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Latest 30 Comments

News - Valve wins legal battle against patent troll Rothschild and associated companies
By Ehvis, 19 Feb 2026 at 1:44 pm UTC

Quoting: Mountain Man$150,000 seems too small of a penalty. They should have added another zero.
As far as I understood (which is very limited), this is just this step and this actually sets Valve up further action. So I'd expect much more in the future.

Not the smartest move to try and screw over a company that actually has the resources to fight back.

News - Get some great games in the new Beamdog & Owlcat RPG Bundle
By Jarmer, 19 Feb 2026 at 1:41 pm UTC

that really is a great bundle. There's about 1000 hrs of awesome content there.

News - Valve wins legal battle against patent troll Rothschild and associated companies
By Mountain Man, 19 Feb 2026 at 1:06 pm UTC

$150,000 seems too small of a penalty. They should have added another zero.

News - Mewgenics is a clear hit reaching over a million sales
By such, 19 Feb 2026 at 12:55 pm UTC

Nothing in life is guaranteed, that's pretty trite, but with Mewgenics there were clear signs the second the media picked it up for the preview cycle. It's not even that it was praised, it's about the type of praise it received, and how it was framed. It wasn't brought up as a quaint indie game by oddball creator first, it wasn't as subjected (if at all) to your typical template-driven news/preview slop. It came across as though people who played it prior to release viscerally liked it and needed to tell you about how much fun they had. At least from what I was seeing it was as much a done deal as humanly possible.

Perhaps I have a career in industry predictions, I dunno ;)

Compare to something like the late Cyberpunk 2077 previews which were all extremely politely lukewarm, but also somehow framed to maintain the ridiculous level of praise from much earlier in that marketing cycle. You could've mapped pretty much the entirety of the design, system and content issues of that game right then, from the universally positive previews, without even looking at the game. Not with certainty, obviously, but the signs were all there.

News - Experimental code ready for testing to enable HDMI 2.1 FRL with AMDGPU on Linux
By tuubi, 19 Feb 2026 at 12:47 pm UTC

Quoting: Eike
Quoting: tuubi
Quoting: Eike
Quoting: syylkThanks for the enlightening answers!

(Yup, didn't think of TV gaming. 😁)
I don't know how usual that is, but I got the problem on the output side:
My company notebook, bought last year, doesn't have DP, only HDMI and USB-C.
Yeah, that's pretty much the norm with (business) laptops. Your docking station likely has DP outputs though.
It does, so yes, I'm not actually using HDMI. (Is it for beamers?!?)
Projectors and TV screens in conference rooms, in my experience.

News - Valve wins legal battle against patent troll Rothschild and associated companies
By grigi, 19 Feb 2026 at 12:28 pm UTC

What's more interesting for me here is that the patent lawyers themselves (Meyler Legal PLLC and the lawyer himself Samuel Meyler) got held responsible for filing without due diligence. This I think is the first time a PLLC has consequences for patent trolling, up to now PLLC's have been in the shadows when it comes to patent trolling.

Hopefully this will mean that lawyers will be more resistant to being complicit in patent trolling. That could change the whole landscape.

Also, wow, that verdict document is properly damning.

News - Godot Engine suffering from lots of "AI slop" code submissions
By scaine, 19 Feb 2026 at 12:05 pm UTC

Quoting: vic-bayIf you see ai slop long enough, you will learn to identify it immediately. Yes, it is still a time waster, but it is nowhere as bad as it looks at the first look. Creating slop commits and pull requests takes way longer than reading it for half minute and smashing ban button.
That might be true, but Godot currently has nearly 5000 PRs awaiting review, and 50K closed PRs overall. I think that when you're dealing with those kind of numbers, it still adds up to a near-insurmountable problem.

News - Mewgenics is a clear hit reaching over a million sales
By Liam Dawe, 19 Feb 2026 at 11:53 am UTC

Quoting: suchOdd thing to say. To me it's very obvious that a reasonably deep turn-based roguelike with some whimsy and personality, AND cats is more popular than the thematic downer that is The Binding of Isaac or the tough as nails meat grinder of a precision platformer.

