That's only a problem if you play games that include anti-cheat. There are a lot of people who exclusively play single player games.

I think there are a few anti-cheat systems that do work with Proton, but in that case the developer/publisher explicitly decided to support it.

If you're referring to Itanium, the situation isn't all that similar: x86-64 has been the main PC instruction set for many years now, so 16-bit and 32-bit support is only necessary for legacy applications, which means that a performance hit from emulation will be far less of a problem, as users will likely have updated performance critical applications to 64-bit long ago. Translating x86 to x86-64 will be easier than translating it to a very different instruction set. Plus emulation technology in general is more advanced these days.

Hi-Fi Rush got a lot of praise earlier this year. But your point still stands: most their recent big games weren't great.

RISC-V is gaining a lot of traction lately, with for example Android announcing support for it. Also Chinese hardware makers are looking at it as a way to be more sanctions-proof.

ARM is based on the same 1980's RISC base, while the other big player (x86-64) is based on technology from the 1970's. Not all old ideas are outdated: many programming languages are based on fundamental ideas from the 1960's.

For a long time, ARM itself was only used for low-power devices, but Apple's M1 showed that the architecture is suitable for high performance as well. If enough resources are thrown at desiging RISC-V chips, I don't see why it wouldn't be able to perform.

It ensures that there will be at least one customer for ARM's designs: their own chips division. If that is their reasoning, they must be pretty desperate. But the only other explanation I can think of is that ARM doesn't realize that competing with their own customers will make it more difficult to sell licenses, which seems even less likely.

On the one hand, selling their own chips could be a way to survive if RISC-V succeeds in eroding ARM's market share. On the other hand, ARM selling their own chips significantly increases the chances of existing ARM licensees adopting RISC-V.

Container images for desktop apps makes sense for closed source applications: those can't be packaged properly by distros and running them inside containers provides extra safety against intentional or unintentional threats they might pose.

What I don't understand is why Ubuntu is pushing Snap for open source applications. I hope and assume that GNOME and KDE are merely providing better integration for Flatpak apps and not pushing for it as the primary way of installing their own applications.

They're thinking from the perspective of the developers distributing the applications, not from the perspective of the end user.

DEBs etc. work great, but each package file works only on one release of one particular distro. Building for all in-use releases of all relevant distros is a lot of work. For popular open source applications, that work is done by the distros, but for niche or closed source applications it falls upon the application developers.

Depends on what is in the image. If it's a pre-compiled application link-time-optimized against only essential libraries, it's going to start quick. If it has to JIT compile hundreds of libraries, it's going to be slow.

It's a non-issue for Intel and AMD, as their drivers are open source and shipped with the kernel itself. In Intel's case, the drivers are sometimes merged into the kernel source tree months before the hardware is even released. NVIDIA is the only one still requiring binary drivers if you want to get full performance out of their hardware.

Granting anyone except the previous owner the ability to unlock the system is indeed a bad idea. But there could be a way to generate a new encryption key such that the system can be wiped and reinstalled for someone new to use.

A lot of efficiency is lost when the heat has to be transported over long distances from where it is generated to where it is consumed. I recently saw a presentation from a cloud provider that tackled this problem: instead of building big centralized data centers, they build a lot of small ones in places that can use the heat, like basements of hotels.

"Every Breath You Take" (The Police)

TFA is even worse, dedicating point 7 entirely to "Web3 gaming’s comeback chance".

First of all, "comeback" suggests that it was a success in the past. There have been very few success stories and even the most prominent one, Axie Infinity, was more failure than success, with its unsustainable economy and security breach. The part where people in the Philippenes got income through it wasn't very glamorous under scrutiny: it was better than being unemployed during COVID, but it's ultimately a low-paying and unfulfilling job.

The author's argument that lots of money invested equals good games coming out is questionable. Just look at how much money Amazon invested in gaming and how little they have to show for it. And just producing a good game is too low of a bar: they'll also have to demonstrate that adding a blockchain somehow improves the game.

Then there is that term "crypto winter" again, suggesting that the current slump is just a seasonal effect rather than the aftermath of a bubble that burst. It's possible crypto will make a comeback some day, but if it wants to do so, it needs to reinvent itself and come up with actual compelling use cases. Just waiting for investors to return isn't going to work.

Not by itself, but probably for itself. Epic likes to position themselves as the player's hero, but I think they're mostly interested in cutting out the gatekeepers so they can keep a larger portion of the pie for themselves. Understandable, as a 30% cut does seem pretty high to me, but it haven't seen any evidence that their commitment to openness extends beyond their bottom line.

The Epic Game Store doesn't support open source operating systems like Linux. While their store doesn't have built-in DRM, they do sell games with third-party DRM. They promoted their store by buying timed exclusive game licenses, which is the opposite of open. And as far as I know Fortnite is not an open platform.

Epic is not worse than most of the game industry, but their PR spin just rubs me the wrong way and I think it's poor journalism to repeat it unchallenged.

Indeed. SBF was lobbying to get crypto assets regulated as commodities rather than securities, because the CTFC has less teeth than the SEC does. That classification debate might be used to dodge one of these lawsuits, but that would then strengthen the government's case in other lawsuit.