• 3 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • In my first month with the Deck, I have mostly played:

    • Death Stranding
    • Red Faction: Guerrilla
    • GRID (2008)

    And the hilarious tech demo of course!

    I’m really happy with how well Death Stranding works and really see myself finishing it now that I can play it on commute. Love that game but it never fit my schedule (at the desk, I always played flight sims in VR or just a very quick shooter session).

    Red Faction and GRID are easy enough on the battery, especially at 40 fps, and not too fussy about controls so they feel good with a controller (I felt a bit handicapped in Dirt Rally 2 and Project Cars 2).

    In terms of emulation, I installed RetroDeck and tried Gran Turismo PSP but found that hard with the large stick and no analog controls for accelerate/brake Just putting some PS1 and PS2 games on it now, let’s see if those will be able to bump GRID and Red Faction from my frequented list:

    • Metal Gear Solid 1,2 and 3
    • Gran Turismo 4


  • Makes sense. Mono was necessary in the “old .NET” world, where runtimes were tied to Windows versions and the framework was a pure Windows framework. Mono made it possible to run old dotNET framework versions (up to 4.8) on other OSes.

    Since dotNET Core and then dotNET 5 and higher, the framework itself is cross-platform so Mono is not necessary anymore, except for backwards compatibility for apps that use a now unsupported framework.

    So it makes sense that Microsoft, after dropping the old dotNET Framework versions, also wants to stop supporting the cross-platform library that was only needed for those old versions.








  • I um… didn’t get started yet. But a colleague demoed it to my and it’s kind of between virtual environments and containers, if you’re familiar with Python.

    You write a Nix config and specify exactly which versions of which package you want to have. Reproducibility is the main selling point of Nix. Things don’t just break overnight because a dependency of a dependency of a dependency got upgraded. You can always go back to exactly what it was like before. Guaranteed. That’s pretty cool.

    Ok so you got that config, then you build and activate it, and it replaces your shell. You enter the Nix shell. You still have access to all your files and directories, but your Nix config controls exactly which versions of your tools you have. gcc, npm, python, maven, whatever you use.

    You can see why this makes people want to build an immutable OS.

    The main drawback of Nix is that it has a bit of a learning curve. Hence why I haven’t started yet. Maybe it’s time though.






  • It’s a new desktop by the Pop!_OS team, System76. They previously used Gnome extensions but to make a snoother, more performant experience, they have been working on an entirely new desktop environment + toolkit, all in Rust. They call it Cosmic.

    The new Cosmic Store is super fast and smooth, perhaps the fastest package manager GUI on Linux desktop.

    Check out this speed comparison against GNOME Software: (Cosmic starts around 1:10) https://files.catbox.moe/mzz004.mp4

    If you’re on Pop!_OS 22.04 you can already install it with sudo apt install cosmic-store.

    There’s a few other COSMIC apps available but the store is the most usable one right now IMO. The text editor is fun too though. If you’re on another Debian based OS, you can probably add the system76 repo and then install it.


  • Congrats! I hope I’ll be able to join you soon!

    For me it’s a combination of factors that make the barrier for this last use case higher. I almost exclusively play DCS: World in VR using a Reverb G2 WMR headset. I’ve had a friend offer his worn Valve Index, which should work on Linux. But:

    • I’ve heard mixed things on SteamVR Linux support (supposedly they just shipped a ton of fixes)
    • DCS:World in VR is hard enough to run smoothly on a bog-standard Windows 10 setup. And there’s quite a bit of artefacting in Wine/Proton. I’m not sure the added troubleshooting and glitches is worth it
    • My graphics card is an Nvidia. This means I’d like to wait for 555 and proper Wayland support to land fully and I’d probably lose out on the DLSS speed boost on Linux. Or I should sidegrade to an AMD RX 6900XT.

    It’s a bit of work. In the meantime, at least as long as Windows 10 still gets security updates, I wikl continue to use my Windows dualboot for VR flight simming only



  • I am like you but a year behind. I hope to get there too at some point. Switched to Linux for the majority of my pc use and a lot of games. But my VR flight sim and the occasional racing is holding me back. I have an HP Reverb G2 (Windows Mixed Reality) headset which doesn’t work very well on Linux (yet?) and an Nvidia RTX 3080.

    There doesn’t seem to be an ideal Linux VR setup yet, now that SteamVR still does not work with Wayland. Hoping they’ll fix it and then I can sidegrade to a Valve Index and an RX 6900 XT and be set. I don’t like the complexity and latency of wireless streaming.