Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: HoriWasn't "it" the neutral one?

"It" is for things (and most animals, I guess), while "they" is for persons with either unknown gender or where it doesn't matter.

I've got a question too, though. Please take it as what it is - purely an interest in the language and its current usage ("they" for persons wasn't a thing when I learned English in school...). I'm not aware of any gender "unusualities" (trans, demi/diverse gender or whatever) of Ethan Lee and think they're male. If that's right, how "usual" is it to use singular they/them in such a case? What would be the wild guess of native speakers which percentage of people would use these words in such a case?

Seems to be a dialect thing, and rapidly changing at that. Up until recently I'd say it was quite uncommon in North America, but may have been more common fairly far in the past, and has recently fast become more common again.
Liam seems to be saying it's more common in British English; Liam's British and I'm not, and I have no reason to disbelieve it.

On the fun side, in French we use something similar for gender neutrality with "ils/eux" which is equivalent to they/them. But now there are some discussions since originally, it is the masculine version of the pronoun. Long time ago it seems we would use the masculine or feminine depending to either who was speaking or the gender of the first noun in a compound subject.
Now we have multiple new usages being discussed either write stuff like il(s)/elle(s), and put all possible suffixes at the end of each nouns. Or (in my opinion) prettier ones like "iel" which would be the gender neutral noun and actually sounds "good" as French.
It is interesting how languages evolve, and seemingly in similar directions. Maybe the discussion of not invisibilizing women (which led to these discussions in French) will also make English change further after. Wait and See I guess.

As for my two cents, I did ear a lot my colleagues (Canadian/UK) use the they/them as gender neutral too, so I thought it was pretty standard.

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Quoting: aokamiSo no, macbooks and macminis are not KO, they just need slightly worse graphics and render pipeline sleeve tricks.

Hmm true that they are not completely KO, but I mean, for many games you will have to give up a fair bit of quality to get them to run anywhere near a "pleasant" experience. Now of course, with a whole lot of optimisation and crazy tricks it's probably achievable, but worth it ... It is a bigger question. Macs represent around 2-3% of Steam gaming market, so in term of optimization cost vs return, computation will most likely not turn very positive. Apple Silicon does not get any more graphical power either according to few benchmarks I found. And as long as it is all integrated, it is unlikely to fight with gaming laptops, and even less with desktop obviously. Will have to see how the lineup evolves for iMacs in particular.

For the iOS/iPad part, it's true I did not think about that. But in the same way, it will require quite a few sacrifices. Honestly, at that point, better just bite the bullet and go cloud gaming. Porting older AAA why not, but newer ones will most likely look scary. Now, maybe you can something like DLSS using included NN cores though. But no idea if that's anywhere near powerful enough, Nvidia sure packs a lot of those for DLSS.
Maybe also if iPad and Apple Silicon macbooks share the same CPU/same OS, it will be more worth it, but how many tablet users are ready to pay AAA price for tablet gaming, considering the lack of good "gaming interface" (integrated joystick etc) is still a good question. iPad pros do have keyboard and mice, but at a very very prenium, really not mainstream price, and clearly not at a gaming competitive price I think (that's a multiple Switch or a good gaming laptop you can buy at this price point.)

Of course, time will tell, and might prove me wrong, but for now I would still not bet a lot on MacOS/iPad AAA gaming (eSport titles that run on a potato why not). And Valve actions show they don't seem to either - and Apple clearly did not make friends with Epic games situations, which certainly won't help.

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Quoting: DrMcCoyThat's sad. While I personally don't use macOS and sometimes macOS vs Linux is pushed into some kind of rivalry, I'm one of these "radical portability" types. I want more portability, not less.

I mean, I can understand flibit's position here, one person holding down the fort on their own is hard.

I'll even attempt to build Apple Silicon binaries and support that hardware as well if it seems like it's easy to do without first-hand testing (admittedly a bit lofty to attempt, but considering I'll probably have to support Aarch64 on Linux/Windows soon anyway it doesn't seem crazy).

This is great, though. Supporting more architectures is always a noble goal.

It will also help find some bugs in the code that are hidden by x86 idiosyncrasies, including reordering constraints and memory alignment. Though probably not immediately on current Apple Silicon machines, since they're still able to run x86 binaries through Rosetta 2. I fully expect Apple to remove that feature in the near future, though, this is what they did with the first Rosetta too back then.

Having portable code is indeed quite cool, same for multi arch. But you also need to balance gain vs cost. Supporting windows + Linux + I think Switch for this case (I seem to remember he also works on Switch stuff) is already plenty enough.

For MacOS, I do think it should be done if it does not cost much, but I think the issue is overall Apple is a burden. The part about bug report only for riches is a good example. It's always the same in the end, gain vs cost. Being multi plat will help stability up to a certain point, but it's a diminishing return. You find lot of nasty bugs by adding a platform, much less with the 3rd one, and then less and less. If you have console + windows + Linux, MacOS will not add much more. ARM porting maybe, but likely not much either. Alignment and co should be managed by the compiler unless you go quite low level, at which point your code is likely arch specific.

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Quoting: pb

Quoting: EikeI just wondered yesterday, reading about Apple's new ARM processor: What will Steam be doing?

It will be interesting to watch what many companies will be doing... like Adobe for example...

As far as I understood, Adobe support is coming, albeit a bit late. Generally speaking Audio/Image and Video world will most likely continue supporting apple, unless they get trampled in the professional world. They have a lot of leverage there.

