Another problem is that having better frame pacing, or better timing stops mattering if the OS decides to reboot for updates mid game. Game experience is much more than just game performance.
Part of the issue is that a large part of linux gamers are saying "linux gaming is great" and meaning "linux gaming is good enough now that it is better than putting up with microsoft and windows 11"
Some people would rather put up with slightly worse frame pacing if it means no microsoft. Some linux folks are super gung-ho pro privacy, some are just super anti-microsoft but can't game on mac. There's a whole lot of reasons to wind up on linux, so the importance of specific performance details may vary depending on WHY you would be swapping.
And some people are playing games on good enough hardware that there arent noticeable frame pacing issues, so good raw FPS numbers just reinforce their views, and they just genuinely mean they are having a good experience themselves.
Some people have TVs or displays that only use HDMI. I personally wouldn't recommend HDMI if DisplayPort is available, but if HDMI is your only option, then having it work properly will be important.
Headphone piece broke. Replacement was covered under warranty. Once. After that it was $30 a pop from amazon for the replacement part. Both of the parts provided under warranty (it was a set of 2) broke in the same way.
Figured if the parts break that regularly, I would wind up spending $500 in just a few years on replacement parts, might as well just get a printer. The part already had a model available (it was apparently a common issue), and the printed version hasn't broken yet.
I know nothing about making models, so the fact that the community already had the replacement part ready to print for me was a huge win, and Valve doing this basically guarantees that there will be a variety of "Controller stand, with puck slot" and replacement part prints available. HUGE win.
It's a flavor of 3D modeling called "constraint-based." You've heard the adage that if you give a million monkeys typewriters, eventually one will write something coherent? Constraint systems embody that same idea: There are infinite possible 3D models. You keep adding constraints until you narrow it down to only one possible solution that fulfills all of them.
I've been learning FreeCAD, while it's still more frustrating than Fusion or SolidWorks it's much better than it used to be pre-1.1, and it's FOSS. Also constraint-based, I've been using the new spreadsheet view as the source of all constraint dimensions, with parts derived by binding to top, front, or right-side orthographic "master" sketches. Much like hand-drawn design, where you draw the orthographic views and use those directly to create an isometric view.
Business minded folk can convince themselves that "ads are for the consumer because they benefit from knowing about our great deals!" but everyone else knows that ads are for the business to increase revenue. If they didn't increase revenue, the business wouldn't do it.
If your website provides an actual utility, then that utility is for the customers. Everything else on the site (upsells, cross sells, branding), is for the business.
I was merely trying to convey that when I go to a restaurant website, I want to: see the menu, make a reservation, see hours. There is a specific list of reasons I would go to your restaurant website. It is utility that serves me.
If I go to your restaurant's website and have to dig to find the menu and the page is just plastered with "Fine dining with a wonderful view" and pictures of models eating... that's not helping me, that's advertising to me. And now your website is no longer a utility/service, it is a billboard. The only reason I tolerate the billboard is because of the utility, and if the utility doesnt exist, why would I ever come back.
"Own" the movie in quotes is interesting. Because you own the physical medium, but the data encoded on it is still copyrighted and can be treated in some ways like a license still. It is possible to obtain a legal copy of physical media and not be legally allowed to view it in certain ways.
Backups are legal (assuming you keep the physical DVD, like youve said, and dont just "make a backup" and then sell the original), but you don't just have carte blanche to the content still (ie, region coding has weird legalities to it, public viewing is still not allowed, because you havent licensed that right.)
That said, I still fully agree with you. I just find the "license" vs "ownership" topic interesting for physical copies. The fact that media companies are so strongly trying to limit your rights just means you need to make sure you keep what rights you do have. I spent 3 years personally backing up my wife's 1400 DVDs, because with that many of them, at some point the discs are bound to go bad.
>Because you own the physical medium, but the data encoded on it is still copyrighted
Yes, and it turns out I also own the hard drives that it's stored on. The thumb drives. The SSDs. And there is no copyright police in my utility room. But there is a Plex server. The "Netflix sucks and I don't have enough control over my shows" problem was solved years ago. Seriously, you can stream this to any device you own, whether you're at home or in some hotel a continent away. You can stream it for your friends.
>I spent 3 years personally backing up my wife's 1400 DVDs, because with that many of them, at some point the discs are bound to go bad.
I made a list of our DVDs, then gave them away and spend a few weeks downloading those. In many cases, like Star Trek TNG, I ended up getting improved versions... god help me, interlace comb.
There are plenty of ways that money could have solved this though.
More thorough prep/training for camera operators, so they can pan the camera according to a plan, instead of by reaction.
