Skip Navigation
What's the most expensive thing you broke as a kid and what's the story behind it?
  • When I was around 12, I was learning about overclocking, and accidentally killed my dad's graphic card, an Nvidia FX 5900.

    I vividly remember launching The Sims 2 to test my overclock, when suddenly the screen started turning on and off (the video driver was probably crashing and restarting), and after I reset the PC, there were 2 green lines on the screen and XP was stuck in 640x480 16 colors because not even the basic display driver was able to load.

    My dad was mad obviously because it was an expensive card, the damage wasn't covered by the warranty, and he was into gaming too at the time. I was stuck with integrated graphics for about a month while we waited for the geforce 6000 series to come out.

    I was so scared of overclocking after this happened, I didn't try it again until a few years later years later when I had my own computer (and killed another card, a 9800GX2).

  • Signs you're getting old?
    • Can't use my phone for more than 10 minutes because it makes my eyes hurt
    • Understanding the mechanics of new games feels harder than it used to be
    • Can't easily remember the names of characters in a game/movie I'm watching
    • Can't remember the names of functions for programming languages I've learned recently, always need to keep the documentation handy
    • I find it absolutely counterintuitive to use "modern" functions in programming like lambdas (and functional programming in general can't get into my head)
    • I almost always HATE changes in the OS and programs I use, while I used to love beta-testing stuff
    • Can't get into new hobbies and interests
    • Still listen to the same genres I used to listen to 10 years ago
    • 2019 feels like a few months ago, not half a decade ago
    • Getting worse and worse at rhythm games

    I'm 33.

  • Linux 6.10 To Merge NTSYNC Driver For Emulating Windows NT Synchronization Primitives
  • Nah mate, 2022 was when it started getting really good, GPL got rid of shader compilation stuttering (as well as dxvk-async related glitches), compatibility improved massively with improvements to both dxvk and vkd3d, and ray tracing finally started working

  • Steam is a ticking time bomb
  • Ok, I had no idea they were the first to do that lootbox shite, I'm not into multiplayer games. That could be considered worse than allowing third party DRMs, since it pretty much introduced kids to gambling.

  • Steam is a ticking time bomb
  • That has to be one of the dumbest articles I've read in a while.

    While I personally use Steam very rarely (I prefer to use DRM-free versions of games), Steam has done very little to be considered on its way towards enshittification.

    The macos situation is completely irrelevant because at this point its market share on steam is lower than linux and it makes no sense for them to invest only to be constantly screwed over by apple changing things on their platforms. My guess is it will be dropped within the next 3-5 years.

    The author points out the deprecation of Steam on older platforms, but fails to mention the fact that this wasn't always their choice, for instance the recent drop of Windows 7 support was caused by the fact that there's an embedded chromium browser in it and google dropped support for Windows 7 around that time. A similar situation happened for Windows XP, which was dropped in 2019, a full FIVE years after Microsoft dropped support for it, and at this time Steam on XP was only used for retrogaming, it made no sense to keep supporting it, there are better ways to get old games on XP.

    There's barely a mention of all the good things that Valve has done for Linux gaming, but the article complains about Steam being 32 bit (which is still a requirement for wine to run, at least until the new wow64 mode becomes stable, and steam comes with its steam runtime specifically to avoid distro compatibility issues); they could have made proton only work with steam, they could have made their dxvk and vkd3d forks proprietary like nvidia did, but instead it's all open source and very easy to build on all platforms and I use my own fork every day to play games without steam. Heck, there are even competitors for the steam deck that run proton.

    Also, can we mention the fact that Steam has not turned into yet another subscription service like some of its competitors?

    If I had to point at something that Steam absolutely did wrong, I'd say it's allowing third party DRMs on the store, it's a consistent source of issues, especially for old games. I understand that when they made the choice we didn't have cancer like kernel level anticheat and denuvo, but still, Steam launching a launcher launching another launcher that launches the game is a trashy gaming experience and adds points of failure as we've already seen several times when big titles launch and their DRM servers go down, or when games get old and the DRM servers are shut down permanently.

    While I'm sure Steam will eventually become enshittified, I don't see that happening any time soon, maybe after Gabe retires, and that's why you should keep a collection of DRM free games on your drives and not rely solely on Steam and other stores.

    Just my opinion of course, feel free to disagree.

  • Do you daily drive Wayland, if so since when, if not when will you?
  • I've been using it since Plasma 6 came out so about 3-4 weeks.

