Quoting: ahoneybun

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: ahoneybunI think the bad experience that bad NVIDIA drivers had (and can still have from time to time) has left a mark on folks so they won't try it again.

And the rest of what you say suggests the plan is to ignore those folks and hope they go away instead of buying your kit. That plan is likely to be successful, but I would have thought not really optimal from the point of view of a hardware sales company.

That's not true at all, there has been movement to off AMD options for laptops like the Pangolin but the desktops (Thelio) have had AMD options from day 1.

Good to hear.

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There's some basis for this stuff. Presumably nothing like the game, but we know that the CIA used to experiment on people during the cold war, testing various drugs including LSD, mostly on unwitting subjects, to investigate their possibilities in terms of brainwashing, mind control and induced psychosis. As far as is known they weren't all that successful, but I believe they did manage to get a couple of people in Canada to jump out of windows.
(As far as anyone knows they aren't still doing that stuff, but we wouldn't know, would we?)

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Quoting: ahoneybunI think the bad experience that bad NVIDIA drivers had (and can still have from time to time) has left a mark on folks so they won't try it again.

And the rest of what you say suggests the plan is to ignore those folks and hope they go away instead of buying your kit. That plan is likely to be successful, but I would have thought not really optimal from the point of view of a hardware sales company.

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It's very positive. Mind you, if it were becoming an actual worker-owned co-operative I'd be ecstatic. The two are not the same; with these trusts employees have an odd theoretical form of ownership, but usually do not have the control or votes that would go with ownership in most circumstances; the trust is typically managed "on behalf" of the employees. It's more like having money in a pension fund that owns the company than it is like owning the company per se. But it's certainly better than corporate status quo.

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Quoting: hardpenguinTo get rid of the glitches you can run Big Picture Mode in a window.

So, Small Picture Mode. :tongue:

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Quoting: ahoneybunDepending on the case this is incorrect, it can be helpful for AI/ML work, video work and gaming.

Gaming, eh?
Well . . . this website is called GamingonLinux. The people here are all about gaming, on Linux. Every. Single. Time an article shows up about some Linux-oriented hardware company releasing a laptop, including System76 ones, it seems to use NVidia. And Every. Single. Time. the comments are mostly not about the specific virtues of the laptop, but about "Why won't they use AMD? Why isn't there at least an AMD option?" And the opinion seems to run 90% in the direction of "NVidia is bad for gaming on Linux" and 10% "Well, NVidia is actually a decent/workable option". Very often many of these comments run along the lines of "I'd buy one of these if it had AMD instead of NVidia, too bad."

So, the Linux gaming community seems to disagree with you. Maybe they're totally wrong and it's just that everyone here is a bunch of idiots; certainly the point I'm making is technically a logical fallacy along the "appeal to authority" lines. But, balance of probabilities, I think it would be worth your while at System76 to investigate the possibility that your customer base could have a point. Even if you are sure they're a batch of fools, it might be worth thinking about selling them what they want to buy.

One thing to keep in mind is that people's problems with NVidia seem to be less about benchmarks and more about quality of life issues that crop up over time during use, something it's a little harder for a manufacturer to test for; sometimes you just have to take your customers at their word.

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Quoting: Pengling

Valve are listing Super Bomberman R as a newly playable title

As the resident Bomberman nut

I was waiting to see if you'd comment on this. :grin:

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Quoting: slaapliedjeWe switched to 4th edition for the game we were playing pre-COVID, but there are definitely things I like about it more than 3rd, and things that I don't (like the dropping of PD, and assuming everyone basically just has a +3 to active defenses... like you're still doing the math there...)

I definitely have mixed feelings about 4th. I agree with you about PD. I like that ST and HT are cheaper than DX and IQ because almost all the skills are based on DX and IQ. It's much easier to build a brawn-based character in 4th edition; in 3rd it's quite hard unless your character is from a naturally strong race. I don't like the simplification of having all the skills max at 4/level instead of mental skills being cheaper. The fact is that a decent mental-oriented character tends to need way more skills than a physical-oriented one, whether it's a wizard or a psionic or just a scholar or engineer or mad scientist. So with 4/level for both physical and mental, suddenly you got physical combat types can push their key skills through the roof while mental oriented characters are half-assed. I like a couple of the combat options in 4th, like the "deceptive attack" where you take a -2 to hit for every -1 to the opponent's defence; we've totally backported that into our 3rd edition games. I kind of like the bonus for defined skill groups thing.

