The vast majority of this increase is from people playing on Steam Decks

I believe this is incorrect. The Steam survey break down GPUs by description and the Deck’s GPU appears in the results as “AMD Vangogh”, which only accounts for 0.39% of respondents. That implies that the vast majority of survey respondents using Linux are actually on PC, not the Deck.

Some of my all-time favorites! I imagine there were precursors in terms of game design, but these were the first games I ever played where the enemy AI seemed actually intelligent. Like, guards would notice if you made noise, or if a torch had been extinguished. If they found the body of another guard they’d start searching for you. Pretty standard stuff these days, but that was a very fresh concept at release.

The studio behind Thief (Looking Glass) collaborated with Irrational Games on System Shock 2. Thief 1/2 and SS2 both used the Dark Engine, which leads me to my favourite piece of game dev lore/trivia. Because Thief was developed first, the game engine had code for sword parries. During SS2’s development they had persistent issues with that parry code activating when it shouldn’t. Testers would be trying to bean a psychic monkey with a pipe wrench and the monkey would parry with an invisible sword.

besides games

Yeah, same here. I haven’t pirated games since I was a broke university student. There’s simply no need to when digital storefronts make it easy to get the games I want in the format I want. Some even offer DRM-free offline backups, or in the case of Steam the games stay in my library even if the publisher decides to remove the title from the Steam storefront.

TV and movies are completely different from this, and so much worse. So many different streaming services, some with intrusive ads, and every one wanting their own monthly subscription. I shouldn’t need to search “where is X streaming.” Ever. Titles disappear from these services all the time. Even if you “buy” a digital movie or show, the rights holder can yank it back from you because… reasons?

TV and movie distribution is such a garbage deal for consumers that open source developers have created a complete software stack (the servarr stack) to automate the process of finding and downloading media. Once you get it set up, it’s about million times more convenient than corporate streaming services.

TL;DR: Getting digital games is easy and feels like a fair deal for the average consumer. Getting movies and TV shows is a pain in the ass and feels like an absolute shit deal for the consumer. I’ll continue to pirate movies and TV shows because as Gabe Newell famously argued, piracy indicates a service problem.

I hate my gas stove

Could you share some details on what you hate about it? I’m super curious. I like everything about my gas range, except for cleaning it.

I did almost the exact same thing, on the same timeline! Installed Bazzite on a second NVMe sometime in the spring, and it’s been my daily driver for months now. For the first couple months I was swapping back and forth due to some graphics driver instability, but that’s because I got a 9070XT at launch and it took a bit for the Linux drivers to get to where they needed to be. That’s pretty much sorted now though, and I can’t remember the last time I booted into Windows.

Guess who just gained a 1TB drive to install more games?

I might use mine to try other distros. Bazzite has been great so far, but I’m not sure I’m sold on immutability and I might try a non-Fedora based distro.

Currently using Bazzite. Wanted something rolling release but I didn’t want to do extensive tinkering, and Bazzite ticked both boxes. Other distros I tried (PopOS, LMDE) struggled with my monitor layout. Main monitor is high refresh rate and VRR capable, secondary monitor is 60hz, not VRR capable, and it’s in portrait orientation. That combination is very not ideal for some window managers, as I discovered the hard way. I’m sure I could have fought through that on other distros, but it all worked out of the box with Bazzite.

Debian Testing is unstable?

Naw, Debian Unstable is unstable. /s

Jokes aside, I don’t think I’d use Debian as a daily driver for desktop Linux, and I really like Debian. Now, for a server? Debian all day erry day. But as soon as a GUI is needed, I’m gonna look to another distro. For context though, that’s mainly because my daily driver needs to be gaming capable, and I have a very recent GPU. Debian 13 has Mesa 25.0, but 25.1 and 25.2 have fixes that keep some of the games I play from crapping out.

Apparently! I’d never heard of it either, and I’m pretty sure it’s primarily known for this meme now. Seems like a dumb name for a company, and it’s making for some pretty confusing headlines in this case. I wouldn’t be surprised if they change the company name in an attempt to remove the stain.