    Overall, it's been a very negative experience for me. The main problems have been:

    • Random scaling issues in apps: some apps show a slightly smaller cursor, other show a poorly upscaled one, others have random rendering issues like lines remaining on the screen after an option is no longer highlighted (gimp, libreoffice, many others), some apps have random flickering of parts of the UI, some apps no longer scale at all or are scaled twice. Plasmashell itself has blurry icons on the desktop but all other KDE apps don't. I know fractional scaling has always been problematic, but it has gotten worse to the point of being almost unusable
    • Random crashes of GTK apps when using the wayland backend. Some GTK apps don't even start and segfault immediately with a wayland error in the terminal
    • Some apps like okular and libreoffice lag like crazy or outright freeze when scrolling
    • Some games not capturing the cursor properly (Proton)
    • Inconsistent font rendering, some fonts look fine in some apps and atrocious in others
    • Issues when resizing or moving windows, some times they "jerk" off the screen or resize to a very tiny window and I'm forced to use key combinations to resize them again
    • Random issues with window decoration not appearing in some apps but randomy appearing for things like context menus

    This is on a full AMD system with Arch Linux, the latest kernel and mesa-git. I hope for KDE's sake that there's something broken in my installation because I can't believe the KDE team released Plasma 6 in this sorry state.

  • AMDGPU driver for Linux 6.7 enforces lower power limits from vBIOS
  • I may be partially responsible for this lazy ass implementation.

    3 months ago I was playing around with stable diffusion a lot and because I sleep in the same room where my PC is, I used to lower the TDP of the GPU during the night to 150w to keep it quiet. One day while SD was running, I lowered the TDP in LACT and pressed Apply but instead of getting quieter, the fans ramped up and I was shocked seeing that the card was in fact pulling 420w instead of its rated 293w (6900xt).

    I tracked down the issue to the driver incorrectly applying the power limit, basically if you set a TDP that's too low for the current power state, the driver would disable the power limit entirely until the card entered a lower power state, after which, your new TDP would be correctly applied.

    Running a modern GPU without power limits is bad and potentially dangerous for everything involved: the GPU, the VRMs, even the power supply cables may melt as we've seen with nVidia cards. So I reported the issue immediately to the AMDGPU developers (my issue is linked in the article).

    They quickly came up with a fix, which I tested, which wouldn't allow you to set a TDP lower than the lowest valid TDP for the highest power state. This gets the job done but it's a kludge more than a fix, ideally the driver should realize that the new TDP is too low for the current power state and switch to a lower power state, and I don't know why AMD implemented such a shitty solution in their official kernel driver.

  • Someone keeps trying to access my MS account
  • If you have 2FA enabled they won't be able to get in, but if you change your password and they're still trying, that means that somehow they have your new password, which means you probably have a credential stealer in your PC or one of your devices. I would reinstall windows immediately then change EVERY password.

  • Deleted
    started to feel headaches and such from headphones, measured how many microteslas it emits or whatever, is this safe?
  • The electromagnetic field generated by headphones is miniscule and the frequencies are very low, whatever's causing your headache is not a tiny electromagnet. Depending on the type of headphones and the volume used, however, the sound itself could be causing it, especially if you're using some 3D spatial filter, those don't always play well with how our brains and ears work.

  • How do I use the kde-unstable repo on Arch?

    I want to try the new Plasma 6 beta so I followed the instructions on the Arch wiki on how to enable the kde-unstable repo and tried to update the system, but when I try pacman says "plasma-activities and kactivities are in conflict", both are required by some of the packages that it's trying to update and there's no way to ignore the conflict.

    Does anyone know how to install it?

    10
    Recommendation for an UPS

    I'm looking for a new UPS to replace an almost 10 years old APC beast that's having issues, but I'm not sure what to buy.

    I'll be using it to power a small home server and some network equipment in an area where there are occasional power outages (but they last 2-3 hours). My requirements are:

    • 300-600€ range
    • At least 1500VA, 900W
    • Doesn't make noise unless it's on battery
    • Must not require proprietary software to monitor it or to calibrate the battery and other basic stuff (if it works with apcupsd or NUT it would be perfect)
    • No weird battery format

    What would you recommend?

    Thanks!

    10
    Communities similar to crackwatch?

    Are there any lemmy communities similar to r/crackwatch? I can't seem to find anything decent.

    7
    APC UPS switches to battery 50 times a day

    Hopefully this is the right place to ask.

    I have an APC Back-UPS XS 1400U that I use to keep my home server running 24/7.

    It was purchased in 2015, batteries replaced around 2020, everything was fine until around June 2023 when it started randomly switching to battery for a few seconds for no apparent reason once or twice a day.

    The UPS is connected to my home server via USB so I can get some readouts. It says "Unacceptable line voltage changes", but it's configured to switch when it's outside the 160-280v range and it gets nowhere near those thresholds, the voltage fluctuates in the 224-234 range.

    I connected an oscilloscope to the mains to see if there were transients when the problem occurred but I don't see anything out of the ordinary and the problem has been getting worse, now it switches an average of 50 times a day.

    The UPS still works, it can keep the server up for hours if I unplug the power, so the batteries should be good. What's going on?

    14
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)DO
    dosse91 @lemmy.trippy.pizza
    Posts 4
    Comments 98