From the article, I believe that it’s Steam Deck parts, not Steam Controller 1 parts.

Which makes sense, because you can get a Steam Deck, but the Steam Controller 1 has been out of production for some years.

EDIT: Wikipedia says that production ended in 2019.

If you had the wedding photos in question professionally taken, it might be that the photographer, if they’re still around, might have copies. I don’t know whether they retain copies, but I suppose asking can’t hurt.

This place says up to a year:

https://www.wanderlustportraits.com/how-long-photographers-keep-photos/

Photographers typically keep photos of their clients for a minimum of 90 days and up to a full year as part of standard practice; however, if this is important to you, review the contract and ask your professional.

This guy says forever:

https://old.reddit.com/r/WeddingPhotography/comments/96ckow/how_long_do_you_hold_on_past_wedding_photos/

I keep ALL files on two 16tb drives drives. Those drives never get wiped and I will always keep two copies even when they fill up. One internal on sata for reference and one off site. When I first started shouting, I was cheap and deleted RAWs and just kept high res jpegs. I have clients coming back for albums and I am stuck re-editing the jpegs to match in the albums. Lesson learned. If you do want to consolidate, then keep the RAWs of the editor we jpegs and delete the unused. But that’s more hassle than the cost to store unused raws. You can also rely on cloud source but you never know if you’ll ever switch cloud servers or move onto another business on want to stop paying cloud fees. For the high volume photographers it becomes wise to invest in tape drives. HDD have lives of 10 years. So eventually all those old drives will need to be transferred to newer drives. Budget this into your bottom line

I was consolidating data from multiple old drives before a major move—drives I had to discard due to space and relocation constraints. The plan was simple: upload to OneDrive, then transfer to a new drive later.

I’m assuming that the reason that he didn’t just do the transfer to a new drive instead of to OneDrive (which seems like it’d be more-straightforward) is because the new drive was going to also be a system disk, not just hold his data.

I think that it would have been a good idea to get a second new drive and have done that transfer just so that there’s a backup. I mean, it doesn’t really sound like the user was planning to wind up with a backup of his data, or for that matter, that he had a backup to start with.

Maybe OneDrive locking the account was unexpected, but drives can fail or be inadvertently erased or whatever. If you’ve got thirty years of irreplaceable data that you really badly want to keep, I’d want to have more than one copy of it. The cost of a drive to store it is not large compared to the cost involved in producing said data.

The title is a bit click-baity.

Steam had a setting where it would only run Proton on games on which it had been verified to work. Some people would inadvertently flip this setting off. Now the setting is gone, so they can’t accidentally do this.

It really depends on how one is applyng mods. Bethesda does have their own mod site and in-game support for modding, and that’s pretty straightforward (and the only option on consoles). That will limit what mods are available.

I do kind of wish that there were one cross-platform open-source universal “game mod” program that could support multiple online services. Would like to have Wabbajack-like functionality (apply a whole set of curated, tested-together mods) as a base too, as that’d lower the bar.

Cannon Fodder - a UK classic, very arcadey but very fun and lighter than all these other “serious” games

It has that iconic theme music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASTLGt_9vbU

Yeah, I really liked JA2. The UI is pretty elderly today, though.

I haven’t been very impressed with some of the subsequent attempts to revive the series, though I still haven’t gotten around to playing Jagged Alliance 3 yet, and that has much better scores than some of the intervening releases, like Jagged Alliance: Back in Action. If you haven’t tried JA3 yet either, you might consider taking a look.

EDIT: Oh, wait, yes I did play it, because I remember the intro mission that they have screenshots of.

https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/1084160/ss_0edc29526ad201a59357234cd77a34a5ba507208.1920x1080.jpg

I don’t recall finishing the game, though. I should go back and see what my status in that game is. Thanks for making me think of it.

Well, unless someone makes an alternative, people are going to use it.

