narc0tic_bird
@narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
- Comment on Citron is yet one more Switch emulator appearing online 5 days ago:
Yuzu is also a citrus fruit, so it at least makes sense.
- Comment on Windows 7 and 8 now dead for gaming, as new Steam update pulls support 1 week ago:
Does the CLI still work? If so, you could download and play all the Windows 7 compatible, DRM-free games in your library just fine. Alternatively, if you already had these games installed, they’ll work fine without launching Steam first.
- Comment on Steam Game Recording is now out of beta 2 weeks ago:
The feature itself is great. It records the last two hours by default and lets you easily create clips from that. The editor is right there in the Steam overlay, it’s pretty great.
I only used it under Linux, and that’s where I’d say it is still very much a beta experience. I have an AMD Radeon 7800 XT. Most of the time, Steam picks up on its hardware acceleration - sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it falls back to CPU encoding (obviously) which occupies around 3-4 cores on my 7950X3D to record 3440x1440 at the highest quality setting. GPU encodes are H.264 even though the GPU is perfectly capable of encoding AV1. Performance impact ranges from almost zero to as much as 30%, which seems a bit excessive. On some games that have a splash screen (Sea of Thieves for example), all it will record is said splash screen, even when it’s not shown anymore: you get gameplay sounds, but the video is just a static image with mouse cursor artifacts. It didn’t record sound from one of the microphones I tried. After swapping it out for a different one, my voice is being recorded. At least one session the shortcut for saving a clip just resulted in an error sound instead of a clip being saved.
So it’s a bit disappointing so far. Yeah, Linux shenanigans and relatively small user base, but Valve out of all companies should treat Linux as a first-class platform. Yes, they do a lot for Linux, with Proton and whatnot. But ironically Steam itself is only in an “okay, it kind of works” state. No official packages for anything but apt-based distributions and Wayland (scaling) support is meh at best.
It did seem to work a lot better on the Steam Deck with very little performance impact in my short testing, so there’s that.
- Comment on Apex Legends is taking away its support for the Steam Deck and Linux 3 weeks ago:
Let me guess without reading: kernel-level anti-cheat?
- Comment on Seeking feedback: how should lemm.ee move forward with external images? (related to frequent broken images) 4 weeks ago:
Can’t you store them in a cache that keeps images that have been accessed in the last 48 hours (or whatever) and deletes others? Should someone request these images after that, cache them again for 48 hours.
- Comment on A New Law Just Forced Valve To Change Steam. 5 weeks ago:
Not really, just some wording…?
- Comment on Proton is the Future of PC gaming. But how does it work? [Gardiner Bryant, YouTube] 1 month ago:
Exactly, and I’d rather devs focus their time on making sure their Windows version works well via Proton than using that same time for a half-assed native Linux version.
- Comment on Proton is the Future of PC gaming. But how does it work? [Gardiner Bryant, YouTube] 1 month ago:
In my experience, even when a game has a native Linux version, the Windows version run via Proton can often be the better choice.
In Tabletop Simulator, I wasn’t able to join my friends’ multiplayer sessions with the native Linux version. No problem with the Windows version via Proton.
The Linux version of Human Fall Flat isn’t feature complete/outdated.
There are better examples though. Valheim runs fantastic aside from a bug that it picks the first instead of the default audio device for sound output on startup. It even supports mods and r2modman supports Linux as well.
Didn’t have any problems with Spiritfarer either.
- Comment on My dead father is “writing” me notes again 2 months ago:
I’m not sure how that would help in letting lost people go.
- Comment on Idea: hardware manufacturers should publish RSS feeds for firmware updates 3 months ago:
BIOS/EFI updates have shown up on my ThinkPad T490 under Fedora.
- Comment on [Gamers Nexus] Intel's CPUs Are Failing, ft. Wendell of Level1 Techs 4 months ago:
They “have to” push their current silicon beyond its limits just to keep up with AMD (especially X3D in gaming workloads).
They pushed too far, big time.
