The vast majority of this increase is from people playing on Steam Decks

I believe this is incorrect. The Steam survey break down GPUs by description and the Deck’s GPU appears in the results as “AMD Vangogh”, which only accounts for 0.39% of respondents. That implies that the vast majority of survey respondents using Linux are actually on PC, not the Deck.

I did almost the exact same thing, on the same timeline! Installed Bazzite on a second NVMe sometime in the spring, and it’s been my daily driver for months now. For the first couple months I was swapping back and forth due to some graphics driver instability, but that’s because I got a 9070XT at launch and it took a bit for the Linux drivers to get to where they needed to be. That’s pretty much sorted now though, and I can’t remember the last time I booted into Windows.

Guess who just gained a 1TB drive to install more games?

I might use mine to try other distros. Bazzite has been great so far, but I’m not sure I’m sold on immutability and I might try a non-Fedora based distro.

Currently using Bazzite. Wanted something rolling release but I didn’t want to do extensive tinkering, and Bazzite ticked both boxes. Other distros I tried (PopOS, LMDE) struggled with my monitor layout. Main monitor is high refresh rate and VRR capable, secondary monitor is 60hz, not VRR capable, and it’s in portrait orientation. That combination is very not ideal for some window managers, as I discovered the hard way. I’m sure I could have fought through that on other distros, but it all worked out of the box with Bazzite.

Debian Testing is unstable?

Naw, Debian Unstable is unstable. /s

Jokes aside, I don’t think I’d use Debian as a daily driver for desktop Linux, and I really like Debian. Now, for a server? Debian all day erry day. But as soon as a GUI is needed, I’m gonna look to another distro. For context though, that’s mainly because my daily driver needs to be gaming capable, and I have a very recent GPU. Debian 13 has Mesa 25.0, but 25.1 and 25.2 have fixes that keep some of the games I play from crapping out.

I must have missed that negative sentiment entirely. I played all three and had no complaints. Did some searching, and apparently a lot of the gripes were related to levels being cut down in size / broken down into pieces to allow for a console release (strict memory requirements). Also I think they changed engines for the 3rd game, or at least a lot of people complain that movement and controls were worse in DS. I guess ignorance is bliss, cause I enjoyed them all.

Do you mean Thief: Deadly Shadows? That was the 3rd game in the series, and from what I understand it was pretty well received. The orphanage level alone is so highly regarded that it has its own Wikipedia page.

Now the 2014 reboot, just titled Thief, that was so poorly received the it basically killed the series. It might have been a decent game, but it was not a good Thief game.

Not the person you replied to, but I’m in agreement with them. I did tech hiring for some years for junior roles, and it was quite common to see applicants with a complete alphabet soup of certifications. More often than not, these cert-heavy applicants would show a complete lack of ability to apply that knowledge. For example they might have a network cert of some kind, yet were unable to competently answer a basic hypothetical like “what steps would you take to diagnose a network connection issue?” I suspect a lot of these applicants crammed for their many certifications, memorized known answers to typical questions, but never actually made any effort to put the knowledge to work. There’s nothing inherently wrong with certifications, but from past experience I’m always wary when I see a CV that’s heavy on certs but light on experience (which could be work experience or school or personal projects).

I also unplugged the psu for a while. It makes a slight buzzy noise after powering the computer, but I do not know if this is normal.

I’d recommend starting with the PSU. A buzzing noise is not a good sign. This article has details on how you can test your PSU: https://www.howtogeek.com/172933/how-can-i-test-my-computers-power-supply/

You can perform a basic test with just a paper clip or a bit of 16 or 18 gauge wire.

It sounds like the PSU is giving some power, given that the keyboard lights up. The issue could be isolated to one or more rails, e.g. it’s not delivering anything / enough on the 12V or 3.3V rail. I’m guessing 5V is OK since that’s USB voltage and your USB keyboard gets power. You’d need a multimeter to check individual power pins on the PSU connector.

Edit: if you have access to a second PC, you can swap PSUs between them. If the problem follows the PSU then that’s the faulty component. If the problem stays with the original PC then it’s likely motherboard, CPU or RAM.

