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I have been LOVING The Finals on Linux, but I certainly worry about the future. I have been following ARC Raiders since the initial trailer so I can't help but pick it up. However, their unresponsiveness to your emails is also disappointing.... huge youtube creators campaign, interviews at twitchcon, but a popular press blog cant get any love?

Hopefully putting up some cash will help move the needle on some spreadsheet somewhere to show how powerful and passionate Linux gamers are/can be.

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Nice to see more distros moving towards optimized builds for various x86 feature levels. So Windows can left behind in the dust even quicker. Considered how bad Windows already performs compared to Linux even without optimized CPU architecture packages.

Even though Linus hates this "abomination" of these feature levels as they are not really a thing from a CPU architecture point of view. Some do exposure only some "v3" Features, some with hybrid cores do even have "v3" only on one set of cores while the efficiency cores for example don't.

Anyway: Hope in the future Ubuntu does automatically install thoe v3 optimized packages on eligible hardware as Tumbleweed does. (Yes that is the whole reason I wrote this comment to say TW already does it)

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i played the Playtest and i really liked the atmosphere, but i will wait some months, to see if they break it for Linux.

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For those wanting to squeeze every possible bit of performance out of their machines, this sounds like a nice upgrade for Canonical to be working on.

The best thing one can do for performance on ununtu is to get rid of snaps.

The snaps version of microsoft edit was reported (by omgubuntu) to take 5 seconds to start on modern system.

Let me repeat that: 5 seconds to start *edit* because of a flagship tech.

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I think I ran into the incorrect Steam Play thing when I purchased Forza Horizon 5, right after purchase it would tell me 'only available on Windows' and would refuse to install it, this was fixed after a restart

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Nice; Minecraft itself started as a mod on top of Zachtronics's Infiniminer.

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What an amazing update! I already updated everything to Bazzite 43 (AMD Desktop, Nvidia Laptop, Asus Ally X) and it works extremely well. Nothing seems broken and the new Bazaar is a joy, especially with those new pride progress bars This is the best experience I've ever had with upgrading across OS versions, compared to something like Kubuntu which would always partially break with upgrades. I already donated to them their new OpenCollective page because Bazzite has made my Linux gaming experience infinitely better and I'm grateful for that

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oh my

https://i.postimg.cc/bNdVY5Kj/get.gif

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I would like to buy this but I am sure that they will anticheat it away...

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Wild response or not, whole concept of "work life" is about to change. GenAI, AI, whatever AI. We're talking about AI, yes.

It's obvious that AI as a tool frees times already. Whether ppl turn it into pure free time is of course debatable. Inside many modern people is this programmed (early in life) code: "gotta gotta gotta".

There will be no human bus and cab drivers much longer in "developed countries". AI can be an extension to our own goals and even history. Modern brain can only take so much, and the information flood has made masses quite exhausted mentally, noticed or not. For example ancient hieroglyphs forgotten languages have been deciphered by AI in moments, whereas the human way would have taken years or even decades to reach the same (to make it readable for modern ppl). Factories? Certainly no need for "machine maintainers and button pushers" for much longer. It is "sad" that people lose these jobs, but it has happened before. Just have to find something else to make that buck (i suggested humanitarian work all around the world).

Also my message "freaked out" right off the bat as did ssj17vegeta's (though he talked about coding, same essence: human coding can be "replaced" (read: aided). This freaking out is because this is a sensitive subject and scary to those who assume that world will go on about unchanged in its lines for eternity. The truth is that people are simply just not "needed" on many areas of mechanical society anymore. Simple things and "jobs" automate increasingly and "just work".

Also hey: we're not talking the very now, this is just a beginning in "progress" if someone wants to call it that. It is here to stay and indeed is irreversible. We (or some of us) did this to ourselves to effect whole human collective. Now in this very beginning we can see huge impact:

Amazon is laying off approximately 14,000 corporate employees as part of organizational changes aimed at reducing bureaucracy and reallocating resources, particularly towards AI initiatives.

Especially such stuff as "bureaucracy" is definitely handled much more efficient in future by an automated and versatile AI-algorhithm than mentally tired over caffeinated office "workers". Why are they sitting there all day every day, indeed wasting their life, in the first place. I indeed see this as a chance to get that free time available more if individuals even aim for that. Monetary system itself then again, is a whole 'nother matter (problem). Natural resources (and those which are considered scarce, after research - are definitely not) are there with or without our printed moneys or screen moneys you know.