Maybe this camera operator wasn't supposed to pan because it was trying to capture diagnostic imagery that wasn't really intended for viewers, but because of budget cuts, they opted to use diagnostic views as presentation views.
Maybe there was supposed to be a cut to a different camera. But the production room was not sufficiently staffed to coordinate the switch.
Maybe there was no broadcast plan at all and it wasn't clearly coordinated who should be taking what shots.
Maybe they were underpaying the operators and they were not qualified.
Maybe they were underpaying the operators and a single operator was stuck operating multiple cameras and was framing a different camera at the time.
Automated tracking systems.
Sure, it's very likely that this might have happened anyway, but there are a lot of ways that reducing budget reduces planning and coordination. Especially if there is enough budget squeeze to move funds from public support campaigns (this entire stream was a public support campaign) to critical things (like building a rocket).
KISS is a complete paradigm shift from other phone launchers. It takes some getting used to. It has made me rethink how I use my phone from time to time because I have it set to sort by recently used: I only have a few apps I use regularly it seems.
Not for everyone, but it's my preferred way to use a phone now.
I suppose it doesn't matter because there is probably a search or something, but I only use my banking app and children's games every month or 2. I like knowing where they are at. 2 swipes away.
Also, doesn't this mean more attention to the screen? I can blindly pick apps without looking at my screen. Makes it useful when running + audiobook + taking notes.
Yes. Search works for finding things once every few months. Or, I've found that they tend to not really be that far down the list, because I only use a few apps per month anyway, so "1 month ago" is actually pretty recent in that regard.
But I also have specific apps pinned. Messaging, Browser, Camera all have fixed icons across the bottom of the screen, so I could blindly pick those as well as on any other launcher.
And in some cases, it means more attention, but more intent - which I find good. I'm far less likely to randomly open an app just because I see it on the screen. "Oh I havent played this game in a few months" never pops up (unless I scroll the complete app list, which it still has).
It's a trade off, for me, it means faster (but not no look - but tbh, I never have had that level of accuracy with any launcher) access to my most common used apps, and a slight decrease in rarely used apps. So I save half a second 10 times a day, and lose 5 seconds once a week. It's a tradeoff that I'm willing to make based on my particular usage patterns.
Power outages here tend to last an hour or more. A UPS doesn't last forever, and depending on how much home compute you have, might not last long enough for anything more than a brief outage. A UPS doesn't magically solve things. Maybe you need a home generator to handle extended outages...
How bottomless of a pit it becomes depends on a lot of things. It CAN become a bottomless pit if you need perfect uptime.
I host a lot of stuff, but nextcloud to me is photo sync, not business. I can wait til I'm home to turn the server back on. It's not a bottomless pit for me, but I don't really care if it has downtime.
Fairly frequently, 6kVA UPSs come up for sale locally to me, for dirt cheap (<$400). Yes, they're used, and yes, they'll need ~$500 worth of batteries immediately, but they will run a "normal" homelab for multiple hours. Mine will keep my 2.5kW rack running for at least 15 minutes - if your load is more like 250W (much more "normal" imo) that'll translate to around 2 hours of runtime.
Is it perfect? No, but it's more than enough to cover most brief outages, and also more than enough to allow you to shut down everything you're running gracefully, after you used it for a couple hours.
Major caveat, you'll need a 240V supply, and these guys are 6U, so not exactly tiny. If you're willing to spend a bit more money though, a smaller UPS with external battery packs is the easy plug-and-play option.
> How bottomless of a pit it becomes depends on a lot of things. It CAN become a bottomless pit if you need perfect uptime.
At the end of the day, it's very hard to argue you need perfect uptime in an extended outage (and I say this as someone with a 10kW generator and said 6kVA UPS). I need power to run my sump pumps, but that's about it - if power's been out for 12-18 hours, you better believe I'm shutting down the rack, because it's costing me a crap ton of money to keep running on fossil fuels. And in the two instances of extended power outages I've dealt with, I haven't missed it - believe it or not, there's usually more important things to worry about than your Nextcloud uptime when your power's been out for 48 hours. Like "huh, that ice-covered tree limb is really starting to get close to my roof."
This is a great example of how the homelab bottomless pit becomes normalized.
Rewiring the house for 240V supply and spending $400+500 to refurbish a second-hand UPS to keep the 2500W rack running for 15 minutes?
And then there's the electricity costs of running a 2.5kW load, and then cooling costs associated with getting that much heat out of the house constantly. That's like a space heater and a half running constantly.