They do need to provide a lot of bandwidth, which isn’t free, though I wonder how viable it’d be for someone to create a Nexus-like Website using magnet URLs and BitTorrent as a backend.

Maybe too much of a technical bar to attract users.

GNU cat

You mean GNU cat?

Obligatory Marathon 2 theme music

I’m able to do so in Firefox Fennec 138.0.0.

It didn’t do it by default, but it looks like if you grant Camera permission (Settings:Apps:App Management:Fennec:Permissions), at least “Ask Every Time”, then when I choose an image to upload I use “Media Picker”, then the three dot menu, then Browse, then my file manager app, I can browse the filesystem.

If the Camera permission is set to “Don’t Allow”, then the three dot menu is not present.

I normally just use the Eternity client for lemmy, rather than Firefox Fennec, though.

Your browser still has a disk cache, which will write to the phone’s SSD.

You can view it via going to about:cache in your URL bar.

But it sounds like that’s not what you were referring to.

My firefox browser has become slow beyond imagination.

No problems here.

Moreover, it’s not fetching images for lemmy directly from my folders.

I don’t know what this means. You mean that you can’t browse through your images to upload something?

You mean that it’s not using its local disk cache for images? I guess that could make a browser slower, but that seems like odd phrasing if that’s what you’re saying…

It’d theoretically be possible to run a straight GNU/Linux tablet or laptop

“GNU/Linux” is the full way to say what sometimes gets shortened to “Linux” — a family of operating systems based on the Linux kernel and a lot of software from the GNU project. This explicitly distinguishes it from Android, which also used the Linux kernel.

The former is not, in 2025, typically used to run smartphones. The latter is the most-common smartphone operating system in the world. If you buy a smartphone that isn’t an Apple smartphone, it almost certainly runs Android.

with a 5G cell modem for data

5G is the current generation of cell phone radio protocols. Communicating directly via voice over this protocol is not something that I believe is available to GNU/Linux in 2025. However, it can send non-voice data.

, use SIP service

SIP is a protocol for running voice over a data connection to the Internet. If you have an Internet connection, you can use SIP. There are companies, SIP service providers, which will, for a fee, provide a phone number at which one may be called or call others from a computer that can make use of SIP.

and a GNU/Linux dialer,

A dialer is the piece of software that on a smartphone, a user would probably call something like “the phone app”.

and then run Waydroid for any specific Android apps that one has to run.

Waydroid is a piece of software to run Android apps on a GNU/Linux system.

Idle power usage is gonna be a lot higher than on a phone, though.

Phone hardware and software has had a lot of work put into optimizing it for very low power usage. A larger device, like a laptop or tablet, will probably also have a larger battery, but it will consume more power as well.

And a lot of Android apps are made with a touch interface

Smartphones, due to physical space constraints in one’s pocket, typically have an entire side be a touchscreen. They do not have a keyboard. In general, software optimized for this works somewhat differently from software optimized for use with a keyboard and mouse.

Most GNU/Linux software is written with the intent that it be used on a system that almost certainly has a mouse and keyboard available. Most Android software is written with the intent that it be used on a system with a touchscreen available.

This means that even if one can run GNU/Linux software on a phone, much of the (large) collection of GNU/Linux software available will not be designed with an interface ideal for use on a phone.

and small screen in mind and are aware of things in a cell environment, like “only update X when on WiFi”. Not really common for GNU/Linux software to do that.

Smartphones have two widely-used mechanisms of accessing the Internet — connecting to the often slower cell network, or to a much-shorter range, but faster, WiFi network. Many people connect their smartphone to a WiFi network at some times and a cell network at others. Because this is so common, a lot of Android software has behavior designed to support this and act more-appropriately, like having an option to only transfer lots of data when on a WiFi netwprk. This is not the case for most GNU/Linux software.

The last time I used a commercial VPS, I’m pretty sure it used VNC to provide console access.