I guess it's possible to spend years dedicating your life to something unaware of what it is that you're actually doing?
The point is - nothing in game development is guaranteed. We've seen lots of games fail that many thought would be a clear success.

News - Experimental code ready for testing to enable HDMI 2.1 FRL with AMDGPU on Linux
By dziadulewicz, 19 Feb 2026 at 11:01 am UTC

Quoting: vic-bayWhy HDMI cartel doesn't want HDMI on Linux? So more people won't use HDMI? Do they hate money, or did Microslop bribe them?
It's always about control. Even in this scale. Not so much about "money" (though that concept is a control mechanism itself too). What matters is power and natural resources, not some monopoly "money" (worthless in itself) or numbers on screens..

News - Unity CEO says an upcoming Beta will allow people to "prompt full casual games into existence"
By Ehvis, 19 Feb 2026 at 10:45 am UTC

Funny thing is that this is apparently not really that much of a change. Most of the functionality is already in Unity and it just requires tying a few things together. Which makes this statement primarily one for shareholders in an (apparently successful) attempt to raise the stock price.

News - Godot Engine suffering from lots of "AI slop" code submissions
By vic-bay, 19 Feb 2026 at 10:41 am UTC

If you see ai slop long enough, you will learn to identify it immediately. Yes, it is still a time waster, but it is nowhere as bad as it looks at the first look. Creating slop commits and pull requests takes way longer than reading it for half minute and smashing ban button.

News - Experimental code ready for testing to enable HDMI 2.1 FRL with AMDGPU on Linux
By vic-bay, 19 Feb 2026 at 10:36 am UTC

Why HDMI cartel doesn't want HDMI on Linux? So more people won't use HDMI? Do they hate money, or did Microslop bribe them?

News - Prepare for HDD availability trouble as they're getting sold out too
By vic-bay, 19 Feb 2026 at 10:30 am UTC

Quoting: hardpenguinThis is getting ridiculous
This is Dark Souls of ridiculous situations.

News - Experimental code ready for testing to enable HDMI 2.1 FRL with AMDGPU on Linux
By Eike, 19 Feb 2026 at 10:12 am UTC

Quoting: tuubi
Quoting: Eike
Quoting: syylkThanks for the enlightening answers!

(Yup, didn't think of TV gaming. 😁)
I don't know how usual that is, but I got the problem on the output side:
My company notebook, bought last year, doesn't have DP, only HDMI and USB-C.
Yeah, that's pretty much the norm with (business) laptops. Your docking station likely has DP outputs though.
It does, so yes, I'm not actually using HDMI. (Is it for beamers?!?)

News - Prepare for HDD availability trouble as they're getting sold out too
By g000h, 19 Feb 2026 at 9:39 am UTC

Quoting: pbinb4 they start selling headless terminals that have to be connected to the cloud, where all our files would reside (at a hefty monthly fee, of course)
Well, Chrome Books (Google) and Mobile Phones (Google and Apple) are not far off being headless terminals. The public uses them for consuming content, most of their functionality relies on cloud services (e.g. WhatsApp, Instagram, iCloud, Google Maps, Google Docs, etc).

People are already being manipulated into not having fully functional computers any more.

News - Valve confirm Steam Deck stock issues due to "memory and storage shortages"
By Trias, 19 Feb 2026 at 8:47 am UTC

On a good side of things: all those news finally convinced me to buy a Steam Deck while it's still available.

:).

News - Experimental code ready for testing to enable HDMI 2.1 FRL with AMDGPU on Linux
By tuubi, 19 Feb 2026 at 8:37 am UTC

Quoting: Eike
Quoting: syylkThanks for the enlightening answers!

(Yup, didn't think of TV gaming. 😁)
I don't know how usual that is, but I got the problem on the output side:
My company notebook, bought last year, doesn't have DP, only HDMI and USB-C.
Yeah, that's pretty much the norm with (business) laptops. Your docking station likely has DP outputs though.

