Quoting: Purple Library GuyI remember reading years ago that circuit sizes were, or would be, starting to run into fundamental physical problems in being basically just too thin to keep the little electrons from wandering between what's trying to be separate "wires".

That already happened. It's why we have multiple cores rather than faster processors. We got to 3 GHz pretty quickly, and then slowly managed to crawl up to sometimes, maybe, for brief periods, getting close to 5 GHz over the course of two decades.

As you scale things down if you want to switch faster then you need a lower switching voltage. But, as it turns out, low voltages with small features are the same as the voltages that just leak out on their own, so your 1s and 0s become indistinguishable from each other.

But they still keep shrinking things, 5nm coming up . . .

Not easily. Intel have been failing to do 10 nm for years. Features are etched by focusing light through a mask, and there's a limit to how much you can focus light. We passed the point where features were smaller than the wavelength of the light being used a while back, and lenses are opaque to light with shorter wavelengths, so you need to focus it with other methods instead.

I wonder if at this point the actual shrinkage is smaller than the change in definition makes it seem just because if they pack any closer things stop working.

The manufacturing process node name used to refer to the size of the features. Then the size of the smallest feature. Then a size that was a bit like the size of the features. And then it didn't really mean anything, except which generation of process a particular semiconductor was made with.

TSMC's 12 nm is about as dense as Intel's 14 nm - how many things you can fit on a chip of a given size. Both of them get various numbers of pluses for how much you can squeeze them without changing the fundamental process, since switching to a new process is both hard and very expensive. TSMC's 7 nm is about the same as the 10 nm that Intel didn't really get to work. TSMC's 5 nm will probably be about the same as an Intel 7 nm, if either manage it. The light used for it will probably be Extreme Ultra-Violet.

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Quoting: toojaysI'd like to be able to add selected Windows Itch games to Steam so my son can access them from family mode without having access to my whole Itch library. Hopefully this is doable, but maybe I have too many layers of indirection. Suggestions welcome.

I've not done it with Itch games yet, but it's pretty straightforward to add games to Steam. I've got Minecraft and the GOG version of Witcher 3 added to Steam, and you can pick the Proton version in the usual way if it's a Windows game that you've added. I've not tried the family mode with them yet, though, since my little one just knows which games he's allowed to play from my account and when.

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16:10 means that my next laptop when it's time to upgrade will be a Dell. I hope other manufacturers can move away from 16:9 as well.

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As an event it's mostly celebrating that all these people have gone a year without being murdered, and commemorating the ones who have. If you think that it's a good thing that they haven't been murdered, you should celebrate along with us. If you don't think that's a good thing, then there's nothing I could say that would fit within GoL's rules.

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Quoting: einherjarI am white and hetero, but why should I be proud because of that?

I'm not really sure why people are conflating race with it.

If you were gay, or bi, or trans, why should you be ashamed of that? Why might you not feel safe to reveal that aspect of yourself? That's why Pride events have to happen.

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Quoting: ZlopezBut I don't need any special month to be proud about myself. For me it's funny that somebody even needs this :-)

Only having one month when people aren't as marginalised as much or discriminated against as much isn't funny, it's tragic. Taking that as an opportunity to assert your privilege, and the fact that you aren't marginalised or discriminated against, would be a dick move, yes. But taking it as an opportunity to celebrate the existence of people that are different from you, and work to minimise the harms they experience, would be an entirely appropriate thing to do.

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Quoting: ZlopezSo if I am white heterosexual I can celebrate the pride month?

Why wouldn't you?

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Quoting: EikeI found those few who were most interested in talking Linux down were those that had tried it and didn't succeed. Kind of unrequited love...

The Windows Power User problem is real.

It's really uncomfortable to learn that you don't really know anything about computers, you just know about Windows. When confronted by that lack of knowledge it's easy to lash out at the thing that highlighted it.

Unfortunately for us, the people that are most likely to try installing an OS are the Power Users.

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Quoting: MohandevirI really do like KDE... I might be alone on my planet, but there is tearing all over the place, even while gaming with Vsync ON. What have I done to deserve such a treatment?! :smile:

I've never had any tearing with KDE on my Nvidia desktop or my Intel laptop, which both have standard fixed refresh rate displays. So neither AMD graphics nor variable refresh rates are necessary requirements. There is a triple buffering option somewhere, but you've probably already tried that.

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Quoting: Neverthelesswho think they just installed an apt package

You really should read the link that Liam gave. There is exactly one package that does that, which was widely publicised, and the reason for picking that package for dogfooding snaps is

In summary: there are several factors that make Chromium a good candidate to be transitioned to a snap:

• It’s not the default browser in Ubuntu so has lower impact by virtue of having a smaller user-base


• Snaps are explicitly designed to support a high frequency of stable updates


• The upstream project has three release channels (stable, beta, dev) that map nicely to snapd’s default channels (stable, beta, edge). This enables users to easily switch release of Chromium, or indeed have multiple versions installed in parallel


• Having the application strictly confined is an added security layer on top of the browser’s already-robust sand-boxing mechanism

as given in Liam's link.

If Mint don't like Ubuntu's packages they can maintain their own.

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