Immutable might be fine for a single-purpose OS like SteamOS but it felt like jumping through hoops just to get basic packages installed and added to PATH without writing to root. Using a mutable distro with BTRFS snapshots has been the best of both worlds for me, I get to modify and install to root as I please and whenever anything goes wrong I just revert back to a previous snapshot and get a working system again.

- No Fcitx: Sorry, but there are more native Chinese speakers than native English speakers, having an IME is not an excessive luxury (and please, don't use Ibus, that garbage is horrible).

I'm glad someone else gets it. I swear the only reason it sticks around is because the people who call the shots on most distros speak non-IME languages like English and German to which IBus "gets the job done". If you speak a language that requires an IME (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.) then it's just an painfully buggy experience and you'd be much better off with Fcitx 99.9% of the time.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

maybe with the sole exception of how fast you can access the RAM

That's really the crux of it. This chip has way more memory bandwidth then anything you'll find in the consumer desktop space, and bandwidth is the biggest limiting factor for LLM AI model performance. AI hobbyists have been stuck between a rock and a hard place until now with GPU VRAM having fast bandwith but low capacity and typical CPU RAM having high capacity but slow bandwidth, a lot of people have resorted to buying multiple used 3090s or multiple ancient workstation GPUs to get that large amount of high-bandwith memory for cheap. This is a much more practical, energy efficient and cheaper alternative to that so I'm not surprised it's selling well.

I can appreciate it looks weird for Framework fans who don't know what AI MAX/Strix Halo is and just see that it has soldered RAM but this isn't competing with standard desktops, it's in the same category as Mac Studio and Nvidia Digits. From that perspective, Framework are taking something that has only been avaliable in Laptops and Mini-PCs until now and making it avaliable as standard ITX with standard PCIe, M.2, etc.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Looks like they submitted it with AI-generated library assets. [External Link] Not sure what Valve's current stance on AI is but that probably didn't help.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Does the slider jump straight from 30 to 40 fps? Because the screen can't run at 31-39 hz and with frame duplication the screen would have to run at 62-78 hz.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: ShmerlMay be they can turn FSR without upscaling part into a Vulkan layer now, similar to how VkBasalt does it.

I don't think that would work considering FSR 2/3 needs access to motion vectors, depth buffer and a ton of other data from the game to work properly. It's possible in theory by having the layer read that data from the game process but that would likely require per-game support.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Liam DaweA lot of console ports a done by a third-party, and they end up having their own code-base that's separate.

Yup it's the same case with The Sims 4 and Civilization VI. It's yet another downside of using porting companies over in-house multi-platform development.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This update adds fractional scaling (finally!!) but in the process they also added a load of bugs to the way scaling is handled in different parts of the UI (desktop, big picture, in-game overlay). Relevant Github issues for anyone interested: #5908 [External Link] #9565 [External Link]

Also if you're on KDE Plasma X11, whenever you close Steam or open Big Picture mode there's a chance the entire desktop environment will crash and therefore all of your opened programs too. If there was any reason to keep this in the beta branch a bit longer it should've been that.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: legluondunetWe had never known an emulator that emulates a console still on sale.

Not true, it happened with the N64 (UltraHLE), the GBA (NO$GBA) and the DS (Desmume). Citra was running most 3DS games about half way through that console's sales period so you could say that one counts too. This isn't a new phenomenon.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

They updated the server browser🥳 I'm sure the ten other people that actually use that feature are happy too

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Isn't going from 4 GPU cores to 12 quite a big jump? I would've expected a Z1 Pro or something with 8 GPU cores to fill in the gap.

View this comment - View article - View full comments