The only right thing to do here would be to offer a full refund of the original purchase price of the CPU and mainboard to all customers, stop selling affected models immediately and release revisions that aren’t unstable and rapidly degrading by default.
But this won’t happen of course.
- Comment on Vivaldi: "Many have tagged us in discussions about a specif…" - Vivaldi Social 4 months ago:
I feel like most of Vivaldi’s target audience is knowledgeable enough to enable an extension that’s disabled by default. Heck, just display a notification asking whether to enable the extension when a Google Meet site is opened.
These proprietary, bundled-by-default extensions are just a taste of what a browser engine monopoly looks like. Alternative frontends to the Chromium engine don’t make a difference as these frontends will suck up whatever changes upstream. We only have 3 major/relevant engines left, Blink (Chromium), Gecko (Firefox) and WebKit (Safari, originated in Konqueror I think), with Blink being a fork of WebKit (although very diverged by now).
The web is so complex now that I don’t really see more engines becoming actually usable. Even Microsoft bailed out and eventually switched Edge over to Chromium.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
Very reasonable take. Thank you!
- Comment on Windows 11 is now automatically enabling OneDrive folder backup without asking permission 4 months ago:
Yeah, it’s also not “just” if it’s one of what feels like hundreds of steps now to make the OS somewhat usable.
- Comment on [May 29] Introducing the new Framework Laptop 13 with Intel Core Ultra Series 1 processors 5 months ago:
Lenovo has been weird for many years now with their built-to-order configuration options. They often announce 4 to 5 display options when in reality maybe 2 or 3 are available, and some of them only in combination with some weird other configuration options. Then it also depends on country of order.
- Comment on [May 29] Introducing the new Framework Laptop 13 with Intel Core Ultra Series 1 processors 5 months ago:
Oh yeah, looking forward to hopefully many years of platform support. They’ll obviously have to switch to different memory modules (as an example) at some point (CAMM should be next), but I hope they keep the board compatible with the case, modules, I/O and display for as long as anyhow possible.
I’m coming from a ThinkPad T490 and if that would’ve been a Framework which I could just upgrade from the i7 8565u to a Core Ultra or Ryzen 7000, I wouldn’t need/want a new notebook and could simply upgrade.
- Comment on [May 29] Introducing the new Framework Laptop 13 with Intel Core Ultra Series 1 processors 5 months ago:
This will be my first Framework, already preordered a few weeks ago.
They finally offer a 120 Hz display, and while it has slightly rounded corners which isn’t ideal, but I’ll take the 120 Hz with VRR and higher resolution over perfect corners. They explained they had to use a panel that was already on the market because they don’t have enough volume that they can afford to order a custom display and with the Framework 13 using a 3:2 aspect ratio options were apparently very limited.
They also offer a keyboard with the Super key having a neutral label (not a Windows logo) now.
The new webcam is apparently quite a lot better, but I don’t care too much about that.
I went for the i5 125H model, I think the difference of almost 400,-€ to the i7 155H isn’t worth it for most use cases, as you only get 2 more P cores (with all other core clusters being identical, I think 4+8+2 vs. 6+8+2) and 8 instead of 7 GPU CUs. I feel the difference will be negligible for my use case as soon as it hits power/thermal limits anyway. This also seems to be the stop-gap generation of CPUs, with both AMD and Intel appearing to make noticeable steps forward in the generation.
There’s also the AMD model which is great and got most upgrades the Ultra model did (new display, webcam and keyboard options), only missing out on a slightly improved cooling system. Between the i7 and R7 I probably would’ve gone for the Ryzen 7, but I feel the i5 is the better choice compared to the Ryzen 5, primarily because the iGPU is stripped quite a bit compared to the R7. Intel is also less restrictive on which expansion slot supports what, with every port supporting full USB 4 including DisplayPort. Not a big deal as there are still enough fully-featured slots on the AMD model, but it’s a bit more convenient to just plug in any card anywhere and it works.
- Comment on Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown requirements for PC 5 months ago:
These are hardly surprisingly high System requirements, at least if the game looks the part. Achieving 1080p60 at medium settings on an RTX 2080, which performs pretty much on par with an even older flagship card (1080 Ti) sounds about right.
