1. Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree. Stuff like this is partially necessity and partially a REALLY good excuse to see what the price ceiling actually is… and then turn that into the floor moving forward. Just look at gas prices
2. The “AI Bubble” is likely to be on the same level as the Dotcom Bubble and the like. It is going to be brutal and a LOT of people are going to lose their jobs… and then much of the same tech will still dominate just with more realistic expectations. And that will still need large amounts of memory
3. If the “AI Bubble” really is as bad as people seem to want it to be: A LOT of the vendors who make the parts you are buying RAM to use are going to be gutted. And then RAM production will drop drastically. Which will decrease supply and…

If you process digital photos, the edits get saved, so you can change them. It’s like a digital darkroom. I’d lose all that and be left with the unprocessed photos.

And you export them when you are finished? So you have the unprocessed photos AND the finalized processed once? And you just have the ones that were in flight that are… in flight.

But it sounds like you think this is worth using. If you think you understand the crack and understand the risks then go for it? Just understand that piracy of media and games is very different than piracy of productivity software and the risks and liability go up drastically with the latter.

I guess I am confused what what is actually going on.

All your photos should be stored locally first. It looks like Capture One provides some form of cloud based access if you want to edit with a mobile device but you should still have the raw (possibly RAW format) files yourself?

So the only thing you are “risking” is your most recent batch of edits that you haven’t exported/finalized yet. So if you are actually a hobbyist… who cares?

As for whether you should crack it:

1. If you are relying on cloud storage, this is a deeply stupid idea. They will have logs of your data store being accessed and will have logs of you not having a valid license. A paralegal can pound out the lawsuit over lunch.
2. If you are less a “hobbyist” and more running a business (what it sounds like): You are inherently playing with fire if you use pirated software for profit. Up to you but my general rule of thumb is that if you are making enough to do something professionally then you are making enough to buy a seat for the industry standard software (or to take the time to learn something jank but cheap)

I’ll also add on that there are a LOT of blog posts and youtube shorts about “Game X is 20% faster on Linux than Windows!!!” that everyone loves to regurgitate. And the reality is that it was a single outlier or it all boils down to Steam distributing “good enough” shaders to Linux but not Windows (and let’s not get into the weeds of why).

Whereas GN, especially since “All New Data” a few years back, have very heavily focused on reproducible and “good” data. That is why Steve basically apologized for not having error bars or having what looks like messy data for a few of those runs. And they’ve done entire videos on their testing methodology that often includes MANY runs to normalize out the noise.

So without being able to explain exactly why? I doubt they will EVER put Windows and Linux data on even the same page of their website. But… someone who cares will be able to see trends.

And you can similarly do most/all of your dev work in a container that you spin up with a podman alias (fuck hashicorp with a rusty metal pole but damn if Vagrant wasn’t awesome). Hell, there are a lot of arguments that you should.

It inherently becomes a question of what your primary use case for a machine is and how often you spend fighting it to accomplish that. And, personally, I run Linux so I DON’T have to fight my OS. Which… is really weird when you think about it but holy crap Windows and Mac are annoying.

Immutable OSes are amazing for corporate environments and HTPC/Gaming computers are another solid use case. But if your primary focus is whether you can be a developer (as indicated by the doomemacs ask)… you are gonna be cranky.

I’m of a few minds on this.

First and foremost: I am a huge Gamers Nexus fan and think Steve et al are a great complement to Wendell when it comes to the decade of Year Of The Linux Desktop. And I love that they actually addressed the elephant in the room where… quite often you actively don’t want to use the linux binaries for a game.

But I do think that having Linux as the second class benchmarks are inherently going to cause problems. Assuming they stick to doing a batch every couple months, that… okay, ain’t nobody actually buying hardware unless they have to. But still. And this was apparently collected during one of the months where nVidia was a complete shitshow. But Dragon’s Dogma 2 completely breaking is the kind of thing where… look, I became WAY too aware of exactly how denuvo registers a machine while I was debugging that. I was able to get DD2 to run beautifully on my PC but… as a HUGE DD1 fan even I think I wasted my life doing that (would do it again though).

