GolfNovemberUniform

Recently I asked about a new PC build. I got helpful responses about the topic but also a suggestion of just upgrading my GPU to a 3080 (from 3050). I looked deeper into it and it looks like I can do it easily even right now. Then I saw a 3080 FE for sale and I've always been a fan of how they look so now I want one.

However I also discovered that my CPU (i5-11400F) will be a severe bottleneck in that configuration. I don't really mind decreased GPU utilization and I'm pretty sure my CPU cooler will keep up just fine (tested in benchmarks and UE5) but will it give me any serious issues such as freezes or full on crashes? My resolution is 1080p btw (with the monitor itself actually being 768p but I increase resolution in games beyond that for better quality) but I might as well upgrade it to a 1440p one soon if necessary and use it for the new build when I undoubtedly waste my money on it.

I'm a decently happy owner of a system with an i5-11400F and an RTX 3050. It just barely works for my needs (1080p 60-90 FPS ultra) but next year there will be some new games I'd like to play such as GTA 6 and FH6. With the current trends it's obvious my current system won't handle that on settings higher than low. So I'm thinking of getting a new PC.

For now I'm thinking something like a Ryzen 7 and an RTX 5070 Ti should work. That would be around 2.5-3k USD in my area depending on the components. Also I'd like a large monitor so I'll have to upgrade to a 1440p one which will increase the hardware requirements too.

AMD cards are quite expensive here apparently (9070 XT is significantly more expensive than 5070 lol) and I'm a massive fan of RT so those are not an option (I can remove the RT requirements if there's no way to use it with decent settings at no less than 60 FPS). Also NVidia 40 series is not good value here like at all.

Another interesting option is RTX 5080. It's still within my budget of around 3k but I'm very afraid of the connector melting issues. After all I can't build a PC myself (not an option at all) so a special well known company will handle it instead and nobody knows what connectors they use (I can ask as they're pretty open about this stuff but still). I've already worked with the company btw and it's not shady so that should be fine as long as I don't forget to edit a decent PSU in the specs instead of their common firework ones.

However with my limited knowledge I can't predict how far technology will go in the short term. We already saw that the latest gen showed pretty much no improvement over the previous one. So is it even worth waiting for the next year's tech or will it just be the same but with more AI frame gen slop and zeros in the price tag strapped to it? And will games get so much more demanding in just a year or two that trying to target ultra is already a bad idea?

What makes me even more worried is the slightly unstable financial situation in my country. It's possible that tech will get significantly more expensive here soon.

Yea this post is very long so I guess say gingerbread if you read it till the end lol.

I just updated my Fennec (F-Droid build of Firefox with some deblobbing and changes) and half of my settings got reset, with the most interesting one being my search engine being changed back to Google. Is it just a bug in their building script or is it actually something more shady?

I suggest just reading the full article and making your own conclusions but I personally deleted the game for now. I need to see how far these measures will actually go and will they want to like take my DNS history or something.

I love ray tracing and path tracing when they're done right. Ik fully ray traced scenes are hardly playable even on high end cards without upscaling but like if one has a powerful enough card, why not utilize its potential? Yet most people don't seem to care about RT.

When it comes to upscaling though, I hate it, and I'm not even talking about frame gen. It makes things look blurry and causes annoying artifacts. I think playing on lowest settings with clear textures is more enjoyable long term than maxed out in 4k with a consistently blurry image. Also this new technology makes devs care less about optimization (which will backfire btw as we're approaching the physical limit of transistor size).

I believe it's one of the first apps to do it. It's not too responsive on my device now (newer software do be meaninglessly heavier) but M3E is stupid and cool so all apps should be M3E.

Free and open-source software is now going strong with extremely popular and even industry standard products. However with fame always comes abuse which unfortunately affected FOSS as well.

In recent times we saw separate political decisions by big FOSS companies/teams such as the Linux kernel development team prohibiting citizens of Russia to contribute to the project, as well as general rise of political (specifically aggressive left and ultraleft leaning) drama and discussions in the space.

This makes me believe that the situation is only going to get worse. I can't be sure if projects will start implementing restrictions on their use (therefore switching to a model that is not considered free and open-source) but it's clear that contributions will likely and increasingly continue to be affected. This may cause all kinds of issues, up to addition of malicious code that starts on certain (and obviously unreasonable) triggers.

A complete death of the free and open-source model is practically impossible. There will always be people making their code truly free (as in freedom), at least for a limited time. Though when it comes to big players, their free future is at a significant risk.

"But I can always fork it!" - sure you can and your project might even gain solid ground but the political issues will remain, both for you and your contributors.

"Then how do I fix it?" - it's simple - keep unrelated politics away from your and others' projects and don't ban contributors who have political activity of any kind outside your projects, even if you disagree with them. Also create a separate account on social media for all politics-related discussions. Do not use your developer account or especially your project's official account.

Unfortunately there's still no information on the matter. Neither Tobias nor Brodie know pretty much anything.

However I would say the reason for the ban has to be illegitimate if the truth remains hidden even after the negative public reaction. From my knowledge on the FOSS development world and community, the chance of the reason being political is fairly high as the FOSS community stupidly doesn't respect anyone right leaning. The "we won't let you change our system" reason is also possible though.

I've always been a hater of the Anaconda installer. It's not necessarily hard but everything was in wrong places and UX was nonexistent (just try to remember the tile view of steps). Now that I've heard a lot about the new one, I had to try it.

So I downloaded the latest stable Fedora 42 GNOME edition image and booted it off an approximately 15 years old flash drive.

The first impression was "bruh no rounded corners. Imagine using web UI" but then it got better. There's no stupid tile view and the only real complaint is in my case the buttons on the bottom were in a weird spot between the left side and the center (just move them to the right please).

However I'm strict so I also checked the partition manager thing and I actually liked it. I haven't tried doing actual work with it though (as I didn't plan to install anything) so there might be issues there that I didn't notice.

Overall it's a terrific improvement but you do a simple installer so just switch to the GNOME's one duh.

I'm genuinely curious. Other changes are just following modern (and stupid) trends so nothing weird with that. This one though just makes the maximize, minimize and close buttons look smaller than others (new tab in Console etc) which imo creates inconsistency. Also it may not apply to all display resolutions but it does on mine.

As a tech support channel member I sometimes see people not being able to install or repair a desktop OS because of inability to get another PC to create a bootable medium on. I guess such an app should help them because USB-A to USB-C adapters are much cheaper than computers. The only downside (or probably a feature) is it can't flash official Windows ISOs yet.