I’m playing Satisfactory at High or Ultra settings 1440p ultrawide Lumen on with a Ryzen 7700x and a Radeon 7900GRE, and maintaining frame rates in the 80’s. What is out now, or is in the works, that my machine can’t run well?

Go grab you something later in the AM4 line, like a 5600 or so, and an RX6700, as long as your power supply is up to it.

I just built a computer, and honestly I didn’t need much more CPU than the Ryzen 3600 from my old one. CPUs don’t go obsolete the way they used to.

I went with a 7000 series pretty much entirely because my new motherboard said “Compatible with 7000 series. Compatible with 9000 series with a BIOS update.” And I didn’t want to bother with having to get a loaner 7000 series to do a BIOS update, then swap CPUs.

Ubuntu is dead on the desktop.

I’m hoping to have bought my last x86 portable device. Hell it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if my Ryzen 7700x was the last x86 processor I ever buy.

The one that does what I need it to do on the device I’m running it on. I’ve currently got four different Linux distros on x86 PCs around my house at this moment.

I honestly can’t be mad at this point because what they SHOULD do is sell cables in bulk packaging to the Apple store, and then when they sell a phone they say “Do you need a USB cable? Free with the phone.” If they say “No we’re okay I’ve got hundreds of them by now” no problem, if they say “Yeah in fact can I get two?” Sure. Same with chargers. Of course this is Apple we’re talking about, so they’re probably $69.99 each.

A surprising amount of Fractal Design’s cases do.

You copied that floppy?!?!

You mean that inferior version of Scorched Earth?

I thought Gen Alpha was very explicitly NOT learning cursive.

I had typing tutor software on the family PC. It made the mistake of trying to teach typing by starting with only home row keys, then expanding outward from there. So for a very long time, you would type things like adj daf jal ls; dal fka and so forth. It was a very long time until you really started to get it.

And then MSN chat rooms and messenger happened to me, and suddenly touch typing was the main way I had to hit on chicks. I knew what the home row was, so I knew what touch typing looked like, so I started actually doing it, but typing things I wanted to type. I’m now the third fastest typist I know. On a good keyboard with a passage I’m familiar with I can key 106WPM, right now typing conversationally out of my brain I’m probably hitting about 65 or 70.

I would draw the line at shareholders.

You may use my software free of charge if you are a student, hobbyist, hobbyist with income, side hustler, sole proprietorship, LLC, S-Corp, non-profit, partnership, or other owner-operator type business.

Corporations with investors or shareholders will pay recurring licensing fees. Your shareholders may not profit from my work unless I profit from it more than they do. If you can afford a three inch thick mahogany conference table you can afford to pay for your software.

Humans are indeed creative by nature, we like making things. What we don’t naturally do is publish, broadcast and preserve our work.

Society is iterative. What we build today, we build mostly out of what those who came before us built. We tell our versions of our forefathers’ stories, we build new and improved versions of our forefather’s machines.

A purely capitalistic society would have infinite copyright and patent durations, this idea is mine, it belongs to me, no one can ever have it, my family and only my family will profit from it forever. Nothing ever improves because improving on an old idea devalues the old idea, and the landed gentry can’t allow that.

A purely communist society immediately enters whatever anyone creates into the public domain. The guy who revolutionizes energy production making everyone’s lives better is paid the same as a janitor. So why go through all the effort? Just sweep the floors.

At least as designed, our idea of copyright is a compromise. If you have an idea, we will grant you a limited time to exclusively profit from your idea. You may allow others to also profit at your discretion; you can grant licenses, but that’s up to you. After the time is up, your idea enters the public domain, and becomes the property and heritage of humanity, just like the Epic of Gilgamesh. Others are free to reproduce and iterate upon your ideas.

Fedora KDE does. I think it’s going to go with the DE rather than the distro, I bet Kubuntu also does.

I think dating back to the Space Cadet keyboard, Unix systems recognize 6 modifier keys: Shift, Control, Alt, Super, Meta and Hyper. It is my understanding that they choose to bind either Super or Meta to the “Windows” key (or the octothorpe whatever that thing is called key on Macs) and in practice it’s used as another modifier key, often with Windows-like functionality such as opening the Menu if tapped tacked on.