If you can determine that the PSU is OK then the next step is to try booting with the bare minimum amount of hardware. That’s motherboard, CPU and one stick of RAM. If that won’t boot then you try with a different RAM. If it still won’t boot then the issue is motherboard or CPU. Before you replace either of those expensive components, try replacing the cheap CMOS battery as another poster recommended.

After thoroughly shuffling, the exact order of the deck is one of 52! (52 factorial, or 52 * 51 * 50 * … * 2 * 1) possible combinations. That is such a large number that it’s possible, even likely, that the exact ordering of your deck has never existed before and will never exist again.

Yeah, I don’t get it either. What I’ve seen doesn’t look anywhere close to an 8+ out of ten rating. Will be interesting to see the player ratings on this one…

I don’t dislike that art style in general, but to my mind it seems like a poor fit for a Dragon Age game. I guess they’re pivotinf strongly away from the series dark and gritty roots, which is unfortunate because I think that was one of its strong points.

Watching Skill Up’s review now, and oof. That art style… that writing. Don’t know who they made this game for, but it’s definitely not me.

Oh I’m streets ahead, I never took him at his word in the first place.

OpenAI on that enshittification speedrun any% no-glitch!

Honestly though, they’re skipping right past the “be good to users to get them to lock in” step. They can’t even use the platform capitalism playbook because it costs too much to run AI platforms. Shit is egregiously expensive and doesn’t deliver sufficient return to justify the cost. At this point I’m ~80% certain that AI is going to be a dead tech fad by the end of this decade because the economics just don’t work now that the free money era has ended.

It’s likely CentOS 7.9, which was released in Nov. 2020 and shipped with kernel version 3.10.0-1160. It’s not completely ridiculous for a one year old POS systems to have a four year old OS. Design for those systems probably started a few years ago, when CentOS 7.9 was relatively recent. For an embedded system the bias would have been toward an established and mature OS, and CentOS 8.x was likely considered “too new” at the time they were speccing these systems. Remotely upgrading between major releases would not be advisable in an embedded system. The RHEL/CentOS in-place upgrade story is… not great. There was zero support for in-place upgrade until RHEL/CentOS 7, and it’s still considered “at your own risk” (source).

Anything that pushes the CPUs significantly can cause instability in affected parts. I think there are at least two separate issues Intel is facing:

• Voltage irregularities causing instability. These could potentially be fixed by the microcode update Intel will be shipping in mid-August.
• Oxidation of CPU vias. This issue cannot be fixed by any update, any affected part has corrosion inside the CPU die and only replacement would resolve the issue.

Intel’s messaging around this problem has been very slanted towards talking as little as possible about the oxidation issue. Their initial Intel community post was very carefully worded to make it sound like voltage irregularity was the root cause, but careful reading of their statement reveals that it could be interpreted as only saying that instability is a root cause. They buried the admission that there is an oxidation issue in a Reddit comment, of all things. All they’ve said about oxidation is that the issue was resolved at the chip fab some time in 2023, and they’ve claimed it only affected 13th gen parts. There’s no word on which parts number, date ranges, processor code ranges etc. are affected. It seems pretty clear that they wanted the press talking about the microcode update and not the chips that will have the be RMA’d.

I’m sure there would be a way to do this with Debian, but I have to confess I don’t know it. I have successfully done this in the past with Clover Bootloader. You have to enable an NVMe driver, but once that’s done you should see an option to boot from your NVMe device. After you’ve booted from it once, Clover should remember and boot from that device automatically going forward. I used this method for years in a home theatre PC with an old motherboard and an NVMe drive on a PCIe adapter.

Elon broke the seal on firing huge swaths of a tech workforce to make your numbers look better.

Don’t give him too much credit, it’s hardly the first time the tech sector has gone through this cycle. Elon had to do it because he massively overpaid for Twitter. The fact that his layoffs came at the front of this wave is probably just coincidence.

Containourboros!

If you have multiple sticks, you can remove a bad one until you can replace it. Many memory modules have a lifetime warranty so you can often get them replaced by the manufacturer. I don’t think there’s a scenario where the system will stay stable with a bad stick installed.