Thanks for the recommendation! I was looking at the Fedora family since AMD officially supports RHEL 9. Hadn't gotten as far as to figure out how well that transfers to Fedora and its derivatives. Good to hear that it works.

If you're only testing on one set of hardware, it isn't going to tell the whole story. The results might be very different on an AMD vs Nvidia GPU, or even on a brand-new vs 1-3 generation old GPU.

Probably the most important thing for gaming is driver support and ease of installation. This sometimes runs directly counter to other general-purpose needs.

I'm still on the hunt for a distro where everything I need is easy to install. I don't think any exist, primarily because GPU drivers suuuuuuuck, especially when you need CUDA or ROCm to work.

This is the great thing about open source. It benefits everyone. Any good idea that does not have significant drawbacks should get broad adoption. And that's generally how it plays out.

Reputations live on for many years (decades, even) after they are justified.

Emulation.

Definitely going to incur a performance hit relative to native code, but in principle it could be perfectly good. It's not like the GPU is running x86 code in the first place. On macOS, Apple provides Rosetta to run x86 Mac apps, and it's very, very good. Not sure how FEX compares.

Correct.

Batteries will still lose charge very slowly, so at some point the battery controller will top itself back up. This is nothing to worry about, and I'm not sure macOS (or Linux) will every display the true charge level of a battery. I believe there is some wiggle room built in at the firmware level.

When MacBooks are plugged in, they get their power from the charger. They are not simultaneously draining and charging the battery in general, unless they need more power than the charger can provide (unlikely unless you are using a charger with lower wattage than the official charger that came with your laptop).

I was not able to find an official source on this from a quick search, but if I remember correctly, this should be true for any moderately recent MacBook. Maybe any MacBook at all, since they only started making "MacBooks" in 2006 and then tech hasn't changed much since then.

Personally, I leave my MBP plugged in during use whenever possible, and I typically unplug it at the end of the day. You don't need to unplug it, but hey, it's a good idea to unplug anything that doesn't need to be plugged in, just to save power.

This is my plan A. I'll only go to plan B if something goes wrong — which has happened to me a couple times. I tried to upgrade Ubuntu (LTS, I forget which version) years ago, but it failed hard. I still don't know why. It wasn't something I could figure out in half an hour, and it wasn't worth investing more time than that.

Come to think of it, it's possible all my upgrade woes came down to Nvidia drivers. It was a common problem on Suse (TW), to the point where I pinned my kernel version to avoid the frequent headaches. I'll try a rolling distro again when I switch to AMD, maybe.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/243/

There will be more diversity in software and distros

I wish, but I doubt it. If we get to the point where there is a mass migration from Windows to Linux, it will almost certainly be concentrated into one or maybe two big distros. Probably Ubuntu.

Today, most proprietary software vendors only support Ubuntu and RHEL. Look at AMD. The ROCm installer supports Ubuntu 22.04, RHEL 9, and SLES. That's it. Not even modern versions of Ubuntu. And it's extremely ornery about dependencies. Python 3.8 or 3.10 required! No 3.9! No 3.11! Trying to get it to install on any modern Debian-based distro is the ninth circle of Dependency Hell.

AI does not mean artificial brain or anything similar. It's a very broad term that's been in use for about 70 years now.

Pac Man has AI.

I remember a lot of KDE hate up until Gnome 3, which was controversial, to say the least. It mirrored old-school Mac hate, with a lot of invalid arguments parroted by people who never took time to learn it (or more to the point, to unlearn what they came from).

I've swapped between Gnome and KDE a bunch of times, and it hasn't really made a difference to me in many years. There was a time when running apps built for one on the other was a painful experience either way. Nowadays my DE choice doesn't really influence my application choices.

This is the part that confused me most. At the first mention of web apps, I just thought, okay, if you have a web server you can have it run under a service account that can do what it needs to do. Sure. Kind of beside the point, but sure.

Then this came at the end and and I did a double-take. He's really suggesting a web app as a substitute for sudo in general? Two questions:

1. Wat?
2. Wut?