Why does it require a phone number to use?!

I do, I feel like we desperately need some more competition/options in the browser engine space.

I basically have one primary criteria in choosing operating systems: I want the one that gets the least in my way doing the things I want to do (whether that’s something productive or entertainment). I don’t care that I’m using Linux, it just happens to be Linux (or a Linux distro) that’s currently better at getting out of my way than Windows (or macOS, or any other OS).

I’ve been evaluating Linux on my desktop like once per year maybe, and until recently Windows always won in terms of getting out of my way. I was using Windows 10 LTSC IoT before (because guess what: it got in my way less than regular Windows 10/11) and it was pretty good honestly, but what finally tipped the scales over for me was that Microsoft decided to let an update add unwanted entries into my start menu and re-enable the stupid search field in the task bar.

So I re-evaluated different Linux distributions last year, eventually landed on Fedora and together with swapping my Nvidia RTX 3080 for a Radeon 7800 XT for better Linux compatibility (especially with Wayland) and also Valve’s Proton getting better and better, I started using a Linux distro full-time on my desktop January 1st, 2024.

Stuck with Fedora for a few months and landed at openSUSE Tumbleweed (after some annoyances regarding SELinux and other things iirc with the Fedora 40 update). Tumbleweed or rather the fact that it’s bleeding edge had its fair share of issues in the last days (with some big releases like Mesa 24.1, Plasma 6.1 and some other packages being relatively buggy). This made me think about using a more stable distro like Debian or openSUSE Leap (I know there’s also Slowroll, but some issues Tumbleweed has also roll over to it), but then again I pretty much always have fairly recent hardware in my PC, which usually demands somewhat recent kernels and other packages.

If I find that Windows gets less in my way tomorrow than what I’m currently using, I’ll consider switching to Windows. Or macOS. Or Debian. Or FreeBSD. Etc.

If you count different versions of Ubuntu separately, then yes.

Hahaha that got me! I legit thought this could’ve been a PR stunt that actually may have happened until I read the last sentence … after which I thought it was even more likely to have happened.

It’s actually 10 years old when taking the original Wii U version of Mario Kart 8 into account.

One might even go as far as saying it’s morally not okay to pay for a Nintendo game because you are in a way financing their lawyers.

But consider that anything not honoring your time and attention is disrespecting you.

This is why I use ad blockers, switched to Linux and why I’m always quick to delete apps that continuously nag me to do something.

rclone supports Proton Drive, no need to run a Windows VM for that.

Sounds feasible.

Clothing (or other things, clothing was just an example) does get you excluded from a group. The only reason a bully would want to “include” the bullied person in their group is so they can bully them more.

I agree that they could open up iMessage to competitors with relative ease and that this would be a good move. Not because it would seriously stop bullying, but because it would make it a little bit easier to find a common messenger to use (we don’t really have that problem in my home country, as most people use WhatsApp, which is multi platform).

What I’d hate is if Apple removed all indicators that what I’m sending or what I already sent is an SMS/RCS message instead of an iMessage. It shows me what features work for that particular conversation, and if I’m roaming in a region where sending SMS is not free, I want to know when I’m about to send one.

I doubt the bullying would be any different if it was a beautiful red (or whatever is considered a pretty chat bubble) instead.

And even if it was a blue bubble, the bullies would find another reason to bully someone.

I get the peer pressure part and sure Apple might be exploiting that in America, but in the past it was clothing brands or whatever it is now. Making the bubbles the same color (or even bringing iMessage over to Android completely) would get rid of a single symptom, not of the root cause.

Funny how many people wanted RCS on iOS in order to be compatible with Android, while large parts of Google’s implementation of RCS in Android is proprietary as well.

I do, and I couldn’t care less. I think a visual indicator that tells me “hey, this is an iMessage” or “hey, this is an SMS/RCS message” is a very good thing to have.

Porting games to a different architecture is normally quite a bit more involved than just recompiling them, especially when architecture-agnostic code wasn’t a design goal of the original game code. No, Valve couldn’t release all their games natively running on ARM tomorrow, the process would take more time.