News - Godot Engine suffering from lots of "AI slop" code submissions
By sharkwouter, 19 Feb 2026 at 8:28 am UTC

I'm starting to see this same issue with Minigalaxy. Someone made a massive AI made PR and after going through it 3 times to review it, they figured out they were unable to fix it and closed it.

News - Experimental code ready for testing to enable HDMI 2.1 FRL with AMDGPU on Linux
By Eike, 19 Feb 2026 at 8:03 am UTC

Quoting: syylkThanks for the enlightening answers!

(Yup, didn't think of TV gaming. 😁)
I don't know how usual that is, but I got the problem on the output side:
My company notebook, bought last year, doesn't have DP, only HDMI and USB-C.

News - Unity CEO says an upcoming Beta will allow people to "prompt full casual games into existence"
By pb, 19 Feb 2026 at 7:36 am UTC

I'm sure glad I already have enough games to last me a lifetime, because gem discovery is going to get quite a lot harder...

News - Prepare for HDD availability trouble as they're getting sold out too
By pb, 19 Feb 2026 at 7:35 am UTC

inb4 they start selling headless terminals that have to be connected to the cloud, where all our files would reside (at a hefty monthly fee, of course)

News - KDE Plasma 6.6 released with improved accessibility, new on-screen keyboard and lots more
By Phlebiac, 19 Feb 2026 at 6:28 am UTC

Quoting: rustynailIirc on wayland vsync can only be disabled for games running in fullscreen
As I recall, "no tearing, ever" was a design principle from the start. It was much later that the option to allow tearing, such as for fullscreen games, was added. I forget the details, but I think it has to be specifically requested.

News - Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan for the Vibrant Visuals update
By mr-victory, 19 Feb 2026 at 5:43 am UTC

Quoting: Persephone the SheepPart of me is like "man now minecraft can't run on anything" but also vulkan support have been here since 600 series nvidia with kepler and HD 7000 series AMD with GCN 1 both from 2012 so as long as your gpu isn't more then 14 years old you can still play as long as they don't go past vulkan 1.2 because of kepler. I'm not sure about the laptop side with intel so that concerns me. I don't know how kepler does with vulkan I know it does terribly with DX12 my GT 640 is dead so I can't check for myself. I just hope this doesn't effect too many people.
On linux side:
* Intel GPUs found in Intel Gen 6 & above have active support and vulkan 1.4, can run latest dxvk or vkd3d
* Intel Gen 5 has Vulkan 1.3, supports up to dxvk 2.5.3. Can run minecraft with zink.
* Gen 4 has 1.2
* Gen 3 either has 1.2 or nothing

Below has nothing

On windows side, according to the url, anything under gen6 has nothing. However I recall the same document mentioned 1.2 support all the way back to Gen 2 in the past.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005524/graphics.html

News - Experimental code ready for testing to enable HDMI 2.1 FRL with AMDGPU on Linux
By Shmerl, 19 Feb 2026 at 3:29 am UTC

it's not entirely clear if the HDMI Forum can (or will be able to) block people going with a trial and error approach to getting more modern HDMI features working in the open source drivers.
They can't forbid clean room reverse engineering. But they could definitely try to make life harder for people even without legal basis, just because they have money and lawyers to wave around. Hopefully this developer can get backing from EFF or someone who can advise how to fight off HDMI patent trolls.

News - KDE Plasma 6.6 released with improved accessibility, new on-screen keyboard and lots more
By rustynail, 19 Feb 2026 at 3:25 am UTC

Quoting: mr-victory
Quoting: Lofty
Quoting: mr-victory
Quoting: PyrateCould say this about a lot of Linux projects, or just any open source project really, but Plasma is the gift that keeps on giving. No enshittification, just continuous improvements. We can't stop winning.
KDE Plasma updates are the few I look up to. Back in 5.24 I was installing betas to get some features early, I haven't installed a beta in years but dammit the changelogs still have gems.

