Debian, Fedora, EndeavourOS (arch).

Nvidia’s issues on Linux are very well documented… even by the inventor of Linux himself. I didn’t realise I had to bring receipts.

As for what do I mean by nightmare, I already said. It would break after updates, I had constant flickering, stuttering, and artefacts. No it wasn’t a hardware issue. They’re Nvidia driver issues.

To me, that’s a nightmare. I need my machine to function, and with Nvidia, it couldn’t.

“usually”

I am a raspberry pi owner. And a pinephone owner.

And even on those very open devices, booting alternate OSes is less straightforward than on x86.

What the hell are you talking about? That’s not how people charge EVs.

EVs on their own are typically 90%+ efficient. Although some are as low as ~85%.

Even running on a generator, though, they’d still be more efficient than any ICE engine found in a car, aside from a Formula 1 engine.

EVs are far cleaner, even if ran on a fossil fuel energy grid.

That is not a solution. People still need to use electricity at night, and if pretty much all power comes from wind and solar, you’re really reliant on there being wind, and wind in the right direction.

Energy tariffs that encourage/discourage energy use at certain times is helpful, but it’s very far from a silver bullet.

• Renewables + nuclear

• Renewables + fossil fuels

• Renewables + frequent blackouts

The above is all we can achieve in the short-medium term. I know what I’d pick.

The third option wouldn’t even work, practically speaking. Any political party that instigates that would not be getting re-elected anytime soon.

So for all practical purposes there’s only two options. And I would prefer nuclear over choosing to continue pumping out greenhouse gases and other particulate matter.

A mechanical Turk from a tyrannical jerk

(shamelessly stolen from mastodon)

Except, as I and others are telling you, it doesn’t “just work”.

A crying-laughing emoji is not a counter-argument.

Ok, you’ve added more solar panels and wind turbines.

It’s nighttime. There isn’t much wind. An extremely common thing to happen I’m sure you’ll agree.

There now isn’t enough power, places have constant blackouts, electricity prices skyrocket because demand far outstrips supply.

Grid storage large enough to replace fossil fuels + nuclear is far, far, far, far further than 10 years off.

I’ll ask again:

• Nuclear base load that assists renewables

• Continued fossil fuels for multiple decades that assists renewables, and hope that we can reverse some of the damage done in the meantime through some kind of carbon capture tech (unfortunately we can’t fix respiratory issues, strokes, and dead/extinct animals and plants after the fact).

• Regular blackouts, energy rationing, but 100% renewable

What do you choose? Saying that you’ll magic up some batteries in a capacity that currently isn’t possible isn’t an answer.

I want 100% renewables too. Anybody with any sanity would. But it’s currently not feasible. Our choice is between having a fossil fuel base load or a nuclear base load. Other options aren’t available yet.

I’ve tried a 3060 as well, which was a nightmare too. Although that was in a laptop so I’m not sure if that’s a laptop-specific thing.

I doubt it though, since every other update would render it unbootable, and there was excessive flickering, both of which also happened with the 1080 Ti.

I do know that AMD “just works”, though.

Nvidia needs to seriously improve before they’re right for a typical Linux user.

Shit, Valve’s new big picture mode was delayed for like a year because it was unusable on Nvidia hardware. Doesn’t exactly sound bug-free to me mate.

I’m conflicted on ARM.

The additional competition is great, but it presents a great risk of PCs becoming more locked down. They don’t have an open, standardised BIOS/UEFI like x86 systems do.

Booting alternate OSes on ARM systems can be a nightmare. Usually it’s straight up not possible.

I don’t want PCs to be like smartphones. I don’t want locked bootloaders.

EDIT:

FFS people. I know there are some ARM devices that allow booting of non-official OSes. That’s why I said usually.

Even for those devices though, they typically have to use non-standardised firmware (you can’t just take an OS for device A and use it for device B), and it requires the OEM to want the device to be open.