For Steam, honestly, I never understood why even bother to port games to MacOS. Mac is already not such a big market, but the number of Macs that can actually game is probably multiple times smaller than Linux gaming market. Macbooks are KO, mac mini is KO, so it leaves you with a bunch of iMacs and Mac Pros users I guess ? I mean, what's the point ? Of course, now that vulkan support (through moltenVK) exists, and since it is posix, it might still make some sense to support both Linux and MacOS, but MacOS as a primary port platform makes no real sense to me.
Btw, if anything, with Valve not giving any effort on Proton/Steam play on Mac, I think we kinda have our answer: they won't shut down the remaining lights right away, but I think they have already disengaged mostly. As long as there are people buying games there, they will probably keep it alive, but I would not expect anything more.

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Quoting: ShinyaOsen

Quoting: 3zekielOtherwise, if your PC is powerful enough, I recommend rpcs3 emulator, it works quite well for me.

RPCS3 was the reason i got a PS3 played some games and really liked them but preformance was poor with somegames (about Version 0.0.6-7830) at the time and getting games was hard and games i wanted to play didnt work so i bought a ps3 because it was easier. Best thing that happened was when i was buying games from gamestop's website and the system bugged and had to only pay $0.24 i still dont know how this happened

Ah yes, some games still do not play nice. I do have my PS3 still around for that. I don't know if there is a list somewhere of streamable games on PS3, it's true in those case I would have some use for it too

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Quoting: ShinyaOsenWish they would add ps3 support because sonys program doesnt work on windows let alone wine but id imaging that would be to much of a hassle for little reward

For PS3 I don't remember that there were much games running with remote play? But it would be a nice feature yes.

Otherwise, if your PC is powerful enough, I recommend rpcs3 emulator, it works quite well for me.

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Quoting: HoriNice!
I used Steam Remote Play quite a lot with Steam Link and I enjoyed it very much. For me it was one of the strong points of Steam.
It will definetely come in helpful when I will eventually join the console gaming peasantry (just joking, no offence intended)... once the scalping overlords deem that they made enough well-deserved and hard-worked-for profits and through their endless generosity deem me worthy enough to bestow upon me the privilege of being able to buy a PS5 at MSRP from a real store.

But a PC is still the priority for me. PS5 is just secondary

Quoting: 3zekielAlso houray for dropping github. Now that it is in Evil's hands, I prefer to avoid having to use it ...

But why was GitHub all good and nice and suddenly bad and evil overnight just because it is owned by another company?

Hating something just because it is owned by Microsoft is not very reasonable. And to go even further I find it to be very similar to racism except it's directed at companies instead of "races".

Personally I judge every thing individually, like Windows which I think it's a sh***y OS, and GitHub which I think is still a very good and nice platform (and only got better TBH since they had access to MS funds).
And there's many other good, and bad, products from Microsoft. Just as there are from any other company.

And just as the companies we dislike (e.g. Microsoft) can make good products, also companies that we like (e.g. Valve, Canonical, etc) can make bad products. Judging things based on who made them is *very* inaccurate - kind of like judging a book based on its cover. Sure it might give an initial impression and set some expectations (especially the latter) but that's just about it - which is not much.

Sentence was kinda made to be exaggerated ;p
However, you have to remember that Microsoft is a specialist of EEE (Embrace Extend Extinguish) strategy, so avoiding them and having back up plans still makes a lot of sense.
Honestly, I was not so fond of github before either, being an American company and all. Those companies tend to not respect even the bare minimum in term of data privacy, and Microsoft (and their track record concerning that) acquiring them just made my worries that much worst. Boycotting thoses companies as much as possible is a good way to show disapproval to the way our data is handled.
I much prefer that open source projects use self hosted git, or smthg hosted in Europe by a European/Swiss company which are under much more privacy minded jurisdiction. Same reason that I use Qwant as a search engine.

I still use Steam because not much better choices, and since I do pay for it, I tend to think they are probably nicer in that respect ...

Now of course, even a broken clock gives the right time twice a day, and Microsoft can have good products, but I still am overly wary of them.

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Whoa that's a good news. When I can find a PS5 in store, I can use it to replace my PS4 pro then (I use it mostly in remote mode). Now, I just wish Sony would add 1440p support ... And with streaming of course, 1080p limit on ps4pro streaming is a bit of a pain (PS4 limit, not chiaki).
Now if we can stream in 4k, maybe can just stream in 4k and downscale at arrival too.

Also houray for dropping github. Now that it is in Evil's hands, I prefer to avoid having to use it ...

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Quoting: JuliusAny further details why this isn't using the existing Portal2 OpenGL version?

Hmm probably because opengl is not that great ? When I see the port of Observer which uses OpenGL, it does not run quite good ... The windows version with dxvk runs better.

I mean, at the time these ports were done, there was only OpenGL, and the ports themselves are good. But there is a big chance that a vulkan backend will actually beat it nowadays. Vulkan drivers are in better shape, vulkan overhead is just overall better etc etc

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Quoting: NanobangAfter reading through the Best Linux ditros for gaming article of a couple days ago, I decided it was time to begin a distro-hop and began downloading several potential Xubuntu replacements.

The first of these was Linux Mint XFCE because it keeps me close to the Debian derived Ubuntu I've grown accustomed to over the years while ridding me of Canonical's Microsoft-like "We know best" policy of forcing Snaps down everyone's throats.

The others, incidentally, are Manjaro and EndeavorOS (both XFCE); PopOS (I was really impressed with their hotkeys, window tiling, and focus on gaming); and KDE Neon because, well, I want to like KDE.

I expect it'll end up being Mint XFCE in the end, though. :)

If you still have some time for distro hop, do give a try with Fedora too. As far as gaming and work goes, with an Nvidia card, it has been a very nice experience for me. I come from Arch btw.

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