Late reply I know, but I wanted to clear up that I don’t want to normalize a 2.5kW homelab. Usually when talking to people about it I refer to it as “insane.” But, having an absolutely insane amount of computer and RAM is fun (and I personally find it genuinely useful for learning, in particular in terms of engineering for massive concurrency) and I can afford the hydro, so whatever. To match the raw compute and RAM with current gen hardware, you only need maybe 500W - you’ll just be spending a shitload of money up front, instead of over time on hydro. (To match my current lab’s utilized performance, I’d need at least 2 servers, one of which with a ~threadripper 7955WX and 256GB of DDR5, and another with an Epyc 9475F and 1TB of DDR5. That would put me somewhere in the neighborhood of $35k? Ish? Costs me about $115/month to run the rack right now (cheaper than my hot tub) and cooling is free in the winter (6~7 months of the year) so the break even is loooooong term. And realistically, $100ish a month isn’t crazy, considering I self host basically everything - the only services I pay for are my VPS to run my mail server, and AWS for glacier S3 for backup-of-last-resort.
Again, not trying to normalize 2500W, most people don’t need that (and I don’t really either), but I do make good use of it.
As for “rewiring the house for 240V”, every house* in Canada and the US is delivered “split-phase” 240V (i.e. 240V with a centre tapped neutral, providing 120V between either end of the 240V phase and neutral or 240V from phase to phase), and many appliances are 240V (dryers, water heaters, stove/ranges/ovens, air conditioners). If you have a space free in your breaker panel, adding a 240V 30A circuit should cost less than $1k if you pay an electrician, and can be DIY’d for like $150 max unless you have an ancient panel that requires rare/specialty breakers or the run is very long. It’s far from the most expensive part of a homelab unless you’re running literally just a raspberry pi or something.
*barring an incredibly small exceptional percentage
I agree with you. My use case doesn't call for perfect uptime. Sounds like yours doesn't either (though you've got a pretty deep pit yourself, if 240v and generator weren't part of the sump plans and the rack just got to ride along (that's how it worked for me)).
But that doesn't mean its for us to say that someone else's use case is wrong. Some people self host a nextcloud instance and offer access to it to friends and family. What if someone else is hosting something important on there and my power is out? My concerns are elsewhere, but there's might not be.
My point was simply that different people have different use cases and different needs, and it definitely can become a bottomless pit if you let it.
For me, IPMI, PiKVM, TinyPilot, any sort of remote management interface that can power on/off a device and be auto powered on when power is available, so you can reasonably always access it, and having THAT on the UPS means that you can power down the compute remotely, and also power back up remotely. Means you never have to send someone to reboot your rack while youre out of town, you dont shred your UPS battery in minutes by having the server auto boot when power is available. Eliminates reliance on other people while youre not home :tada:
But again, not quite a bottomless pit, but there are constant layers of complexity if you want to get it right.
> though you've got a pretty deep pit yourself, if 240v and generator weren't part of the sump plans and the rack just got to ride along (that's how it worked for me)
Generator was a requirement for the sump pump. My house was basically built on a swamp, so an hour in spring without it means water in the basement. Now admittedly, I spent an extra couple hundred bucks to get a 240V generator with higher capacity than strictly necessary, but it was also roughly the minimum amount of money to spend to get one that can run on gasoline or propane, which was a requirement for me. 240V to the rack cost me $45, most of that cost being the breaker (rack is right next to the panel).
> What if someone else is hosting something important on there and my power is out? My concerns are elsewhere, but there's might not be.
I host roughly a dozen services that have around 25 users at the moment, but I charge $0 for them. I make it very clear: I have a petabyte of storage and oodles of compute, feel free to use your slice, and I’ll do my best to keep everything up and available - for my own sake (and I’ve maintained over 3 nines for 8 years!). But you as a user get no guarantee of uptime or availability, ever, and while I try very hard to backup important data (onsite, offsite split to multiple locations, and AWS S3 glacier), if I lose your data, sucks to suck. So far most people are pretty happy with this arrangement.
I couldn’t possibly fathom worrying about other people’s access to my homelab during a power outage. If I wanted to care, I’d charge for access, and I’d have a standby generator, multiple WANs, a more resilient remote KVM setup, etc. But then I’d be running a business - just a really shitty one that takes tons of my time and makes me little money. And is very illegal (for some of the services I make available, at least), instead of only slightly illegal.
Part of the issue is that a large part of linux gamers are saying "linux gaming is great" and meaning "linux gaming is good enough now that it is better than putting up with microsoft and windows 11"
Some people would rather put up with slightly worse frame pacing if it means no microsoft. Some linux folks are super gung-ho pro privacy, some are just super anti-microsoft but can't game on mac. There's a whole lot of reasons to wind up on linux, so the importance of specific performance details may vary depending on WHY you would be swapping.
And some people are playing games on good enough hardware that there arent noticeable frame pacing issues, so good raw FPS numbers just reinforce their views, and they just genuinely mean they are having a good experience themselves.