Quoting: LoftyI have stayed on X11 because of this using the admittedly great application 'onboard'
I use wayland but there is a bug not affecting X11: moonlight and seemingly nothing else can disable vsync so I get higher input latency.

https://discuss.kde.org/t/1-frame-latency-on-moonlight-only-on-wayland-cannot-turn-off-vsync/40157
ohh that's not good because i do use sunshine/moonlight.
I'm guessing the bug is specific to my hardware though, the problem appears to be that nothing can turn off vsync so I have higher latency. You can test yourself by bringing the server next to client, opening the website below and shooting a video at slow motion.
https://dregu.github.io/frameskip/
Iirc on wayland vsync can only be disabled for games running in fullscreen

News - Mewgenics is a clear hit reaching over a million sales
By fenglengshun, 19 Feb 2026 at 3:22 am UTC

This is what an actual independent game success looks like. Not what the Tencent-funded industry plant that Highguard masqueraded and rightfully failed to be.

News - Unity CEO says an upcoming Beta will allow people to "prompt full casual games into existence"
By emphy, 19 Feb 2026 at 1:18 am UTC

I'm all for making game development easier and accessible - but at what cost.
Chucking in a slopper does nothing to make development easier and accessible.

News - KDE Plasma 6.6 released with improved accessibility, new on-screen keyboard and lots more
By Pyrate, 19 Feb 2026 at 12:14 am UTC

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: Pyrate
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: Pyrate
Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut it doesn't seem to be available in any distros as user friendly as Mint. One of these days I'll give it another look.
Fedora KDE is user friendly. Not having Nvidia drivers pre-installed ≠ not-user friendly. Windows comes without drivers pre-installed as well and people think that OS is user friendly. There's no harm in websearching "install nvidia drivers fedora Linux" and learning a thing or two about package management in the process. It's good practice long term.
So, first of all "user friendly" is a very vague term and I'm willing to agree that Fedora satisfies it. "as user friendly as Mint" is less vague, and I have never heard anyone claim Fedora satisfies that.

As to that second thing, no. I learned a thing or two about package management back in the 2000s. It was really annoying, as soon as they existed I moved to distros that did not make me do that. There is a finite amount of stuff I am capable of knowing a thing or two about, and a near infinite amount of stuff that would in some manner be useful to know, and I'm sorry but guts-details of operating systems is not in my top 1000. Computer people always think their particular area of knowledge is the one everyone really ought to know, but as far as I can tell there is no real basis for that believe
This turned argumentative real quick.

I didn't say Fedora is as user friendly as XYZ, I just that is, and in the midst of your confusion you seen to agree.

Secondly, your claim about wanting dsitros that "did not make you do [package management]" and that there's a finite amount of stuff you're capable of learning. I'm puzzled because A: what distros don't make you manage your packages? :D do you mean using GUI such as an app store ? Well Fedora KDE has the Discover store that let's you do that. And B: literally what else is there to know about a Linux system at all if not simple package management tips ? do you claim dnf install/update/remove is a difficult thing to understand and learn ? Genuinely, tell me one other thing that's more important for a new user to learn about Linux other than learning how to properly install apps and update their system.

Also, for the last unfounded assumption here: I'm not a computer people, I'm in med school.
No, the point is not that I should learn other things about my Linux distro rather than package management. The point is that I might want to learn about politics, or pickling vegetables. I use computers, I want them to be out of the way and let me use them to do things. Currently, Linux Mint is very good at this. You suggested that I instead use something else which would entail learning to do command line things, because "It's good practice long term."

Well, no, it isn't. It's time from my life that I won't get back, that I could simply not spend if I continue to use Mint, thus allowing me to instead spend time on things I find more interesting or compelling or important.
Please, point to me where I suggested that you should use or not use anything. The lack of reading comprehension here is astounding.

The real time of my life I won't be getting back is this back and forth, lmfao. Maybe make it clear next time that your idea of user-friendly Linux is strictly Mint and absolutely nothing else, so one won't have to waste their time and have no productive discourse.