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This is interesting but I have a couple caveats. First thing is, it might be too maximalist for me. Seems like it's a tool that wants to be everything for you and have you put everything into it and take advantage of their way to organize the stuff. And I mean, it seems like a pretty good way to organize the stuff, but I'm not sure I really want that. If nothing else, if I've organized all my bits and pieces by slotting them into their maps in this nested way, how do I get all that out again? I store my RPG stuff in document files on my thumb drive (backed up to my computers) that I can open on any computer whether it's got internet access or not. If I'm using Roll20 and all I've done is shoved a couple maps on there and taken advantage of some dice rolling features, I can still do that. But this thing seems to want all my stuff to live in the cloud, set up their way, and the results of pulling out the data, if I even can, might be pretty incoherent.
Side note, their organization seems very dedicated to the physical--information is all attached to a place or maybe a person. A lot of the information about my campaigns is about cultural institutions or history or stuff, it's not really geographical in nature, and I don't want to organize it into snippets attached to places.

Second is, they talk about putting in systems other than D&D, but it's hard to be sure how well that's likely to work. From the way they talk the rest of the time it seems quite D&D-centric.

Spoiler, click me

(And frankly, I don't like D&D; I don't think it's a very good roleplaying game. D&D was the pioneer and I started playing it back in about 1981 and had countless hours of good times (and a bit of drama and angst). But it hasn't changed that much since then. I've actually been playing some lately because my group felt like doing some retro gaming; we started off going back to 1st edition, then eventually shifted to 5th to see where D&D had gone since then. Still in the end stage of that right now, and I can have fun with it because I have fun with those people. But 5th edition . . . to its credit in a way, it's still fundamentally the same system. It's better in that it's gotten rid of a lot of inconsistencies and some needless complications. And, it's given character classes a few more goodies and options, so that you can have two fighters and they don't, like, fight exactly the same. But it's still very, very combat oriented--if anything, 5th edition seems to have less non-combat skill availability than 1st edition with all the extra books did, and there are still very few spells for doing sort of useful or basic things that aren't about killing people. And the class system remains very restrictive, if anything somewhat more restrictive than 1st edition because multi-classing is totally useless and unworkable. Don't get me wrong, they had to nerf that because in 1st ed it was massively overpowered, but it was also the only way to get any flexibility in your character concept, and now it's gone, so all you've got is those little choices of perks within a given class. In the end, the scope for both roleplaying and character design is very limited in D&D compared to points-based systems with skills and stuff. It's not a good system unless you're strongly oriented towards hack&slash, and even on that level I'm getting kind of bored with it.)

TL;DR I don't want to play D&D, I want to play GURPS or Hero System or stuff like that, and even GURPS my group has decided we prefer 3rd Edition to 4th overall (although we import one or two little 4th edition features), and I'm not confident this thing will actually and practically let me do that.

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Quoting: GuestMuch of the third world doesn't bother upgrading their PCs as it is rather expensive.

Mind you, there is nothing stopping "much of the third world" from putting together a retro distro specializing in old hardware. We're talking billions of people, a surprising number of whom have computer skills, and it only takes maybe half a dozen people to do a decent distro. That's one beauty of the GPL, eh? The third world don't just have to passively consume whatever Microsoft decides to give them.

Anyway, I don't frankly think there's much of an argument for Linux breaking old hardware more than other OSes. I don't think that's the case. And I agree with TheSHEEEP that it's not a huge issue.

But Linux breaking old software, that's another question. I think it clearly does, and although it hasn't been a huge problem in the past, it's a barrier to expanded Linux desktop use. It hasn't been a huge problem in the past because most the Linux software ecosystem has been open source. Active open source projects get updated to depend on newer libraries more or less as those libraries are themselves updated. There's some slippage, which has resulted in distros and package managers having to come up with ways of keeping multiple library versions working side by side, but basically open source software that's in common-ish use normally kind of keeps up with changes in Linux itself. So for the open source Linux software ecosystem it hasn't mattered much that Linux libraries keep changing and breaking compatibility. It still matters some . . . sometimes nice bits of niche software get abandoned and for the people in that niche it would be nice to keep on using them anyway. But it's been an irritant, not a dealbreaker.

But closed software is a different story. Closed software (such as most games) does not get eternally updated. Closed software on Linux becomes unusable faster than closed software on Windows. And this is a problem. Mind you, there are solutions going forward--I think things like Flatpaks are useful for this, for the future. If someone releases a closed application on Linux via a Flatpak, that Flatpak will keep working for quite a while. Even if it stops working, you could probably figure out what broke it, stick an appropriate version of that in the Flatpak too, and keep going. The Steam Runtime sort of does that, although I'm not sure it allows you to maintain different versions and have old software run in an older Steam Runtime. Still, it surely could do that. But that doesn't help now for software from the past. I can no longer get my Loki games to work.

It might be good to have some sort of "Wine for old Linux" project which makes containers with appropriate stuff in them for old Linux software.

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