger numbers == more addresses == more places to put stuff”

So anywhere you need a number bigger than 32 bit represents, you can either just use a 64 bit number, or do a bunch of shenanigans. Those shenanigans require extra calculations inevitably. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,147,483,647 If youve ever seen this number before, it’s probably because of a 32 bit limitation. It shows up all sorts of weird ways.

Bigger numbers here aren’t about taking up more space, just representing literally bigger numbers. “9999” only takes up 2x as much “space” as “99” but it repesents a number ~100x bigger.

Sorry, I’m tired and rambling.

Another solution I’ve played around with, but it didn’t work super well… would be krfb-virtualmonitor

KDE’s remote framebuffer tool for making a virtual monitor to VNC into. For me it didnt do what i wanted because I have 3 other monitors and I couldn’t assure that things would launch directly into the virtual monitor… and it doesnt support any sort of dynamic resizing… But there might be something there.

I also hope that this kind of stuff improves in the future because of the Steam Frame. In Tested’s video, he calls out that he can only stream games at 21:9 if his 21:9 monitor is on. And other VR friends have pointed out the desire to dynamically resize content in the headset. So maybe this will get better in the future.

For me the issue is that i have a OLED 21:9 desktop, and streaming to my Steam Deck risks burn in on my desktop, and annoying black bars on my steam deck… I’d love to just have a 1280x800 faux monitor to stream to my steam deck, nothing needs to be visible on the desktop (headless, like you want).

But anyway tl;dr - krfb-virtualmonitor vaguely worked but not for what i needed. Virtual monitors are definitely a possibility

https://www.amazon.com/DIOOEER-Dummy-Headless-Adapter-Emulator/dp/B0HBQJQSDS

This might not be what you want specifically, but this is the kind of thing that came to mind. Basically a stub that feeds EDID data into the GPU so it THINKS there is a physical monitor with any resolution you want connected.

There are more advanced models out there that will allow you to custom program the EDID that it feeds, so you can use higher resolution or frame rate or whatever.

For some people, the anticheat becomes the game.

I feel like I’ve heard stories about famous DRM crackers that don’t even play the games - the DRM battle is the whole point. And for some people, it’s not about cheating, it’s about beating the anti-cheat. It just sucks that when you beat the anti-cheat you have the side effect of ruining the experience for other players.

And also, some people are just REALLLLY pathetic and have to cheat at games to feel adequate.

And importantly, it seems to ship with mesa 26. Which fixes a DRM leasing, which means VR works. I was just able to play beat saber on my steamOS system.

The home assistant voice is the mic and speaker but isn’t a system itself. You attach it to your existing home assistant. If you don’t have home assistant set up you’ll want to look into that first.

Even steel battalion?

That makes sense. I have no idea if I have a ground. If I don’t I assume I need a battery powered thermostat, which I would then need to periodically change batteries on or externally power?

The fact that I don’t know what I have, means I dont know what I need, means I need to bring an electrician or someone who knows what is going on, and suddenly the project becomes more work.

I could totally handle the “build a HA dashboard” part of things… it’s the physically setting up devices part that gets me every time.

I was under the impression that some smart thermostats need batteries because the “power to the thermostat” wire was designed for super low power devices, or is otherwise not there at all (thus the different number of wires). So “already wired with everything you need” varies from house to house.

This sounds a lot like what I want to have done. my biggest issue has been figuring out which thermostat to buy? Finding a zigbee vs zwave vs wifi model. Do I need to have 4, 5 or 6 wires or something? Do I need to re-run wires in my wall if I have the wrong number available?

Even just having a manual read-out and the ability to remotely manually change settings would be a win. Everything about this dashboard looks cool to me, but even without the smart auto changing of settings, I want this, but just dont want to spend money and buy the wrong thing.

The first line of my pacman.log file is from 2015. I’ve not had a need to change or reinstall

I think OP chose a random picture of servers to represent “linux” despite netflix[0] not having anything to do with this. And then cited the first item in the Debian social contract[1]. And then just wildly speculated that because other distros don’t have a social contract, that they might someday start charging money (they won’t they would just as soon stop existing than charge money, but ok).

So in summary… “Computer pictures” + “Debian good” + “Arch not good” in a wild mishmash of nonsense.

Also, to the OP: using a picture clearly labeled as Netflix just to start a conversation about the debian social contract is highly confusing and misleading. No one here has any idea wtf you are talking about.

0: Netflix has published plenty of stuff about how they exclusively use FreeBSD for their CDN https://freebsdfoundation.org/end-user-stories/netflix-case-study/

1: https://www.debian.org/social_contract

https://freebsdfoundation.org/end-user-stories/netflix-case-study/ Netflix. The one that famously uses FreeBSD for their stuff?

I’ve been told plenty of times that when I had bugs that weren’t getting fixed that “stability means no unexpected changes, not uptime, compile the package yourself if you need it fixed.”

There are plenty of examples of upstream projects asking debian to not package their stuff because they get bug reports for things that were fixed months ago.

Debian does not ship bugfixes. Debian only ships security fixes.

If something works, it’s not going to break. But if something doesn’t work, it’s not going to unless you fix it yourself by going outside of the official packages.

Also worth noting that Debian’s definition of “stability” doesn’t mean “doesn’t crash” even in the slightest. It means “doesn’t change.” That means not changing broken software to be newer working software.

Any non-security bug that exists will stay because new software only ships for backported security updates. So if you have a crashing issue, Debian has no interest in fixing it until the next release. Unchanging is more important than working.

If you don’t have any crashes or bugs popping up, Debian is great, because it won’t introduce crashes or bugs. Nothing unexpected will happen.

By Debian’s definition, the Titanic is now VERY stable, unmoving at the bottom of the ocean.