But I keep thinking of how many Influencers have done a variant of “tech isn’t fun anymore”. And… it kind of isn’t. But from the editorializing from Steve et al over the past year or so, it is clear they are excited that things are actually changing sometimes week to week and so many of these problems are ACTUALLY solvable by users. Sometimes it is trivial (check protondb for what settings) and sometimes you find yourself going down a rabbit hole of just how bad the Nioh 2 PC port actually was.

I suspect this ends with the vast majority of outlets embracing “XBOX For PC” in a year or two… and Steve looking even more like the crazy old man of PC reviews. But I do think this will go a long way towards helping the fence sitters get away from MS.

Believe it or not but some content isn’t conducive to being tweeted.

The high level summary you want is “Gamers Nexus is doing linux gpu benchmarking using bazzite”. If you want actual details, watch the video (or at least skim to the graphs).

I use Bazzite for my HTPC (AMD NUC).

For a “set it and forget it” gaming console experience? It is awesome. It feels like I already have a GabeCube under my TV (that I bought for probably half the price…). And when I have to do more complicated things than “run the update once a month”, I just ssh in from either my desktop or laptop.

But… it is an immutable/atomic distro. So if the packages you want to add are flatpaks or appimages? You are probably fine. Otherwise? You get into a mess where you are adding packages to your layers (?) and kinda feel like you are playing with fire. I did that to get iperf3 installed to test some networking upgrades and it was mostly painless but it was also a really bad experience versus sudo dnf install iperf3. And… even on machines where I spend 90% of my time ssh’ing into servers, I still tend to want to install a good amount of local packages as a developer.

So my suggestion would be to stick to Bazzite for gaming first platforms and continue to use whatever distro you like (Fedora for the win!) for “real” computers.

Also, if you aren’t as annoyed by atomic distros as I am, I would still be wary of Bazzite. They have a lot of different SKUs and I don’t care enough to try to parse what each one does. But the common use case is to basically treat a machine like a Steam Deck… which means you boot into Big Picture with essentially no login screens or a REALLY insecure pin code. And then you switch to desktop mode with a single click.

There are ways to harden that (and very much an argument of whether you need to harden a machine in your home). And Linux, generally, has very good protections by actually requiring auth for sudo. But I already feel sketchy that I am logged into Steam/GoG on a box with almost no protections. But I also live in an environment where I don’t have to worry about someone buying 10k in fortnite bucks on my TV.

Homie. You’re asking for help. Provide the info up front rather than expect people to dig through your entire mess to collect basic details.

Other useful information: Is this raw dog or flapak steam? At a glance that looks like a modal controller. What mode(s) have you tried connecting it as?

And, generally, usb dongles don’t work as well as bluetooth for gamepads in linux.

Steam Frame is going to have a snapdragon processor and will “be a computer”.

So there will be an ARM native Steam client (and Steam OS that may or may not be SteamOS). Just a question on whether that gets a wider release.

But yes. Games themselves will be heavily dependent on FEX.

Related: has anyone actually tried Alyx on Linux recently? I set up ALVR with my facebook quest the other month and every game except Alyx was fine. Half-assed googling makes it sound like that was a known issue but there are also probably like five people on the planet trying Alyx in Proton.

Skimmed the article (yay for reader view) but it doesn’t really say WHY the channel was deleted?

I am not in the slightest bit shocked by google bending over backwards to pleasure trump and netanyahu. But this also doesn’t seem like their MO. They are usually “good” about explaining what new rule they invented and why that suddenly gave a channel 40 strikes retroactively and I am not seeing that here?

Whereas there are a few mid-size channels that have allegedly been flagged “by AI” as being other bad channels? Which… actually seems more likely since it is less youtube taking an actual stand on anything and more just deciding the ai slop channels that stole footage are the originators and to ban everyone involved.

It depends on the game and service.

But the best thing you can do is just go buy a new 1 tb os drive. Not too expensive, even for nvme, and it guarantees you lose no data. Then you have more storage once you actually know you migrated all the old data.

Then don’t fucking parrot their nonsense.

“jokes” are fun until it is indistinguishable from the same bullshit the people raping humanity are saying. At every step of the way, call them out on their shit.

