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The 7950X3D or 9800X3D are both faster (besides the 7800X3D you mentioned).

GPU-wise this is obvious the best AMD has to offer, but an RTX 4090 is obviously faster still. With the typical caveats for NVIDIA on Linux.

I’d rather have properly working accessories that connect using Thread (not Wi-Fi) to one another and work without requiring a separate app. Currently almost every manufacturer requires their own proprietary bridge or they want to connect directly to Wi-Fi.

Give me a button/switch, climate sensors (Eve Room comes to mind as it has Thread but it’s a PitA in some other ways), thermostats that can adjust based on an external climate sensor, lightbulbs etc.

Apple TVs and HomePods already work fine as a “Home hub”, I don’t need a separate, central display.

Does the CLI still work? If so, you could download and play all the Windows 7 compatible, DRM-free games in your library just fine. Alternatively, if you already had these games installed, they’ll work fine without launching Steam first.

The feature itself is great. It records the last two hours by default and lets you easily create clips from that. The editor is right there in the Steam overlay, it’s pretty great.

I only used it under Linux, and that’s where I’d say it is still very much a beta experience. I have an AMD Radeon 7800 XT. Most of the time, Steam picks up on its hardware acceleration - sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it falls back to CPU encoding (obviously) which occupies around 3-4 cores on my 7950X3D to record 3440x1440 at the highest quality setting. GPU encodes are H.264 even though the GPU is perfectly capable of encoding AV1. Performance impact ranges from almost zero to as much as 30%, which seems a bit excessive. On some games that have a splash screen (Sea of Thieves for example), all it will record is said splash screen, even when it’s not shown anymore: you get gameplay sounds, but the video is just a static image with mouse cursor artifacts. It didn’t record sound from one of the microphones I tried. After swapping it out for a different one, my voice is being recorded. At least one session the shortcut for saving a clip just resulted in an error sound instead of a clip being saved.

So it’s a bit disappointing so far. Yeah, Linux shenanigans and relatively small user base, but Valve out of all companies should treat Linux as a first-class platform. Yes, they do a lot for Linux, with Proton and whatnot. But ironically Steam itself is only in an “okay, it kind of works” state. No official packages for anything but apt-based distributions and Wayland (scaling) support is meh at best.

It did seem to work a lot better on the Steam Deck with very little performance impact in my short testing, so there’s that.

Let me guess without reading: kernel-level anti-cheat?

Include adding kernel level anti cheat to that. This should just give us an option to get a full refund.

That’s mostly down to Teams though (being the bloated web app that it is), and not the underlying operating system.

I also experienced less “hiccups” since switching to Linux with KDE but I’d like to know on what combination of hardware and Windows you experienced anywhere close to an average of 1s response time to “any input”.

iFixit rates it “Difficult” for the Steam Deck OLED and says the time required is 2-3 hours:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Steam+Deck+OLED+Battery+Replacement/168676

This is a slight improvement from the original Deck’s estimated 2-4 hours:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Steam+Deck+Battery+Replacement/149070

It requires removing quite a few parts but the most annoying part is getting rid of the adhesive. It doesn’t have easy-to-access pull tabs or whatever.

They can certainly improve this. Either add pull tabs to the adhesive strips, or better yet use the mechanism from the iPhone 16 where you apply voltage to the adhesive to make dissolve/no longer stick. Or even better make it a screw-in battery without any glue whatsoever. Then update the routing of several cables so they aren’t in the way of removing the battery.

I expected something more shocking when I read “working with Russia”.

Kagi uses multiple search backends, and of course it needs to forward search terms to these backends. These backends probably can’t trace the searches back to the individual Kagi user though, but Yandex could still analyze search trends for example.

What’s worse is that - unless they use Yandex’ API for free - customers indirectly (and likely unknowingly) support a Russian company with their paid Kagi subscription.

Kagi should at the very least release a statement about this claim.

Understandable.

What I will say though is that I personally wouldn’t mind regular spec bumps at all. The Deck isn’t exactly a cheap device and to get the “latest and greatest” for your “investment” at any given point of purchase would help longevity.

But as I said, in this case it makes a lot of sense (for Valve). SteamOS is still under heavy development, even more basic stuff such as the update mechanism and also power management is something they’re still working to improve.

They also use a custom APU designed in collaboration with AMD, and these designs cost a lot of money. It’s not just a rebranded 7840U like the Z1 Extreme for example. This custom design makes a lot of sense in terms of focusing on gaming performance and efficiency, and it clearly shows in (very) power limited scenarios.

Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a new Steam Deck based on Zen 5 and RDNA 4 with another custom designed APU sometime in 2025 or early 2026. Zen 2 is really starting to show its age and Zen 5 is a solid leap even over Zen 4 (not talking about desktop CPUs here, but Ryzen AI 300). RDNA 4 will likely improve quite a bit over RDNA 3(.5) (with the current Deck having RDNA 2) and include some type of hardware-accelerated machine learning upscaling with FSR4, which could make a lot of sense on the Deck as long as enough games support it.

I’d also like to see a few other improvements. The OLED display is great in many aspects, but VRR would be a great feature to have. Internally I’d like to see an easier way to swap the battery, maybe using similar tech to what Apple does with the iPhone 16’s battery. Currently, swapping the battery is one of the most complex repairs on the Deck, but it’ll also be the most common a few years down the line when all these batteries really start to show their age.

I think we’ll get at least one more x86 Steam Deck generation before it moves to ARM (if it moves to ARM at all).

The Snapdragon X isn’t anything to write home about when it comes to efficiency under load, with the newest CPUs (with iGPUs) from AMD and Intel keeping up or maybe even exceeding it.

Bitwarden keeps working just fine.

Meaning up to 28 GB for the Air as well?

Sorry, I don’t know of a guide for other distributions.

This being displayed as “Unknown” is likely just a bug or an app you (very) recently uninstalled. And you probably opened the camera app by accidentally swiping right to left on the lock screen. Even just a slight swipe will launch the app so it’s ready when you’re done swiping.

And I’m not even sure what you’re talking about regarding your QR code.

Android is not de facto superior to iOS, nor is the opposite the case.

If you’re really that paranoid, even GrapheneOS on a Pixel shouldn’t calm you down because it also requires proprietary firmware by Google (and possibly other vendors) to run on these proprietary devices. In this case my advice would be to stop using smartphones altogether and rely on open source computers (couple of RISC-V options out there I think) for your computing needs.

I was surprised until I saw the spec sheet. The A17 Pro in the iPad mini has a 5-core GPU as opposed to the 6-core GPU the iPhone 15 Pro has with the chip.

So the iPad mini features a binned version of the A17 Pro chip, and Apple likely has quite a few of them piled up as they only ever sold fully functional A17 Pro chips so far. The N3B process didn’t have the best of yields to chips with partial defects would’ve likely been quite common.

Combine that with the likely lower volume sales of the mini compared to larger iPads (and obviously iPhones) and Apple can probably sell the mini for a couple of years without needing to produce new A17 Pro chips.

So it actually makes a lot of sense. Makes me wonder what they’ll put in the next regular iPad though.

Not really, just some wording…?

It’s kind of in the word distribution, no? Distros package and … distribute software.

Larger distros usually do a quite a bit of kernel work as well, and they often include bugfixes or other changes in their kernel that isn’t in mainline or stable. Enterprise-grade distributions often backport hardware support from newer kernels into their older kernels. But even distros with close-to-latest kernels like Tumbleweed or Fedora do this to a certain extent. This isn’t limited to the kernel and often extends to many other packages.

They also do a lot of (automated) testing, just look at openQA for example. That’s a big part of the reason why Tumbleweed (relatively) rarely breaks. If all they did was collect an up-to-date version of every package they want to ship, it’d probably be permanently broken.

Also, saying they “just” update the desktop environment doesn’t do it justice. DEs like KDE and GNOME are a lot more than just something that draws application windows on your screen. They come with userspace applications and frameworks. They introduce features like vastly improved HDR support (KDE 6.2, usually along with updates to Wayland etc.).

Some of the rolling (Tumbleweed) or more regular (Fedora) releases also push for more technical changes. Fedora dropped X11 by default on their KDE spin with v40, and will likely drop X11 with their default GNOME distro as well, now that GNOME no longer requires it even when running Wayland. Tumbleweed is actively pushing for great systemd-boot support, and while it’s still experimental it’s already in a decent state (not ready for prime time yet though).

Then, distros also integrate packages to work together. A good example of this is the built-in enabled-by-default snapshot system of Tumbleweed (you might’ve figured out that I’m a Tumbleweed user by now): it uses snapper to create btrfs snapshots on every zypper (package manager) system update, and not only can you rollback a running system, you can boot older snapshots directly from the grub2 or systemd-boot bootloader. You can replicate this on pretty much any distro (btrfs support is in the kernel, snapper is made by an openSUSE member but available for other distros etc.), but it’s all integrated and ready to go out of the box. You don’t have to configure your package manager to automatically create snapshots with snapper, the btrfs subvolume layout is already setup for you in a way that makes sense, you don’t have to think about how you want to add these snapshots to your bootloader, etc.

So distros or their authors do a lot and their releases can be exciting in a way, but maybe not all of that excitement is directly user-facing.