This is about Linux kernel driver maintainership… It’s all open source.

I don’t have experience with MSI recently, but I’d be really surprised if you couldn’t flash a new BIOS off the system partition or FAT32 USB. You may not be able to update from Linux directly, but almost all motherboards I’ve seen support doing it from the BIOS interface.

Yes. It has basically the same issue that any compatibility layer is going to have. It will either faithfully reproduce X11 so well it will bring all of the nonsense Wayland was meant to do a way with (everything not directly related to displaying graphics, like font and geometry rendering from the '80s, network transparency, insecure event handling) OR it will attempt to get a reasonable subset working for modern X apps and it won’t be compatible with dusty old binaries and X forwarding etc.

Right now it looks like a shim for Xwayland so it’s the first one, but as it matures we’ll see.

Intel has been struggling overall, and lately has been letting some of its Linux engineers go. Nothing absolutely fundamental has been affected yet (AFAICT) but I guess Clear Linux didn’t make the cut.

I agree. I have become more amenable to things like Flatpak or Podman/Docker to keep the base system from being cluttered up with weird dependencies, but for the most part it doesn’t seem like there’s a huge upside to going full atomic if you’re already comfortable.

GNOME 3 introduced the current shell paradigm where you don’t really have a start menu but a variety of searches, integrated indicators, per-app desktops with a dock etc.

Before, it was far more conventional experience like Plasma/Windows/Cinnamon are now. GNOME 2 was forked to be the MATE desktop if you want to check it out.

Basically just start with what you’re aiming to enable and work backwards (as you’ve started to do). With judicious use of grep find out where that symbol is defined. If it’s in arch configs for other arches but not your own, it’s probably that.

There may be better tools out there to do this, but in my experience just sleuthing it out a bit will answer your question. The Kconfig system can be complex, but the files are pretty readable.

It’s possible that it’s not supported on your arch.

The only thing Samba is really great for is interop with Windows. If that’s not an issue, Dolphin can browse SFTP directly by adding it as a network share (you may need to setup a password-less key pair to avoid having to login). SSHFS is a similar option and works even if the client is totally naive (it just looks like any other mounted FS).

Right. GCC -f optimizations are basically like “how hard are we going to try to be clever” and are, I believe, orthogonal to the actual instructions used. Machine dependent args start with -m, like -march or -mavx etc.

For XP, the machine KVM presents as may be too new, but that isn’t an issue with non-virtualized QEMU.

TIOBE is weighted toward languages that have existed for a long time by virtue of counting lines written / skilled engineers etc. but the speed at which Rust is climbing that list is a better indicator. Also, a lot of the languages above it wouldn’t be appropriate for anything like a DE.

But you’re right, it’s hyped, I just think the hype is real.

This is a weird take. Rust is very popular and is the current heir apparent to C for systems level stuff. It’s a great choice to start a new DE/toolkit.

As for the rest, you’re right the end user doesn’t care about the language their graphical app is in, but the developers fielding their bug reports and making fixes/features sure do.

John Carmack, author of the Doom engine, is a long time Linux user and for a while the policy was to open source the idTech engines once they had moved on.

However, Doom was hugely popular on its own before this, and was actually more pivotal for making Windows a gaming platform (over DOS).

The reason it runs everywhere is a combination of it’s huge popularity, it’s (now) open source and it’s generally low system requirements.

It does that everywhere, even on non .deb distros.

One thing I’d like to suggest is get most of their forward facing apps as Flatpak and let them install software that way instead of using the system package manager (even if it has a GUI). This jibes with others suggesting an immutable base system.

Obviously this may be more of a concern for older kids, but my kid started with Linux and it did fine… Right up until Discord started breaking because it was too old and they didn’t want to tangle with the terminal. Same thing when Minecraft started updating Java versions. Discord and Prismlauncher from Flatpak (along with Proton and Steam now) would have kept them happier with Linux.

As for internet, routers come with parental controls these days too, which have the added advantage of being able to cover phones (at least while not on mobile data). Setting the Internet to be unavailable for certain devices after a certain time on school nights may be a more straightforward route than DE tools.

This isn’t a benchmark of those systems, it’s showing that the code didn’t regress on either hardware set with some anecdotal data. It makes sense they’re not like for like.

I used (u)xterm for like 20 years before discovering that Konsole is solid and beautiful. My whole tiling setup is backed up with KDE apps now.

I’m also glad to see Wayland tools maturing. The hand wringing about lack of X forwarding was always FUD and a nonsense reason to cling to the fiction that X works well over a socket and justify all the shitty compromises X made to remain compatible with it.

The Windows scheduler is so stupid chip manufacturers manipulate the BIOS/ACPI tables to force it to make better decisions (particularly with SMT) rather than wait on MS to fix it.

Linux just shrugs, figures out the thread topology anyway and makes the right decisions regardless.