They always have used hardware closely related to existing workstation or PC hardware, but the difference is now they try so much less hard to hide it, through crossplay, lack of platform exclusives, and just less trying to innovate on how the games are played. Part of it is that game inputs have largely been standardized, part of it is that the more similar to a bog standard PC the console is, the easier it is for developers to port their existing games, and part of it might just be that platforms aren’t feeling pushed to innovate as much

It’s absolutely incredible how big the gaming industry is now. Where 20 years ago it was extremely male, and mostly limited to 20-30 year olds now it’s everyone! Children and retirees, men and women and everything inbetween or further out to the fringes! And I’m not just talking phone games (which is a gigantic market on its own) at the MSP I work at we’ve had retired folks bring in gaming computers for service or just drop off older gaming computers for recycling

The funniest part is that the best selling video game of all time (Minecraft) currently has an MSRP of less than $30, which technically gets you 2 games because Microsoft/Mojang maintain 2 completely separate codebases for Minecraft (Java edition and bedrock edition) and has to design, program, test and debug everything twice, once for each codebase

I also saw one analysis that suggested the increased cost of buying could decrease trade and therefore shrink the economies the US usually buys from, depressing the shrunken economies dollar values and effectively cancelling out the cost of the tarrif

We have a switch 1 and the game price has been the driving factor preventing us from investing more in the platform. The games are too expensive, go on sale too infrequently and not for low enough prices. Just not the ecosystem for my family right now

This is where I’m at too. If I go crazy and start installing stuff natively to experiment I end up with extra stuff auto configured that’s no longer needed and random problems I’m too lazy to figure out how to solve. Flatpak doesn’t do that and I don’t have to worry about that. I can install random stuff to play with and uninstall it cleanly. Some packages need more system access than flatpak gives natively and with those I’ll make the decision of if I want to set it up and tear it down manually or not.

Storage is cheap, my time not so much.

If you are administrating systems it’s extremely useful to know how to work with stuff by command line, both for remote administration via SSH or Ps-session and for rapid troubleshooting/settings changes and of course for emergency recovery when everything is super broken.

Honestly I personally use a mix of both GUI, CLI and hosted admin portals (the 11 ton gorilla in the room everyone arguing over GUI vs CLI forgets about) and will shift between tools depending on what is best for the given job.

Of course if you’re just an owner-operator, see Joe Average in Anytown America with his household laptop, the GUI tools are the only thing you’ll want to use and even that might get overwhelming or scary, but Joe Average is more often than not these days going to not even own a computer and instead just use their phone. That’s the other thing many folks in these threads forget, is the home computer is a market on life support. The average “not a computer person” does not own a computer at all, they use their smartphone for literally everything

Winget install [programname]

winget search [programname]

winget upgrade --all --silent

Oh look, its also super easy in Windowsland!

Btop will also show disc and network utilization while running much lighter than glances. Personally I keep both btop and htop installed on all of my machines because I feel like htop is better for quickly killing a processes when needed

Honestly, if it’s important enough to RAID, it’s important enough to do right and run full fat ZFS.

You could also go the mdadm route with individual disks but ZFS pools are so battle-tested that whatever unholy edgecase you manage to create will almost certainly be something someone has encountered before, and it’s probably well documented somewhere how to recover from

That’s one of the features Google should have stolen from Cyanogen/LineageOS long ago which had permissions differentiated between precise location and approximate

There’s a double-i in “settings” in the documentation screenshot

I certainly agree, but you can’t replace your entire software, server and groupware stack in a day. Start by transitioning the easiest stuff off of Microsoft, tie it into your existing stack then slowly transition away. Shutting off the last domain controller is a lot easier when you only have a handful of Windows workstations that rely on it than when you have 5000 of them

You seem to be missing the point. All software has a point where it reaches end of support. The problem is Windows 11 has significantly increased the system requirements so that only computers produced in the last 7 years or so are “compatible” and lots of perfectly workable but slightly older machines are now destined for the ewaste burn pit purely because of that decision

And you can just install Edge if you really want to. It’s on flathub

Ehhh it’s not as bad as it used to be. Depending on the distro you might have some finagling to install it to begin with but otherwise their drivers tend to be fine.

It is however much nicer when you can just boot up a bog standard kernel and not have to worry about installing third party drivers, but it’s not the end of the world if you do have to toss some third party drivers in there

I have a bad professional habit of treating windows machines like Linux, abusing PS Sessions like its SSH, downloading everything via winget, and generally trying to do as much of my admin work without popping open RDP as I can. Sometimes that works super well, and sometimes it throws me for a loop. But most importantly, it opens certain doors that remain shut for folks who insist on always RDPing in and using the GUI

Ubuntu supports AD authentication out of the box, so for users whose duties primarily occur in a web browser that rapidly becomes a vary viable option

Yeah there’s a reason I didn’t even call that one out and just called it a bait. It’s in flathub, frequently featured in flathub, and in the same article they spoke with a nonprofit that stated they preload older computers with Linux Mint now, which has a graphical software center that covers both Flathub and the Ubuntu repos

I don’t know about the Mac experience specifically but Krita was incredibly intuitive as someone who hasn’t touched creative software in about 15 years. I downloaded it a couple of weeks ago, doodled a little, then remembered I suck at digital drawing and closed without saving