Your desire to go “umm ackshully…” and be technically correct over a point I never made in the first place is blinding you to the point I was actually making: x86 is fairly open, standardised, and modular by default. ARM isn’t. And all it takes is a look at the phone/tablet market to see that OEMs don’t want them to be.

I worry, and I don’t think unreasonably, that ARM becoming the standard could mean a further erosion of the openness of PCs.

I mean it more in terms of wider API support than in terms of outright performance. GPTK games, when they work, certainly run faster.

Man I wish my time with Nvidia was as easy as you claim it to be.

I had a 1080 Ti that I was forced to sell because Nvidia drivers made my PC unusable.

The performance drop going from a 1080 Ti to a RX 580 was huge, but it was well worth it for a system that would actually work reliably.

Renewables cannot provide a reliable base load. Not unless you can have your solar panels in space where the sun always shines, we figure out tidal power, or you’re lucky in terms of geography and either hydroelectric or geothermal work for you.

Solar power doesn’t produce energy at night, wind doesn’t always blow. You know the drill.

You completely sidestepped the entire crux of my comment.

We need a base load of energy to fill that gap, because batteries currently can’t, and likely won’t be for decades. Here are the options we have available:

• nuclear power, which produces a waste that while trivial to store far away from people, will be radioactive for hundreds of years.

• fossil fuels, which cause massive damage not only to the local environment, but to the planet, and cleanup is effectively impossible.

• we put society on unpredictable energy curfews. At night the population can’t use much energy. When there’s a drop in wind or solar production, we cut people’s energy off. Both political parties must commit wholeheartedly to this in order to make it viable. Our lives would become worse, but we’d not have either of the above problems.

Of those 3 options, I’d rather go with nuclear. What’s your choice?

In what world don’t they count?

They can power EVs. And running an EV on fossil fuel electricity is still far less polluting than running a petrol or diesel car.

One large generator at its most efficient setting is far more efficient than tens of thousands of small ones starting from cold multiple times per day, that aren’t necessarily maintained well, and are constantly going through their rev range.

Where are your sources for any of what you’re saying?

EVs alone require 10 times the current installed energy production.

No they don’t.

The UK national grid estimates there needs to be a 4-5% increase each year, for roughly 15 years. That’s achievable.

The US won’t be too different.

Expect energy rates to quadruple

Why quadruple. Where are you getting this from?

The price will increase until people can’t afford the commute with their entire day’s paycheck.

They obviously won’t.

The cleanup for fossil fuels is an order of magnitude more expensive, and an order of magnitude more difficult. It also impacts so many things that its true cost is impossible to calculate.

I’m aware of the issues with nuclear, but for a lot of places it’s the only low/zero emission tech we can do until we have a serious improvement in batteries.

Very few countries can have a large stable base load of renewable energy. Not every country has the geography for dams (which have their own massive ecological and environmental impacts) or geothermal energy.

Seriously, we need to cut emissions now. So what’s the option that anti-nuclear people want? Continue to use fossil fuels and hope battery tech gets good enough, then expand renewables? That will take decades. Probably 30+ years at the minimum.

Do not use Arch as a daily driver if you are a beginner.

Despite what some people will try to claim, Arch is not stable.

Channel? I think you may be thinking of the other tech Linus

Or does Torvalds have a channel now

The work the Asahi team have done boggles my mind.

They’ve got further with gaming on Apple silicon than Apple has with their game-porting-toolkit.

Despite:

• being on a completely unsupported OS

• running through a virtual machine

• having to rewrite all the hardware drivers from scratch, without the benefit of having hardware schematics/documentation

• not having the benefit of using APIs that were made from the ground up to work well on this hardware specifically

And probably some other stuff I’m completely in the dark on because their work is so beyond me.

I think anything with an ambiguous pronunciation, where someone has to stop and think “wait… is it pronounced this way or this way?” isn’t the best name.

Good that they’re changing from Minetest, but this new name hardly rolls off the tongue. Maybe I’ll get used to it.