I honestly feel spoiled for choice in games... I understand why some devs want to use kernel level rootkits anti-cheat mechanisms, but personally I don't find any competitive gaming that interesting anymore, these days.

Yeah, I grew up playing deathmatches in the likes of Duke3D, Quake, UT, Tribes, etc., and yeah, cheaters suck, but... I could always switch to a different dedicated server with some obscure mods or host my own. When the server OP is watching someone obviously cheat in-game, it's easy to just ban them and move on, because these servers were (and in many cases still are!) run as a community effort, with volunteers keeping the peace.

That's the part I miss from these modern games - by making matchmaking and server infrastructure dependent on the publisher, we lost so much. So if a multiplayer game doesn't let me host my own dedicated server I can opt to password-lock to my friends, I'm honestly just not interested. Give us standalone dedicated server binaries (hell, I'm even running one right now for Empyrion via wine), and let the community sort it out, no kernel rootkit shenanigans needed.

Of course, the real reason behind all this is so they can protect their investment in microtransactions and loot box garbage, so I'm not surprised they don't want little Timmy cheating in that fancy $$$ golden weapon skin without paying them for the privilege. :sick:

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Cool, one more publisher to add to my ignore list on Steam, never to purchase from, again~

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Ooh, just in time for that big shiny IPO and subsequent (continued?) enshittification.

I've begrudingly kept a Discord account for RL friends this long, but I think this year will be the year I delete it for good and not look back.

Having looked at the self-hostable, free & open alternatives, I feel like my best bet is honestly going back to separate apps - Mumble for voice, Matrix (or XMPP) for chat, and something like Owncast for streaming.

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<sarcasm>
You're not supposed to squeeze the eggs! You're supposed to comfort them until they're ready to crack on their own - listen to their worries, reassure them everything's going to be okay. There's usually lots of trauma already built up in them. Share fun memes with them...
</s>

W-wait, what was I talking about, again? :3

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I can't wait for the day Epic finally throws in the towel on this. Valve has put *so much* amazing effort into Wine/Proton, GPU drivers, etc. - obviously self-serving with the Steam Deck.

I'm not about to mess with running the Epic store stuff through an unsupported setup - no shade at the Lutris, Heroic, etc. teams, but you shouldn't *have* to do this. Steam is right there and honestly works nigh-flawlessly these days. I can even run VR now! Quite literally never bothered setting up a Windows install to dual boot with with this new PC build, it's been months and I haven't missed it one bit.

I'll echo the sentiment here though: good news for publishers, but they're doing *nothing* for consumers, so why should we care?

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Quoting: tohurI like this CoC over many others as if you read it and understand it, it is in fact apolitical which all CoC's should be IMO.

Oh totally - the Contributor Covenant is a good solid standard. I meant more: life isn't apolitical - the circumstances that lead some people to be able to contribute to FLOSS and not others is inherently derived from political actions. Which countries invest in related education (and which may not even have the resources at their disposal to offer it), what sort of systemic issues certain groups of people have to navigate and contend with versus others, that sort of thing.

So yes - you should *strive* to be as neutral as possible, but that involves recognizing that everyone comes from different backgrounds - by being equitable, it allows the work to be 'apolitical' in that we don't have to fight to be respected, but on the other hand, it *is* 'political' in that it's expressly countering some of those issues and biases baked into society in the first place.

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Quoting: Liam DaweThe only people usually not in favour of them are the exact type of assholes they aim to keep away.

Hear fucking hear. :heart:

Adopting a decent CoC does not suddenly make the sky fall on developers' heads. The lack of one does not suddenly make a particular software product apolitical (hint: there is no such thing when it comes to being part of a group of people where not only do you have access to technology, but the free time and skills training on top). So if we want to encourage healthy collaboration on a project, we need to do so with a common basic understanding of respect and human decency.

Clearing murky waters and saying 'yes, being a shitty person will get you ostracized' in writing means much less wiggle room for them to try and get out of the repercussions of their own actions.

(Also, I'm sick of anti-CoC people essentially just using it as a dogwhistle for racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia - absolutely hilarious to me considering how many fellow trans people work in open source and tech in general. I can virtually guarantee that at least a good chunk of the tech in your phone and Linux distro of choice has been worked on by a trans person for your benefit.)

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Quoting: MangojuicedrinkerHi
Core Pinning performance gain is minimal for X3D CPUs. use Core Parking instead:
open as root: /usr/share/gamemode/gamemode.ini
under "CPU", change core_parking=yes and also follow the instructions to add yourself to gamemode group (else core parking won't work). This can MASSIVELY increase performance exactly like how AMD has done it in Windows.

Look here [External Link] for more info (and also a benchmark).

Very nice benchmarks! But yeah, not for me; I've got enough stuff going on in the background typically (why I bought the 7950 over e.g. a 7800X3D instead) that I want to keep using those other cores. That said, I'd be curious to really understand why that makes such a big difference, like - when the other CCD is parked, does that free up power budget / TDP room for clocks on the remaining CCD?

There's definitely a choice to make here in configuring, of course - good info to have! (Also, might be fun to play with this being a thing on a per-game basis)

(In my particular case, the RX 7600 is definitely the bottleneck regardless, but that may change in a cycle or two..)

Edit: That said, I made sure to get all my configs right and tested briefly with glxgears and mangohud to confirm that it works, so I'm *going* to benchmark this myself later... ;p

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I just recently upgraded to a Ryzen 7950X3D based system and have been playing around with the latest git version of gamemode for the core pinning and it's been working great! Glad to see it released.

Essentially, in my case it helps pin the game's threads to the CCD that has the extra X3D L3 cache (even if the max frequency is a little lower), leaving the other 'regular' CCD alone for background and other tasks.

Similar with the various heterogenous core concepts like Intel's 'P' and 'E' cores, presumably, and ARM's big.LITTLE.

Most games are GPU limited, but you can still get some modest performance boosts (<= 10fps or so) with this change, at least on my particular setup. I'd imagine keeping game threads off of the Intel efficiency cores would make a much bigger difference.

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Minor correction: GitLab, not GitHub :heart:

Been playing around with this on my new build, and while I love CoreCtrl for setting stuff up, this is also a great monitoring tool. I haven't gone through yet to see if there's 100% feature overlap and coverage between the two, though.

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