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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I agree desktop is not top priority. And I know their money largely comes outside Desktop. In fact, I would be surprised if consumer products came close to their b2b products. Just saying they have more than zero incentive to care about the Linux desktop. And apparently, Nvidia agrees, because they are finally putting more effort in.

    I still use and recommend AMD for Linux desktop, and I’m hoping Intel will become competitive in that space so we have more options and competition. I personally don’t like how closed off, uninvolved, and impassive Nvidia has been in general and I don’t trust them in general to collaborate much, as shown by their history.


  • Well they do lose some business in the Linux world to their issues and will probably take some time to recover their reputation in the Linux desktop community. I know not everyone hates them and the Linux Desktop community isn’t huge right now, but there is some incentive to show the world you care about your customers

    And if Linux Desktop ever gets super popular and easy for everyone but Nvidia, that’s not a necessary risk Nvidia should take. And the catching up later on could be really slow and painful if Nvidia lets themselves get even further behind. GPUs are among the most complicated hardware components to support and develop drivers and other software for.


  • I also have 12 GB. There are usage patterns where additional RAM wull be useful or even necessary on a phone. When you have more RAM, the phone can sleep tasks and leave background apps alone without having to discard their contents from RAM. This means fewer cold startups. Also, more contents can be cached, which means faster app startups. Both of these techniques also reduce CPU usage and improve battery life. You can also achieve more tabs in your browsers and more and bigger apps running at the same time. More RAM also means fewer situations where swapping is done or needed, so additional CPU and disk cycles are saved and battery usage is reduced. Some apps will actually require more RAM or spin more when memory is scarce. Examples can be advanced content creation apps in audio, video, or picture/photography. Also, some games, especially in high settings.

    Are these additional GBs necessary? No. And most people would not notice them, as even 6 GB is overkill for quite a number of peoples’ usage patterns. Your phone does maybe 95% of what it does just about as well, even when you have a low-midrange CPU and GPU that is from a few years ago, and just 4 or 6gb of RAM.

    This holds true for iOS and Android. They’ve both done a fair bit of housekeeping and software improvements to reel in excessive resource usage gen over gen. I think Android was doing some catch-up here for a while, but I don’t know how they go toe to toe on this anymore, and it’s difficult to empirically compare the two in this area.



  • It wouldn’t shock me. A lot of improvements to 14 are reeling in idle usage. In fact, that’s a big focus on the last 3 or 4 Android versions, and something Android is doing to catch up to iOS.

    It seems better for battery life to do batching and budgeting of background activities as much as possible, instead of continuous, unregulated usage.

    I think the one thing I miss is that Android used to have idle background battery usage estimates, so that you knew which apps were killing your battery in the background. It’s not quite as easy to figure that out anymore, but maybe something new will come along to help out with that.



  • Bluetooth still has its place in several instances. From what I can tell, this wifi protocol depends on you having a WiFi network mediate the connection, such as at your house or at a Cafe. Bluetooth is true ad hoc requiring no middleman.

    Bluetooth struggles with bandwidth enough that it affects sound quality and latency, but that doesn’t mean it’s unusable. It also has enough range that I beats some other competing wireless protocols as well.

    I’d love to see WiFi or a higher bandwidth option come out, and I’m hoping this is the beginning of that. They may have to resolve issues with channel conflicts and the need for network mediation. It would be awesome for gaming.





  • OnlyOffice is amazing if you need compatibility with MS Office products. Not saying it’s perfect, and I have and use LibreOffice, but OnlyOffice is better fit than LibreOffice if your goal is to use MSOffice files in FOSS software. I don’t get to decide what files and software my school or work uses, and they use only MSOffice. If I hand my boss or coworker an ODS, they’ll have no clue what to do with it. LibreOffice doesn’t handle XLSX files nearly as cleanly as OnlyOffice.

    If I make a table in LibreOffice, even using their open formats, I am giving up some nice features from OpenOffice.

    There’s no way OO is just a cheap repackage of LO. They look very different and have different features.



  • You can build in subscriptions or support licenses to your open source apps. Look at cryptomator and bitwarden for example. I know others do it. (And the free version is about as good as paid. But you can pay for a few near features and to support the devs)

    And the beauty is that the package management takes no cut and puts no rules on payment methods.