lightstream

Heroic works really well. I've just installed it myself recently, motivated mostly by a desire to finally play the free games I got off Epic. I've only installed two EGS games so far - Civ 6 and Guardians of the Galaxy - but they're working perfectly, running via proton.

The experience is so good I was actually inspired to buy my first game outside of steam in years, namely Wartales which I just bought yesterday on GOG. Installation is a breeze, it runs under proton, and as far as I can tell it is running perfectly.

I sort of prefer Heroic to Steam in fact, because it starts almost immediately - no waiting around for 30 seconds while it tries to connect to the Steam network etc

It's not the image, it's a normal image. The server does the hard work when you make the request, and then it just builds the image accordingly.

Those poor Iranians

I suggest you try to analyse the data. Iranians have a very high energy usage per capita - at least as high as any EU country and probably higher. The country is a major oil and gas producer, and the population is accustomed to cheap petrol prices due to heavy subsidisation by the government. You won't find many Iranians opting to use public transport for the good of the environment. Like Americans, they would rather sit in their own air-conditioned vehicles in interminable traffic jams.

I cannot wait until architecture-agnostic ML libraries are dominant and I can kiss CUDA goodbye for good

I really hope this happens. After being on Nvidia for over a decade (960 for 5 years and similar midrange cards before that), I finally went AMD at the end of last year. Then of course AI burst onto the scene this year, and I've not yet managed to get stable diffusion running to the point it's made me wonder if I might have made a bad choice.

Same. I had an Nvidia 960 for about 5 years on arch with very few problems. Maybe twice over that time I had to rollback to an older version temporarily due to some incompatibility with wine or such like.

Towards the end of last year I finally decided to upgrade (mostly to play RDR2) and I went with AMD. I love the feel of using a pure open source gfx stack, but there is no real functional advantage to it.

.. just don't tell them it was with yourself

I find your comment interesting because you are implying that some people believe being stupid or clever is a permanent unchangeable state. Presumably one is born as either one or the other?

I would say that some ways of thinking are stupid. In particular when one does not challenge one's assumptions. It's possible to build a whole world of stupid on top of bad assumptions. If someone's entire worldview is built in this way - a whole load of bad assumptions held together with poor logic and wishful thinking - I don't think they're even living in the real world any more, they're living in a fantasy land.

Well there's a huge variety of different accents in England, even more if you include the whole UK. British people themselves can struggle understanding other Brits from just 100 or 200 miles down the road. I say that as a Brit - I've worked in call centres where there would frequently be Liverpudlians, Geordies, Cornish etc calling back in a rage after being hung up on multiple times by colleagues who couldn't understand them.