CPU requirements aren’t that out of place either, and I doubt you’ll actually need a 14900K for 60 FPS.
- Comment on Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown requirements for PC 5 months ago:
Intel Thread Director has been backported to Windows 10, and it wouldn’t affect AMD CPUs anyway. Windows 10 has shown slightly better performance in games compared to Windows 11 in many tests.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
And he will continue to do so as long as people keep using the platform. Seems to work well for him.
- Comment on Is the Nitro Deck worth it for the Switch? 6 months ago:
What are you missing without it? If you don’t missing anything, I wouldn’t bother. The Nitro Deck seems to add back buttons for example, but they’ll probably be limited to simple button mappings, nothing fancy like you could do with Steam Input for example.
- Comment on Apple's 'incredibly private' Safari is not so private in Europe 6 months ago:
I’d say it’s probably an oversight. I don’t want to downplay this, it definitively needs to be addressed in some way. But it’s not like there are many marketplaces out there yet (so far the only one I know of is AltStore PAL, and I doubt the creator is out there to track a bunch of people’s web activities).
- Comment on Not seeing banner image in my lemmee community 6 months ago:
Not seeing profile images either. It’s probably the server serving the images being down and the error you got is from the reverse proxy. 10.* is an internal IP range.
- Comment on Maybe hot take: as a handheld, the regular switch is an awful handheld 6 months ago:
Sure, but the AIR 1S is an x86 device with a 7840U, so it runs regular PC games like the Deck for example.
- Comment on Maybe hot take: as a handheld, the regular switch is an awful handheld 6 months ago:
The AYANEO AIR 1S is smaller than a regular Nintendo Switch, being closer to a Switch Lite.
- Comment on Steam Deck is the ❝Biggest Threat❞ to Xbox [Fan The Deck] 6 months ago:
Oh I agree with that and I’m a PC gamer 99 % of the time (well, like 95 % desktop PC, 4.5 % Steam Deck, 0.5 % consoles). I mainly use my PS5 for playing BluRay nowadays. I don’t fancy paying more for games, a subscription for online gaming and getting a worse experience (in terms of graphics/performance and things like modding but also voice chat options etc.).
- Comment on Steam Deck is the ❝Biggest Threat❞ to Xbox [Fan The Deck] 6 months ago:
Sony also built up momentum during the second half of the PS3’s lifespan by focusing on what’s most important for a games console: games. And they made the PS3 more affordable and therefore accessible with a great, focused PS3 redesign in form of the PS3 Slim, saving costs while only cutting features that weren’t really important to most potential customers (PS2 backwards compatibility).
They took that momentum, watched Microsoft fail and made a home run with the PS4 based on the perfect storm that was created.
The PS5 was simply a continuation of their good form, and Microsoft has just been going along with their Xbox brand and consoles, seemingly not knowing where to go, buying studios left and right which then proceed to release mediocre titles. They also tried something with their subscription service, but it turns out most people just buy the games they want to play instead of picking from a selection of games of which they wouldn’t have chosen most of them if they weren’t included in a subscription.
- Comment on [deleted] 8 months ago:
The crowdsourcing part is what I meant. And you probably underestimate infrastructure as well.
This also isn’t something you can just let a few volunteers do once and forget about it. It needs to be something that people run often on their phones. Wi-Fi access points change, cell towers sometimes change. You need to keep this data up-to-date. With Google’s or Apple’s location service, when a person buys a new router, it’s probably added to the database within hours or days at worst.
- Comment on [deleted] 8 months ago:
This should be pretty much impossible to replace short-term without resorting to Google. Building a database that maps routers, cell towers and more to coordinates from scratch takes a lot of time I imagine.
- Comment on Any service cheaper than Backblaze? 8 months ago:
S3 compatible? Wasabi is $.99/TB more, but has no egress or API fees whatsoever. So depending on use, it can be cheaper. For archiving purposes, Amazon Deep Glacier is a lot cheaper for storage (but expensive for retrieval).