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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Yeah, when I made the switch, I checked a bunch of the games I played the most for steam deck compatibility and thought I had to give up on some of them, only to find that they were still fine because my desktop is much more powerful than the steam deck. Plus it has a keyboard; if a game requires a keyboard, it hurts the steam deck compatability score (how much depends on if it’s required for playing the game at all or just needed every now and then to enter some text).

    So treat “steam deck supported” as “works on linux” and “steam deck unsupported” as “maybe works on linux”.

    I think the better indicator of not supported at all on Linux is the “3rd party kernel anticheat” marker in the store, though I tend to avoid games with that anyways, so I can’t really say for sure.





  • Personally, I’d just try live boot usbs instead of going to the effort of setting up VMs for different distros.

    For getting images, my approach would be to search for the distro name to find its website and look for their downloads page. If there’s multiple flavours, just pick one and see how you like it. You can always switch to a different one once you’ve got enough experience to decide what is and isn’t important for you.

    If you just want to game, Fedora was pretty easy to get going for me. I just installed that and then steam and was able to play games after that. I’ve got an AMD gpu and it was actually easier than on windows, since you still need to install gpu and chipset drivers on windows. The only time I spent on that in Fedora was the time it took to figure out I didn’t need to do that.

    Only parts that took a little digging was mounting my other partitions (I think because I misunderstood some setup during the install, but it ended up being no big deal) and finding the setting that enabled all games to be attempted to run with proton, since by default steam will only show games with official linux support as playable by default.

    Also getting sound working the way I wanted it to was a bit of a hassle, though any of the workarounds I tried worked pretty quickly. I wanted to use the optical digital, but it wouldn’t at first, but sound did work from the analog port as well as plugging my soundbar in via USB. And even though I gave up on getting the digital to work at the time because I just wanted to play a game, when I later swung back to it, it just worked, so I’m guessing it was just broken because my motherboard was a new one and the software needed to be updated to properly support it.



  • My first seagate HD started clicking as I was moving data to it from my older drive just after I purchased it. This was way back in the 00s. In a panic, I started moving data back to my older hd (because I was moving jnstead of copying) and then THAT one started having issues also.

    Turns out when I overclocked my CPU I had forgotten to lock the PCI bus, which resulted in an effective overclock of the HDD interfaces. It was ok until I tried moving mass amounts of data and the HDD tried to keep up instead of letting the buffer fill up and making the OS wait.

    I reversed the OC and despite the HDDs getting so close to failure, both of them lasted for years after that without further issue.




  • If it’s a topic that has been heavily discussed on the internet or in literature, LLMs can have good conversations about it. Take it all with a grain of salt because it will regurgitate common bad arguments as well as good ones, but if you challenge it, you can get it to argue against its own previous statements.

    It doesn’t handle things that are in flux very well. Or things that require very specific consistency. It’s a probabilistic model where it looks at existing tokens and predicts what the next one is most likely to be, so questions about specific versions of something might result in a response specific to that version or it might end up weighing other tokens more than the version or maybe even start treating it all like pseudocode, where descriptive language plays a bigger role than what specifically exists.





  • Also windows locks files that are in use, so attempting to delete system32 would (probably, I’ve never tried it) give some errors because it’s using a bunch of those files already and would leave those files intact even if you’re very determined to get rid of them. This is why you need to reboot to apply many updates because even the updater can’t get around that restriction.

    It’s handled differently on Linux. I’m not 100% on the specifics of the implementation but it either loads files in use entirely into RAM or simply removes the reference to the file when deleted (or makes a new file and points the reference there if you’re replacing the file). That means anything that is currently using the file can continue to do so after a delete/overwrite, so the OS doesn’t prevent it from happening. This is why you can run any updates without restarting on Linux (though you do need to restart to get the system to use some updates, if they update critical components that can’t be restarted independently of the rest of the system, like the kernel).

    If you want to nuke your whole os install drive on windows, you need to boot into a different OS instance (which is what the repair partition is, just a barebones windows install that can access files on the main install without the locking). But Linux can do it from within the same instance.