1. I went with Fedora because of newer packages than you generally get in the Debian family lineage.

2. KDE, especially KDE 6, has a fairly robust implementation of Wayland. Cinnamon is just now rolling out experimental Wayland support. This wasn’t an issue on my previous machine with an Nvidia GPU as X11 was the better deal there, but now that I have a Radeon GPU Wayland is the better deal. My two monitors running at different resolutions and refresh rates work. FreeSync works out of the box. There’s even the beginnings of HDR support. Having tried both on this machine, Fedora KDE has a lot more features of my hardware that “Just Work.”

I much prefer using Cinnamon to KDE, but I’ll deal.

Some distros call it the Meta key.

1. I rarely distro hop. I used Linux Mint for a solid decade. I’ve made the jump to Fedora KDE pretty much entirely because Wayland support is the farthest along here, and that enables me to use more features of my hardware such as two monitors at different refresh rates, Freesync, etc. I did come to the conclusion awhile back that there’s a lot of pointless distros out there, a lot of them are just “I want this particular permutation of default software.”

2. Assuming you’re currently a Windows user, I think the main issue you’re going to face using Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition for “programming” is going to be general culture shocks. Using a package manager instead of heading to the browser, stuff like that. “Light gaming” depending on what you mean by that could be no trouble at all or dealing with some hiccups involving Nvidia’s imperfect support. There are some games that require proprietary anti-cheat that doesn’t support Linux, Valorant is one of those that springs to mind.

3. Difficult question to concisely answer; Mint has a system they call “Spices” which include a series of applets and widgets you can add to the UI, choose them from a menu and then configure them. One of these is “Cinnemenu” which replaces the default Menu with a somewhat more customizable one, though you might struggle to exactly replicate the WIndows look and feel. Beyond that, you might look at Conky for your desktop customizing needs.

4. File extensions do exist in the Linux world but they’re not as important for making things work as it is on Windows. Some files, particularly executable binaries, won’t have extensions at all. A text editor might not automatically append .txt to a plaintext file, because it doesn’t want to assume you’re not writing a bash script or config file or something. But if you record a sound clip with Audacity or something it’ll add a .wav or whatever extension as appropriate.

Bonus: You probably mean Neofetch (or whatever we’re using since the developer of Neofetch has “gone farming”). Those are hard-coded into Neofetch by its developer.

At this point, Linux or even any given distro isn’t the problem. The problem is the software library.

I call it GIMP syndrome. There’s a lot of capable and powerful apps in the FOSS ecosystem and most of them have some kind of critical functionality gap or the UX of an Oregon Trail era disease. A lot of them, with the notable exception of GIMP, are actually working on it now.

I found KDE a bit overwhelmingly customizable to start out with, and maybe a bit bloated.

I’ve said this kind of thing before; Gnome feels like it’s trying to appeal to Apple users, “Look how simple it is, look how few settings menus there are, you use it the way we designed it to be used and only that way, nothing else works.” They like their empty blank windows. The ideal Gnome utility app is a blank window with a single button in the title bar that says “Cancel.” Featurelessness is their goal.

KDE always felt like the polar opposite of that to me. Every feature under the sun, sometimes twice. Nothing is consistent, nothing aligns quite right, they love their cluttered windows. The ideal KDE utility app is a window crammed edge to edge with text boxes, drop downs, radio buttons and check boxes that never opens quite big enough for all the elements in it. This one little utility app can do basically everything even remotely related to the task it’s made for plus several other adjacent tasks, to the point it takes you a long time to find the one option you ever actually need in a sea of settings menus.

Cinnamon felt somewhere in between. Except where Gnome apps crept in with their hamburger menus and top bar UI, Cinnamon felt consistent and good looking without being an iPhone commercial, and their included utilities tended to have the functionality you needed and nothing you didn’t.

I just recently built a PC, and to get the most out of an AMD GPU I’m using Fedora KDE instead of my long time favorite Mint Cinnamon, and I’ve already had to boot up my old computer once to use a Mint utility because I couldn’t seem to get the job done in KDE. You know that USB stick formatter tool in Mint? Why doesn’t every OS have that?