You should definitely see if they'll send you one to review.

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Quoting: MohandevirI'm wondering if SteamPal's futur OS isn't going to be ChromiumOS based... Just a tought.

Valve won't want to be beholden to Google any more than they want to be beholden to Microsoft.

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Quoting: Liam DaweAn interesting point that, and I do agree fully that familiarity sells often and quite well so if more people end up sticking with Chromebooks and it pulls more onto the Linux version of Steam - still a net win for us overall.

It was something that Microsoft exploited ruthlessly (as well as when they were starting out) during the netbook era, funding PR saying that Linux was too confusing for inexperienced users, and extending the life of XP and making it free, to starve of oxygen any low-cost competition to their desktop dominance.

Android is the most widely-used consumer OS these days, so Microsoft don't have the muscle that they used to, but people are still people so the same dynamics will apply. Sauce for the goose.

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I've always said hardware is what we need. Hardware on shelves in stores and in more well-known online shops, it is the missing key.

Not just hardware in shops, although that is very important. Getting prospective customers to already have familiarity with the product so that they'll want to buy it is also very useful. Microsoft did it with business machines, so people bought the same thing to use at home. Apple and Microsoft have both tried to get a stranglehold on the education market at various times and, at the moment, Chromebooks are dominant there. With more other reasons to use them it's more likely that the cheap Chromebook they got from school could translate into a more premium Chromebook model, or a Chromebook as their own first computer, later. Google doesn't really care if it's a premium model or a cheapie, but the manufacturers will be after the higher margins and more sales. If Chromebooks expose sufficient Linuxness then the users might not be scared away from upgrading to a full Linux machine in those circumstances, since they'll already be familiar with it.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeIf you have to use a third party repository for something, make sure it is for new packages that don't replace things in your distribution.

Out of interest, does Debian have ppa-purge? It tracks which versions of packages come from a PPA rather than repositories so that if you want to stop using a PPA it can automatically switch you back to the repository version. Much cleaner than the can't-downgrade dependency issues from the before times when people would add full repositories to their sources.list.

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Quoting: denyasisVery cool. I didn't know it existed in the animal kingdom.

It happens in people, too. It comes up every now and then with questions of maternity, organ donation, and things like that, or if there's mosaic skin colouration or differently-coloured eyes. Otherwise no one notices. It's become more common since the invention of fertility treatment, since you're then more likely to be carrying more than one embryo.

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Quoting: denyasisThere are real Chimeras. Not fantastical at all. It's just... They're plants. There might be others but that's all I can remember from school 20 years ago.

Not just plants. It's an organism that contains more than one distinct genotype (the set of genetic material). Most marmosets are chimeras.

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Quoting: jensDo you have a specific example?

Not a specific example, I'm just going from the description from here [External Link]

Some of the features that programmers can access using NVAPI include:

Driver Management: Initialization and driver version controls.
GPU Management: Enumeration of physical and logical GPUs. Thermal and Cooling controls.
Display Management: Enumeration of NVDIA displays, display postion and timings controls.
System Management: Ability to query chipset and system specific information.
Connecting and Configuring Monitors: Ability to set views on multiple target monitors.

and the stuff on assigning handles for GPUs and the like.

Maybe the thermal management stuff is too hardware specific, but being able to find GPUs and what they can do, how to address them, how to allocate memory, and things like that, are things that Vulkan covers. Being able to map those functions from NVAPI, that people are already using, to Vulkan, that people might want to use in the future, seems like it might be handy. There may well be other functions in there that Vulkan could do, but doesn't yet do, that would just be a good idea. NVAPI seems to me like Nvidia's grab-bag of handy things that they couldn't get done another way (pre-Vulkan) and Vulkan so far has worked well as a means of standardising everyone's good ideas so that more people can benefit.

I have no idea if Nvidia, Khronos, or anyone else, would actually do it, but it seems to me to be something that could be done.

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A lot of the stuff that's in NVAPI, which people have been using and wasn't included in OpenGL or DirectX, is in scope for Vulkan. Things like device discovery and capability enumeration. With Nvidia being more open about it, especially if there are alternative implementations, there might be room to start having those functions as part of Vulkan for everyone to use. Maybe as Nvidia extensions, or maybe add as part of the core specification.

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Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: KimyrielleDell has been offering a few more reasonably priced options with preinstalled Linux for a while here. Not sure if that offer is available in Europe, though.

Dell's offerings are usually US only.

Obviously you should tie some string around something before venturing into the Dell website, but I've had no other trouble getting Dell stuff (including a Dell Linux laptop) in the UK. They do have different inventory for different regions, but it's not the US gets one thing and everywhere else gets something different, it's that everywhere gets some haphazard selection. Don't forget the string.

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