That looks pretty interesting, I'll add it to the wishlist!

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Wow, in 6 months? Pretty impressive-looking for that time frame.

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Hmm, there are XCOM (2?), Portal 2, and Defense Grid (2?) board games, aren't there?

On the topic of board games, I actually just picked up Wingspan when it released last week, which is an excellent digital version of a board game which I got to play exactly once in the last physical get-together with friends I had in March. It's an "engine building" game about birds, and the Steam version comes with both some lovely music and actual bird calls for each bird! :woot:

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Quoting: damarrinGreat writeup, Phil, thanks for taking the time to do this. Observing trends is always very interesting and GOL's stats are a splendid tool.

Cheers! I actually surprised myself with how long it came out. Guess it was a slow lockdown day here in Melbourne. :happy:

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Figured I'd take a look at the trends since I haven't done so in quite a while, and point out anything that looks interesting.

Distributions mostly hold flat with some minor wiggles, other than what looks like a long slow decline in Ubuntu and a remarkable doubling in share for Manjaro, from 7.58% in February 2019 to 15.18% today.

8 GB of RAM and 32 GB of RAM have basically traded usage share (with 32 GB on the rise), though both are dwarfed by the 16 GB share, which has held between 51% and 54% the entire period plotted. :shock: (I'm in the somewhat-odd spot of having 24 GB myself, due to half-upgrading when one of my four 4 GB modules failed a few years ago.)

Intel and AMD usage has been steadily converging, with Intel at 52.32% and AMD at 47.68%—a rough calculation puts the slope at about ±0.95% per month, which suggests they might reach parity or even cross over in about 5 months if the trend holds. (I'm considering going AMD at some point in the future, but given my computer still works fine and that would require a new motherboard I can't really see myself justifying it anytime in the near future given my current financial situation as a poor graduate student. :whistle:)

Similarly, Nvidia is slowly dropping while AMD is growing (and Intel holds pretty flat) for GPUS, though the difference between Team Green and Team Red is still 19.22 percentage points, so unless the trend changes it'll be years before they reach parity. And didn't I hear some news about Intel releasing new GPUs or something recently? So who knows how this'll go. (I'll probably go full AMD whenever I do that motherboard switch mentioned above, which means…not for the next year or so at least, probably.)

Proprietary vs. open source GPU drivers are trending similar to Nvidia vs. AMD, I'm guessing because people using AMD are generally also using the open source driver, maybe? Oh, yeah, the next two plots show that roughly 97% of Nvidia users use the proprietary driver (I'm in this camp), while roughly 95% of AMD users use the open source one.

A single monitor remains the overwhelmingly most common option, but it's actually trending down very slightly over time. Very interestingly, the slack is not being picked up by 2 monitors as I would've thought (that's stayed more-or-less the same), but 3 monitors. Though we're talking like 1 percentage point here, so it's not huge. (I'm *sigh* stuck with 1 monitor for now, though I've had 2 in the past, and am eagerly looking forward to an eventual 3-monitor setup of my own in the future for increased productivity. :wub:)

Resolution-wise, 1920×1080 remains the most common by a country mile, at 56% currently, though that's dropped from just under 60% in February 2019. It looks like most of the gains have been made up by 2560×1440, which went from 10.12% to 14.84% in that same time. 3840×2160 (4K) also seems to have gained ~2% over that time, up to 7.78% now. (I think my next monitor upgrade [to accompany this mythical general computer upgrade in the misty future] will include jumping from 1080p to 4K on one of those two or three monitors; I kinda held off before as I didn't have the strongest GPU, but I've realized since then that most of the games I play are really not that graphically demanding anyway, and I expect the extra space will help with productivity as well. Plus I'd like to get into videography with stuff capable of shooting at 4K, and there's not much point in making it if I can't actually see it on my screen. :grin:)

There's more, but that's the stuff I find interesting, or which had interesting-looking trends.

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Interesting! I know after the Lithoids species pack some people have been asking for some sort of "Icthyoids", or aquatic-looking creatures, but I wouldn't have guessed this.

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With my PhD hopefully finishing in the next six months, and thus being able to get away from my university-provided MacBook Pro, I'm probably going to want to start looking for a good Linux laptop soon… :smile:

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Wow, it's definitely leaning hard into the Stardew Valley feel with that collection of systems mentioned, not that that's a bad thing. :smile:

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Quoting: elmapulInteresting, in portuguese that woud be an mistake so i had no idea that its different in english

Ah, no worries! Yeah, English can be a bit…lax about these things sometimes. :grin:

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Quoting: elmapul"Solo developer Danny Preet is currently crowdfunding it on Kickstarter, with a goal of £15K and they have until October 1st to hit the goal. "
"solo developer"
"they"

just an small correction ;P

Eh, using the third-person plural pronoun to refer to a single person has literally hundreds of years of precedent in English at this point. I mean, we've already had the second-person singular form get taken over by the plural form, what's one more? :wink:

Interesting-sounding game, though it feels…incongruous that you're running past bio-hazard-marked containers and jumping through death-traps.

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