Is it unstable, or resource intensive?

Yes and yes. Most of the Steam client is implemented, poorly, as a web app running in a web view derived from (I believe) an old version of Chromium. It’s needlessly resource-intensive, even more so than Electron apps. The suite as a whole uses its own libraries in ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_{32,64} and I’m pretty sure it still depends on some 32-bit-only things. The overlay sometimes causes ridiculous performance issues related to input events (I move the mouse and the game drops to single digit framerates) even if the overlay isn’t active. The Steam Input config utility is poorly designed and horribly implemented.

Lately it’s also been trying to murder my PC.

I love Steam as a service, but the client is in an unacceptable state.

On the other hand, Sky TV somehow managed to successfully sue Microsoft to force them to rename SkyDrive.

Do you get excessive RAM usage?

I’ve had three hard system crashes because something spawned an endless amount of winedbg and conhost.exe processes until the memory is full and I can’t figure out why.

Thinking back to the sins I’ve committed in C# as a high schooler… maybe I should start publishing my works. Put some poison in the soup.

Popularity does not imply quality.

I’ve played the recent Zelda games. They’re okay. But also disgustingly overrated.

most BIOS updaters

I’ve had to RMA plenty of otherwise perfectly usable motherboards because Windows had fucked up their firmware with unprompted updates, bordering on zero-click malware behaviour. The farther that shit stays from Linux, the better.

A blackout is just a loss of power. Nothing complicated about it. There are obvious human and societal consequences, but as far as the infrastructure is concerned, a blackout usually means that protection devices have been tripped and the system has protected itself from greater damage.

A brownout means that the electric grid (or interconnection), for some reason, can’t supply enough power to satisfy the demand, but protection devices haven’t tripped yet. It can result in momentary power losses, drops in voltage, drops in frequency, or some generators getting desynchronized with the rest of the grid. If reactive loads (like HVAC motors) go offline momentarily, they can cause spikes in power consumption, which can overload circuits and trip safety devices.

A UPS needs to immediately switch to battery power when there are signs of an imminent power loss. A brownout might cause a consumer-grade UPS to switch on and off repeatedly, which the inverter circuit probably doesn’t like.

This channel is run by a real civil engineer, he’s released some great videos about the challenges of maintaining an electric grid.

.NET is branding that Steve Ballmer came up with, and yes, it was originally meant to be a set of network and internet frameworks. The .NET Framework was an underlying interface that other .NET products would use. It was then superseded by .NET Core, which was later renamed to .NET.

Brownout once fried my UPS. My guess is the inverter circuit.

At the same time, I liked .NET’s no-nonsense naming of namespaces. When I see something like System.Threading.Tasks, I can immediately recognise that it’s a namespace that deals with task-based parallelism. Then you have tokio in Rust and I want to stab the person that came up with the name. Same for clap and serde. They mean nothing unless you already know what those packages do.

Who needs their files closed and disks synced, anyway?

Don’t be silly, chmod o-w your $WILLY!

I slept on Helldivers 2 for too long, now I don’t think I’ll ever play it. It’s become obvious that Arrowhead is either unable or unwilling to maintain a game that focuses on the player experience, instead making it subservient to the vision of what they think the game should be. It’s a costly lesson that Digital Extremes learned years ago. I also can’t trust Sony not to steal access to the game from me.

I guess I’m actively sleeping on Voices Of The Void. I’ve played a little of 0.9n and it’s exactly the kind of horror I like, but I want to wait for at least the Steam early access release.

I’ve been looking at switching to Windows, but it’s always the horrible gaming experience that holds me back.

For starters, compatibility is complete ass. Windows doesn’t let you choose the compatibility tools and forces you to run every game (every application for that matter) in the systemwide environment. It also only has a single wineprefix-equivalent that just dumps everything in your home directory folder (please don’t crucify me). If a game requires a different Wine version, you can try to set that half-assed compatibility mode thing on the executable, but I’m convinced it’s only there as decoration. If it doesn’t work, you’re kinda fucked.

Windows also lacks the minimal set of utilities that I expect from a system that can run games. There is no Bubblewrap and you can’t sandbox your games without using a VM. There is no gamescope, nor any way to run an application inside a nested graphical session. If an older game can only do exclusive fullscreen, you can’t switch to a less intrusive (windowed/borderless) mode. If a game does have borderless or windowed mode, but doesn’t support your native resolution, you’re playing in a tiny window or not at all.

Windows 11 seems really neat, but it’s not ready for general adoption. There are just too many missing features.

Reminds me of the oilfield unit hell. If you even mention an SI unit on an offshore drilling platform, your beheaded carcass will be displayed on top of the derrick as a warning for others, left to be devoured by birds and the salty wind.

Sounds like a cryptobro peddling some shitcoin claiming that it’s impossible to get scammed because “code is law” four seconds before the liquidity pool gets drained through a vulnerability in the code.

Technically true, but saying that “nothing sells” is fucking wild. The prices are astronomical because the components driving up the price (specifically memory and storage) are being vacuumed up by AI.