yep, you got to love all the, Arch BTW or Linux Mint FYI.

100% relatable. There is a huge difference between, “It broke and I can fix it or that’s annoying but not worth me spending time to learn how to change it (but I could if I was really really bothered by it)” and “It broke again and Windows forced another update and it’s broke and now I have to fix it or that’s annoying and it bothers the shit out of me and and there is nothing I can do to change it.”

Things just feel way better, even when it’s all going wrong, when the problems are within your control. I left Windows a long as time ago because of this very thing.

Nice, Blizzard has always had unofficial support for wine. I used to play WoW back in vanilla on Linux using Crossover (or whatever it was called back then.) Occasionally the battle.net launcher will get an update that borks it, but Blizzard has always been very quick to fix it. I play WoW, Diablo4, HOTS, and Hearthstone from Linux. With the recent influx of Linux adoption, maybe Blizzard will release a native Linux launcher. Have to see where things are in the next 5 years.

That’s what I do. If you use Vulkan, then there is nothing to translate and it’s just a 1 for 1 call. Plus, if the game is taking telemetry to see what people are using, you definitely want them to see more Vulkan usage.

Naa, tar handles archives, it should know how to archive and unarchive really well. It shouldn’t know how to compress or un compress or sort it’s output by human readable file sizes. If you add the -z or -j, for example, to your tar command, tar will filter your archive through gunzip or bunzip prior to doing it’s job of un archiving all your files. If you use the -f flag, tar will spit out a list of files that were operated on. Adding a sort -h feature to tar would violate the unix philosophy.

Naa, it’s about the network affect. Sweeney said there would be no LInux EGL until there is enough demand. Even if the Linux EGL sucks, it’s still Engineering dollars being spent by Epic. Engineering dollars that would never have been spent on Linux unless the there was a requisite level of demand. Sweeney sees the writing on the wall. I’m sure there will be a lot of new to Linux gamers that come for the Linux EGL and eventually switch to Heroic.

30 years of vendor lock’n will do that.

I looked at the article, same as the reddit thread, probably written by the same person. ZSWAP is just not necessary. ZRAM works and doesn’t require disk space w/ 3:1 compression. If I was running out of swap, then yes, I would take a look at ZSWAP to improve my swap situation. It’s just not a thing with ZRAM, not for many years.

I.E. for my use cases, ZSWAP is irrelevant.

You get more ram for very little slow down, that also, would rarely be the bottleneck. For the servers, ram is a constraint, and it’s all just selfhosting. I have a Raspberry Pi that I selfhost with, as well as a couple 10 dollar compute instances in the cloud. More ram is much better than the tiny slow down that might occur during compression or decompression. All my services are all still very snappy, even the mailserver. For my work, I bring up large docker sandboxes of services that I need running to test entire systems. In the past, I would just allocate 32GB to a swapfile. ZRam is way faster.

Because I want to encourage more swapping, not less.

There is a lengthy thread on Reddit about the technical differences. Apparently Zswap will take advantage of the kernel eviction strategy for swap space. Apparently Zram doesn’t have that. To me that never made sense because, you create a Zram block device and then set that as your storage for swap space. Why would the kernel care, or know, that the swap space is backed by a Zram block device.

I do use Zram for my cloud self hosting machines and my dev machine. On the cloud devices they have 1 or 2 GB of ram and on my dev machine I have 32GB of ram. And in both cases it definitely seems like there is swap eviction. I also set the vm.swappiness to 180. Prior to Zram I would set my machines’ swappiness to 10. Swapping is highly encouraged on my machine.

Good to hear from you. I started with Slackware as well, skipped Slackware 5.0 and 6.0 (hehe) and went straight to Slackware 7.0. I eventually jumped to Ubuntu 7.0. Stayed with Ubuntu until recently I’ve switched to PopOS with CosmicDE. Worth a test drive at least, but the DE is not quite finished. Although, what is finished is very stable. I switched from Ubuntu because I’m tired of Gnome wasting years on bike shedding. I didn’t mind Canonical’s Embrace and Extend too much, mostly because I always knew I would be able to slide over to another distro with little fuss. When CosmicDE came out, that was my sign.

Just do live security updates.

MSFT has relied on their vendor lock’n strategy for 30 years now. It is truly awesome to see their grip weaken. It’s especially awesome to see all their free capital tied up in the AI war, so they have no money to throw around and enforce their market dominance.

It’s crazy how fast that day is coming though. Seriously wild how quickly things have changed for Linux and Gaming.

This is the way. I always recommend people to get their feet wet with the live boot. I’ve been using Linux for almost 3 decades. Live boot is the easiest way to find out what will work for you. I’m not a Mint user, but it’s great for the people who like it; best part about FOSS.

Hilarious that’s still a thing. Back in the late 90’s and early 00’s, I had a buddy that would format and reinstall Windows and all his games and applications religiously, once a month. Seems like something would have done about this after all these years.

Pretty sure, it’s a Gnome Shell extension for active workspaces.

I gamed on it when Proton magically made it so games I bought on Steam worked. Otherwise I just gamed on an Xbox before that. I only recently switched to popos, (still gaming on it). I started on Slackware 3.4 and switched to Ubuntu in 2006-2007. I think as long as you aren’t on the LTS version, you should be good. In any case, it’s not a permanent decision and seems like every distro is crazy fast at installing these days. Worth a go whatever you try or where ever you land.

I used to be a Crew Chief of F-15’s in the U.S. AirForce. We had manual patches too. Luckily, that was Supports job duty.