In case you’re not just messin’ around: know your meme link

People who are too cheap to refinish old stairs. Source: I bought a house that had carpet on the stairs, and when we pulled up the carpet we discovered a worn out eyesore that cost thousands to update. In our case the previous owners were a cash strapped family of two young kids with a third on the way. They needed a bigger place for their family so I don’t fault them for going cheap on the stairs. The all-white paintjob and industrial grey carpet in the photo scream “landlord special” to me, so I’m less inclined to be forgiving in my assessment of the stairs in the photo.

I think that’s a heavy duty banister bracket, like this one:

Some banister brackets have a swivel type arrangement so that the bracket can be vertical underneath the handrail, no matter the angle of the handrail. Basic heavy duty brackets like this one are completely fixed in orientation, so they’re installed with the vertical support at an angle to support the handrail. I suspect the bracket in the photo is at a 45ish degree angle and only looks vertical due to the perspective. The banister has been deliberately cropped out of the photo to make the perspective as confusing as possible.

Personally I think the photo was taken from the top of the stairs looking down, based on the wear in the carpet.

I must have missed that negative sentiment entirely. I played all three and had no complaints. Did some searching, and apparently a lot of the gripes were related to levels being cut down in size / broken down into pieces to allow for a console release (strict memory requirements). Also I think they changed engines for the 3rd game, or at least a lot of people complain that movement and controls were worse in DS. I guess ignorance is bliss, cause I enjoyed them all.

Do you mean Thief: Deadly Shadows? That was the 3rd game in the series, and from what I understand it was pretty well received. The orphanage level alone is so highly regarded that it has its own Wikipedia page.

Now the 2014 reboot, just titled Thief, that was so poorly received the it basically killed the series. It might have been a decent game, but it was not a good Thief game.

I switched to AirVPN about 6 months ago and I’ve been really happy with the service. Was previously using NordVPN, which was fine, but I was looking for a VPN provider that offered port forwarding and AirVPN does that. I don’t have hard stats on this, but I do feel that having access to port forwarding has improved my overall torrent speeds since switching.

Here’s the exact post that got the Proton CEO in trouble:

Maybe Gail Slater really is a great pick for Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division. Frankly, I have no idea. But I won’t do business with any company that carries any water whatsoever for Trump.

I’d recommend AirVPN. Here’s why I’d recommend them, in their own words:

No traffic limit. No time limit.

No maximum speed limit, it depends only on the server load

Every protocol is welcome, including p2p. Forwarded ports and DDNS to optimize your software.

Be lucky if we get out of this with only a recession. The slogan might as well have been Make America Great Depression Again.

Canadians have two moods. The first is “I’m sorry”, the second is “You’ll be sorry.”

Second mood activated.

That’s just what happens to CEOs of publicly traded companies when they have a bad year. And Intel had a really bad year in 2024. I’m certainly hoping that their GPUs become serious competition for AMD and Nvidia, because consumers win when there’s robust competition. I don’t think Pat’s ousting had anything to do with GPUs though. The vast majority of Intel’s revenue comes from CPU sales and the news there was mostly bad in 2024. The Arrow Lake launch was mostly a flop, there were all sorts of revelations about overvolting and corrosion issues in Raptor Lake (13th and 14th gen Intel Core) CPUs, broadly speaking Intel is getting spanked by AMD in the enthusiast market and AMD has also just recently taken the lead in datacenter CPU sales. Intel maintains a strong lead in corporate desktop and laptop sales, but the overall trend for their CPU business is quite negative.

One of Intel’s historical strength was their vertical integration, they designed and manufactured the CPUs. However Intel lost the tech lead to TSMC quite a while ago. One of Pat’s big early announcements was “IDM 2.0” (“Integrated Device Manufacturing 2.0”), which was supposed to address those problems and beef up Intel’s ability to keep pace with TSMC. It suffered a lot of delays, and Intel had to outsource all Arrow Lake manufacturing to TSMC in an effort to keep pace with AMD. I’d argue that’s the main reason Pat got turfed. He took a big swing to get Intel’s integrated design and manufacturing strategy back on track, and for the most part did not succeed.