No, they very much fucking do. They’ll be the first to talk about how the weather is getting wild and it is so great they live in florida where every day is beautiful except during hurricane season where they refuse to move.

They believe in the existence of climate change. They just refuse to do anything that will ever inconvenience themselves even the slightest iota. And they’ll bend over backwards to insist “it is just sun cycles” to absolve themselves of any responsibility.

… Is it?

Ten years ago, definitely. Now? We can already see the impact of climate change and it is only getting worse. This is why American and Russian oligarchs want Canada.

It’s more likely the world already got what it wanted out of the Caribbean and just doesn’t care about the inhabitants.

A lot of people in graphics design et al are contractors. They get hired for a job, do it with their own resources, and then move on. Those folk tend to need to provide their own software.

Aside from that? Companies DO provide software. But, at least in my experience, early career staff decide they actually NEED matlab or some other super proprietary nonsense and take it upon themselves to get the tools they “need”. Which results in their manager having to have The Talk about why you don’t do that in an actual company and how they are REALLY lucky you are the one that saw them because that is a fireable offense.

Let’s say you are a graphics designer. You use Adobe Illustrator and you pirate it. You work for Innertrode either as a contractor or a full time employee. You make their new logo.

Adobe’s legal team are bored. They see that new logo. They know it was made with Illustrator because of some of the visual quirks/tools (or, you know, because it is anything graphical so of course it uses Adobe). They know that Innertrode doesn’t have a license. So they call up Lumberg and say “what the fuck?”.

Lumberg then calls the person who was in charge of the new logo and they point at you.

If you are staff? You were given training not to pirate anything. It is all your fault. Innertrode buys a few years of a license and apologizes and fires your ass and makes sure to tell everyone they know about you. Or you are a contractor and you signed an agreement saying you had valid licenses for everything and they just give your contact info to Adobe and move on.

And Adobe MIGHT just want to shake you down. Or they might want to make an example and sue the fuck out of some people.

Also… it is a lot of hearsay for obvious reasons, but there are very strong rumors that some of the more prominent cracks tend to add digital watermarks for the purpose of automating this.

I used a boox for maybe 7 or 8 months? I do not recommend them.

There is a native ebook reader. It is… real bad. And the book management is similarly really weak. Great for throwing a quick PDF on there, not so much for having a “library” as it were where you don’t necessarily want to have to remember which was book 3 of the series while you are on a plane. Not sure if the Calibre support got better to help with this (I know the Calibre devs recently made a huge effort to support non-Amazon devices) but when I used it it was all about you building your own folder structure.

But mostly it is designed around taking advantage of being an android tablet with an e-ink display. So just use the actual kindle app and so forth. Which, on paper (hee hee), is really cool. In practice, you rapidly realize that the kindle et al apps are designed with a fast refreshing display and most of the UX is built around holding a phone in your hands and not gripping a good sized tablet on its edges. LOTS of accidental page skips and font shenanigans.

Also, the android it runs is fairly out of date which is a pretty hefty security concern.

And there is a LOT of “mysterious” traffic going off to servers in China. How much that bothers you is… up to you.

Switched to a kobo and incredibly happy with that.

There are two layers to this (actually a lot more but)

What you are describing is mostly supply chain. It is the idea that the package manager’s inventory should be safe. And that is already a nigh impossible task simply because so many of the packages themselves can be compromised. It seems like every other year there is a story of bad actors infiltrating a project either as an attack or as a “research paper”. But the end result is you have core libraries that may be compromised.

But the other side is what impacted OP and will still be an issue even if said supply chain is somehow 100% vetted. People are inherently going to need things that aren’t in a package manager. Sometimes that is for nefarious reasons and sometimes it is just because the project they are interested in isn’t at the point where it is using a massive build farm to deploy everywhere. Maybe it involves running blind scripts as root (don’t fucking do that… even though we all do at some point) and sometimes it involves questionable code.

And THAT is a very much unsolved problem no matter what distro. Because, historically, you would run an anti-virus scan on that. How many people even know what solutions there are for linux? And how many have even a single nice thing to say about the ones that do?