But even if Valve were to recompile all their games for ARM, many other studios wouldn’t just because a few gaming handhelds would benefit from it. The market share of these devices wouldn’t be big enough to justify the cost. Very few of the games that run on Steam Deck are actually native Linux versions, studios just rarely bother porting their games over.

I’m not saying ARM chips can’t be faster or otherwise better (more efficient) at running games, but it just doesn’t make sense to release an ARM-based handheld intended for “PC” gaming in the current landscape of games.

Apple can comparatively easily force an architecture transition because they control fhe software and hardware. If Apple decides to only sell RISC-V based Macs tomorrow and abandon ARM, developers for the platform would have to release RISC-V builds of their software because at some point nobody could run their software natively anymore because current Macs would be replaced by RISC-V Macs as time passed by. Valve does not control the full hard- and software stack of the PC market so they’d have a very hard time to try and force such a move. If Valve released an ARM-based gaming handheld, other manufacturers would still continue offering x86-based handhelds with newer and newer CPUs (new x86 hardware is still being developed for the foreseeable future) and instead of Valve forcing developers to port their games to native ARM, they’d probably lose market share to these other handhelds as people would naturally buy the device that runs current games best right now.

In a “perfect world” where all games would natively support ARM right now an ARM-based handheld for PC gaming could obviously work. That simply isn’t the world we live in right now though. Sure we could ramble on about “if this and that”, it’s just not the reality.

As you said yourself, it’s not the same thing. Proton can occasionally beat Windows because Vulkan might be more efficient doing certain things compared to DirectX (same with other APIs getting translated to other API calls). This is all way more abstract compared to CPU instruction sets.

If Qualcomm actually managed to somehow accurately (!) run x86 code faster on their ARM hardware compared to native x86 CPUs on the same process node and around the same release date, it would mean they are insanely far ahead (or, depending on how you look at it, Intel/AMD insanely far behind).

And as I said, any efficiency gains in idle won’t matter for gaming scenarios, as neither the CPU nor the GPU idle at any point during gameplay.

With all that being said: I think Qualcomm did a great job and ARM on laptops (outside of Apple) might finally be here to stay. But they won’t replace x86 laptops anytime soon, and it’ll take even longer to make a dent in the PC gaming market because DIY suddenly becomes very relevant. So I don’t think (“PC”) gaming handhelds should move to ARM anytime soon.

No, that’s not at all what I said. Translating between CPU architectures and translating API calls isn’t even close to the same thing.

I wouldn’t be so sure. I feel like many people would not buy another MacBook if it were to feel a lot slower after just a few years.

This feels like short term gains vs. long term reputation.

Yeah, it’s also not “just” if it’s one of what feels like hundreds of steps now to make the OS somewhat usable.

If both AMD/Intel and Qualcomm do a good job with their core design and the same process node is used, I don’t see how a translation layer can be any faster than a CPU natively supporting the architecture. Any efficiency advantages ARM supposedly has over x86 architecturally will vanish in such a scenario.

I actually think the efficiency of these new Snapdragon chips is a bit overhyped, especially under sustained load scenarios (like gaming). Efficiency cores won’t do much for gaming, and their iGPU doesn’t seem like anything special.

We need a lot more testing with proper test setups. Currently, reviewers mostly test these chips and compare them against other chips in completely different devices with a different thermal solution and at different levels of power draw (TDP won’t help you much as it basically never matches actual power draw). Keep in mind the Snapdragon X Elite can be configured for up to “80W TDP”.

Burst performance from a Cinebench run doesn’t tell the real story and comparing runtimes for watching YouTube videos on supposedly similar laptops doesn’t even come close to representing battery life in a gaming scenario.

Give it a few years/generations and then maybe, but currently I’m pretty sure the 7840U comfortably stomps the X Elite in gaming scenarios with both being configured to a similar level of actual power draw. And the 7840U/8840U is AMD’s outgoing generation, their new (horribly named) chips should improve performance/watt by quite a bit.