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OpenRazer is great, but sadly still unusable in immutable systems because of the very custom udev rules and other system-wide changes needed.

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Very nice!

* continues to play Luanti with VoxeLibre *

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My interest in this game has plummeted like a cow's tail since the steam release. Not sure if it is the excitement around it having died down or whether the recent microsoft-negativity caused it, but where I might have purchased it at first sale opportunity if it had released on gog back on launch day, I am simply meh-ing at the news now.

Think I will brush up my gog version of last crusade instead. I am astonished to find out it even exists and still wondering how I missed it back in the day and how it got in my library.

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Oof, forgot I already have timberborn in my library. Good opportunity to have a more extensive gander at it.

Though, and I know this is silly, them beavers walking on their hind legs when carrying loads is bugging me for some reason. I think I would have preferred some more leaning into quadruped aesthetics.

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I vaguely remember that notch selling the game was under condition about the game and that's always how I understood that java was not yet a pay to play game like on bedrock. And if I remember correctly there was something about java staying the main game... I might be wrong tho.

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Weren't they working on a huge Lord of the Rings MMORPG? I'm guessing that was quietly canceled?

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I like your hammer analogy. And I would still argue that a blanket ban on hammers and forcing people to drive nails with rocks is barking at the wrong tree.

Absolutely, fair enough!

In general, I think there's more to be gained by working towards solutions compatible with free software ideals than by forcing big tech to operate in any particular way - and of course LLMs do have very real practical uses (if far more narrow than big tech makes it out to be!) which would be very useful if their downsides were addressed in whole.

My main argument would be that projects such as Fedora, which by their own mission statement exist to further free software ideals, ought to approach these issues from that angle. That doesn't mean prohibiting LLMs forever, but rather than say "You can use LLM-generated code under these criteria", a far more reasonable approach would be to say "You cannot use LLM-generated code" for now, and consider assisting other projects up- and downstream that seek to advance new and free technologies around LLMs and generative AI that actually respects these ideals, if that is something the Fedora project wants to actively help out make happen faster.

After all this is the huge strength of communally developed software - there are no profits to chase, no need to be first to market. The rise of LLMs and generative AI is really the perfect example of how projects such as Fedora can take the much wiser approach of helping out build up free and respectful foundations for these technologies and integrate them into actual development only once this point has been reached.

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Norbert: In the day, he bites down trees
and chews away the bark
But he really starts to work it
after it gets dark

Daggett: He's got the beaver fever
Beaver fever
Oh, yeah, ooh

🪩🦫

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That's a wild response, dziadulewicz. I'm not going to break it down line by line, as tempting as that is. I'll just re-iterate some of my position on it.

1. I'll start by being super-clear - we are definitely talking about genAI, not AI generally. AI has been around for decades and the neural networks that power them have had enormous benefits. It's marketed to niche areas where it serves a specific purpose. Great! Meanwhile genAI is glitzy, but it's also power hungry and sold to billions around the world. Power hungry x consumers = the planet burns. Or if that's an over-dramatisation, then here's a fact - three genAI advocates (Google, Microsoft and most recently Meta) have re-started three separate large-scale nuclear programs to power genAI.

2. genAI is incredibly inaccurate. I could go on, but that's the crux of it. It lies. All the time. Convincingly. And yet we're meant to rely on code it produces? Or excel functions? Or financial forecasts? Oh, we're not and we have to check everything ourselves? Yep, but then where's the efficiency gains? Turns out, there aren't any - go read that article I've mentioned twice in this thread already.

3. genAI is front-loaded on price. We're not paying the correct amount of money to use it. The genAI companies are losing BILLIONS when they offer this service. That's not sustainable, so what's the catch? I have theories, but honestly can't be arsed speculating here.

4. Until your comment, dziadulewicz, no-one would be crazy enough to suggest that genAI is going to enrich our lives soooo much that we'll actually have more free time to spend with family or donate our time to worthy causes. That's absurd. If people have more free time as a result of this AI "boom", it's because they've been fired from their job. This isn't a golden age of productivity and happiness. It's a bleak, sharp downturn in employment worldwide. That usually leads to several unpleasant trends: increased crime, decreased mental health, decreased life expectancy, etc.

I think I'm gonna unsub from this discussion though. It's pretty clear that most of us have already made up our minds on genAI. The next 24-36 months will see it swing one way or another, I think.