The VNC software I linked to above appears to support TLS. If TLS isn’t sufficient transport security, then most Internet-using software is going to be in trouble.

I’m not sure what you mean by subjective.

I haven’t looked at the VNC protocol for a while, but I don’t think that it imposes any terrible inefficiencies. A couple of decades back, I needed to implement something quick-and-dirty similar to VNC, and went with rendering window contents and handling dragging of windows locally, which I don’t believe that VNC can do (or didn’t then) but IIRC VNC has a tile cache, which, if intelligently used, should avoid most traffic. Dunno if it can deal well with efficiently rendering visual effects.

Right. What I’m saying is that the benefit that VRR provides falls off as monitor refresh rate increases. From your link:

If a game on console doesn’t deliver new frame on time, two things can happen.

Console can wait for a new TV frame, delaying display time about 16.7 ms (VSYNC). Which leads to an effect called stuttering and uneven frame pacing…

If you have a 60 Hz display, the maximum amount of time that software can wait until a rendered frame goes to a static refresh rate screen is 1/60th of a second.

But if you have a 240 Hz display, the maximum amount of time that software can wait until a rendered frame is sent to a static refresh rate screen is 1/240th of a second.

OLED monitors have no meaningful framerate physical constraints from the LED elements on refresh rate; that traditionally comes from the LCD elements (well, I mean, you could have higher rates, but the LCD elements can only respond so quickly). If the controller and the display protocol can handle it, an OLED monitor can basically display at whatever rate you want. So OLED monitors out there tend to support pretty good refresh rates.

Looking at Amazon, my first page of OLED monitor results has all capable of 240Hz or 480Hz, except for one at 140 Hz.

That doesn’t mean that there is zero latency, but it’s getting pretty small.

Doesn’t mean that there isn’t value to VRR, just that it declines as the refresh rate rises.

Reason I bring it up is because I’d been looking at OLED monitors recently myself, and the VRR brightness issues with current OLED display controllers was one of the main concerns that I had (well, that and burn-in potential) and I’d decided that if I were going to get an OLED monitor before the display controller situation changes WRT VRR, I’d just run at a high static refresh rate.

It does sound like there’s a way to ask GNOME to use VRR only when fullscreen stuff is running:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1brlzqj/mouse_cursor_stuttering_on_gnome_with_vrr_enabled/

I prefer Gnome+Dash2Dock- there I have set it to do VRR only in fullscreen apps (aka games).

But the user doesn’t specify what he’s done to enable that setting, and I’m not familiar with GNOME’s (mutter’s?) Wayland settings. But if you are okay with VRR only with fullscreen apps, looking into that might address the issue.

Setting a high refresh rate is somewhat of a given, but won’t negate anything which VRR helps with - screen tearing.

I mean, I’d just turn on vsync; that’s what it’s for. VRR is to let you push out a frame at the instant that it finishes rendering. The benefit of that declines as the monitor refresh rate rises, since there’s less delay until the next frame goes to the monitor.

If you’re always playing with VSync on and getting constant frame rates, that’s not an issue

looks blank

Constant framerates? You’re saying that you get tearing with vsync on if whatever program you’re using can’t handle rendering at whatever the monitor’s refresh rate is? I mean, it shouldn’t.

Running a static refresh rate with vsync will add a tiny bit of latency until the image shows up on the screen relative to VRR, but that’s a function of the refresh rate; that falls off as the refresh rate rises.

VNC is dead.

How so?

There are a number of software packages in Debian that implement VNC. To grab one random example, the last commit to their git repo was last month.

If OP is specifically wanting commercial support, they do mention two companies that provide services.

https://www.freerdp.com/support

FreeRDP itself is a community driven open source project. However there are some people and companies that do offer all sorts of commercial support around FreeRDP:

• David Fort - Hardening Consulting - Contact
• Thincast Technologies GmbH - Contact

FreeRDP doesn’t seem to be soliciting donations, though.