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Well, I will say one thing: The bit about automation increasing people's free time is a bit of a mirage. In practice, that doesn't happen. At the local level, if automation allows for greater productivity, workers are expected to produce more. At the global level, if automation allows for greater productivity, you don't get a shorter work week or more money for employees. You get some combination of higher unemployment, creation of demand such as by marketing more luxuries or planned obsolescence, and bullshit jobs. More broadly still, creation of more surplus normally just means that more surplus goes to the rich. Productivity has been decoupled from income or leisure since at least 1980--basically, since the fall of "new deal" and "social democratic" thinking. I mean, when most women in North America joined the workforce and so typical nuclear families went from one "breadwinner" to two, in theory that should have meant both could work half time. Instead, the cost of living was changed so that maintaining a half decent middle class household took two incomes.

Maybe with some kind of bottom-up socialism, automation would result in broadly shared prosperity and leisure. But with the system we have, not so much. This is why unions so often end up opposing tech change--their experience is that it leads to speedup and layoffs, while the productivity increase does nothing for them. Sure, it may make the firm more competitive . . . but that's a Red Queen's race for workers: They run faster and faster just to stay in the same place and shovel a few more billion to Jeff Bezos or whoever.

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This seems like a false dichotomy. Surely a project can acknowledge that LLM-based tools exist, and then choose not to use them on practical or ideological grounds (or both) - one doesn't really exclude the other.

Indeed, I might have worded that poorly, "handle [LLM tools] appropriately" was not meant to equal allowing their use. A ban or restriction is also an appropriate way to handle the issue.

I like your hammer analogy. And I would still argue that a blanket ban on hammers and forcing people to drive nails with rocks is barking at the wrong tree.

On the other hand, we are definitely seeing a lot of people bashing wood screws in concrete beams with their newfound unethically-made hammers. A scene which doesn't give hammers the best reputation for sure.

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If I were Twitch I'd be getting really nervous.

You'd be... twitchy?

I'll see myself out.


On topic, that's disgusting. I bet poor ol' bezzie could've kept all of these people employed until their retirement had he used 0.1% of his fortune.

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Nice release!

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But... but... Microsoft loves Linux, don't they?

Microsoft loves the money Linux makes to them

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The offline installers are fine-ish, but in some cases, they can lag behind the game versions available in Galaxy (or alternate clients like Heroic, obviously).

Interesting, I didn't know this.

Btw, for anyone looking to backup their offline installers definitely check out [lgogdownloader](https://github.com/Sude-/lgogdownloader).

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I love Balatro and this looks pretty sweet though I feel very overwhelmed by the amount of content in the base game already. 16 new characters may as well be 100000 new characters. I've got a few of the DLCs and I've barely touched those yet.

I'm gonna hold out for the next update and see if there's a better way to visualize and progress through the content

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Pre order DLC skins not available for GOG release. It's enough to call it a deal breaker in my book.

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However, the cynic in me says this suggests that it's a step towards Mojang eventually retiring Minecraft Java and going all-in on the modern Minecraft: Bedrock Edition (which doesn't have Linux support).

But... but... Microsoft loves Linux, don't they?

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@Jarmer

Look, you don't need to state the reasons why you don't reply. But you seem upset, so why don't you huh. You could maybe start with plans on how to stop this AI phenomena. I'd be all ears dude. That kind of "reply" makes no sense and also does not help!

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I'd much rather trust a project that acknowledge LLM-based tools and handle them appropriately than one which pretends they don't exist and nobody uses them.

This seems like a false dichotomy. Surely a project can acknowledge that LLM-based tools exist, and then choose not to use them on practical or ideological grounds (or both) - one doesn't really exclude the other.

The "LLMs are just tools" argument is one that seems to go around a lot, but rarely with any context or further explanation. A hammer is a tool, but if companies started selling hammers built through unethical labor, using materials that destroy the planet, and directly funnel money into megacorporations, it doesn't really matter if the hammer in a vacuum is just a tool or not. The context matters, and in this situation it really is impossible to separate the product from the process of creating the product and the immense harm it is causing to the planet and society at large.

Even this is ignoring the biggest issue of LLMs however, which is that we are inviting these technologies to become essential to day-to-day life and work, ignoring the fact that this puts our lives in the hands of a few companies who do not have our best interests at heart. Even if there were no ethical concerns regarding LLMs whatsoever, it is still incredibly dangerous to embrace commercial products as public services, as we have seen again and again through the advance of Big Tech.

To be fair, a lot of these problems have more to do with the underlying fabric of Big Tech more so than LLMs specifically. In that sense LLMs really are just a tool, but a tool towards an end purely benefiting Big Tech and not those who actually use them.

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