Ah yes, well that is sort of what I've discovered too, but at some point I gave up. I've never gotten the proprietary AMD drivers to work. Either they are not supported, or there are install errors.

I actually messed up my system pretty bad trying to install the latest AMD drivers to get ray tracing. The install didn't work, so I hacked some files to proceed, and it bricked my system.

So I had to boot up in a Live USB, chroot into my system (which is a PITA cause I have full disk encryption and physical hardware key authentication) and then manually remove the failed AMD driver.

But I got it working. I would consider it a learning experience. I guess if you're not used to it, it can seem like a huge deal, but I kind of figured out how things work, so I make sure to be careful and not break the system.

It happens, that kind of comes with using Linux. I mean, Windows is not free from issues either, but it definitely gets first class support from big companies. With Linux you are on your own.

packrat sleep/suspend/hibernation is rather infamous. I don't think I've ever had a system that hibernation and sleep actually worked properly on. Even this system has problems sometimes freezing in the middle of just shutting down.

Pixophir As an example of not a problem, but a little complication, when I got my new PC last November I had to install the unstable branch of Debian to get rudimentary vulkan ray tracing support with the open source driver (mesa/radv) for the graphics card. Otherwise I would have had to revert to the AMD drivers (amdgpu or amdgpu pro). The latter would have been a manual installation, which means I break the updates from the repositories. I try to avoid such things, as one day there may be incompatibilities between kernel and driver.

Right, the specific reason why I'm using KDE Plasma-wayland session is that it's basically the only combo that actually supports adaptive sync over HDMI. Haven't checked if other wayland implementations by now support it too, but afaik x11 likely won't ever. Could be wrong tho. And waiting for that adaptive sync support was the reason I stuck to win7 for as long as I did.

        Megalomaniak It's been so long I forgot those functions are supposed to exist in computers. It freaks me out when i use another computer and it doesn't boot into tty1 for me to login and type "startx". From my very sheltered Arch safe space and modern midline computers, it really seems like it functions how normal computers should with no problems. Even Lubuntu freaked me out with all the pretty colors it was throwing at me when I installed it on the sacrificial lamb.

          No problem with suspend for me on Ubuntu. One time I had my computer on for almost a full year of uptime without shutdown or rebooting.

          I know with laptops it can be weird sometimes. On desktop it seems okay.

          @packrat : I have no problems with suspend, except it uses too much energy :-/. Haven't used hibernation in a long time, afaik the swap partition must be big enough to hold the computer's memory, but I don't know what happens with the vram on the graphics card ...

          Someone did a test and found shutting off your computer every night versus putting it on suspend doesn't actually save power. Maybe like 1W, which is negligible.

          This is because the boot up sequence of a the computer uses a certain burst of energy, while suspend/resume uses a very small constant amount (just enough energy to keep the RAM alive basically).

          I guess this would be true for desktops or laptops connected to power. If you have a portable system, maybe the math would be different, I don't know (for example, optimizing for battery life versus energy cost savings).

            My computer is working right now and I don't want to mess it up. It's not quite old enough to get rid of. The OS just isn't that important to me. Either way, I'll be doing the same activities. Surfing the web. Taking care of my finances. Playing around with Godot. If I get another one, I'll make sure it either has linux installed or there won't be a problem installing it. The trouble is, I play fewer and fewer games and I only write low poly games so a new computer gets less and less important. I'm pretty sure what I have runs Godot 4. I think I've run a few demos. It was pretty slow, but it ran it all right.

            I have a really bad problem where I don't like buying nice things. I love how durable older boxier stuff feels, and I love the mechanical sounds they make. I love spending $7 on something some old dude spent $300 on 10 or 20 years ago, and getting by with garbage is so much more fun.
            The only thing I really get with not compromising for something old is the guts inside your main workstation/studiostation/whateverstation. Having blender and godot open as the scanner scans AND I don't have to close everything for Krita as it's hogging 20GHz of CPU and 5GB of RAM is pretty cool. The old thinkpad would have crashed just running Krita like that.
            I do really miss that metal roll cage.

            cybereality I don't do it for saving power, turning on the computer in the morning makes me feel good. Typing startx and watching my screen turn red, beige and orange makes me want to do things that day. That and chocolate milk that I have the balls to call "coffee". It's like a starbucks frappe but only 2% of the sugar content. And warm. Very warm. I don't handle caffeine well.

              She made it to the top!!! Realistic rooftop scene created in Godot Engine 4.0.

              Still trying to figure out if I want to make this parkour game, so just playing with some assets I found.

              Concept was a modern day Eastern Europe kinda ghetto rooftops. Thoughts?

                Looks nice. If realism was your goal you made it. Ambient occlusion could be tweaked, looking at her feet. But I am really nitpicking :-) Many games aren't that good.

                Yeah, I tried to add more AO, it's there but I couldn't set it too high for the feet or it darkened the level too much.

                The issue is that most of the lighting comes from the sky, not the directional light. And the ambient bounce is blowing out the shadow.

                But getting the shadow darker made the rest of the picture look unrealistic. I could have probably tweaked it more, but it looked good enough to share.

                cybereality The outfit makes me think eastern europe, and the scene makes me feel tense like taking a bus ride through old china town in Portland.
                I don't know a thing about realism, but it makes me feel things, and I like it when art makes me feel things.

                  Watched a few shows today. One was this Sherlock Holmes movie where he was able to tell a person he just met that he had just made a trip to some place, the reason being he had some mud on his shoe that was distinctive to that place. Kind of hilarious when you think about it. The other was this anime where it was after an apocalypse and they were using technology they found here and there, but were driving around in huge cities that had like tank treads underneath but it looked like they were running on steam power. No it wasn't anime, that would have been better, it was actually live actors.

                    cybereality Concept was a modern day Eastern Europe kinda ghetto rooftops.

                    I used to do free-running like that in abandoned 90's early 2000's industrial environments and while we were lucky not to get hurt I'd have to advise against it now that I'm older and smarter. But maybe it would work as a game, yeah. To be fair most of the dilapidated soviet era industrial environments are cleaned up and gone now. At least in the Baltics.

                        fire7side For a moment I got excited and thought you were talking about Psych. I've seen every episode of that show maybe three times now. That and ghost whisperer, which my mom banned me from watching 3 years after i started watching it telling me it would give me nightmares. I watched it anyway and got a nightmare about getting a nightmare from watching the show.
                        The only things those shows really did was give me a taste for spooks and a dark sense of humor. That and jealousy of James Roday's face and hair back when it was 2006. Before now, where he looks frighteningly like my youth pastor when I was a teenager.

                          Megalomaniak I stick to the wetlands at night where there's no one to complain but the homeless dudes who're also trying to avoid cops. The savannah's so wet and cold at night it gets incredibly misty. You can't see through mist that thick so as far as anybody's concerned, I'm probably just a buck. Or a coyote.

                            Megalomaniak I used to do free-running like that in abandoned 90's early 2000's industrial environments and while we were lucky not to get hurt I'd have to advise against it now that I'm older and smarter.

                            Yeah, I was big into skateboarding in the 90's / early 2000's. I guess it's kind of related, well more to tricking, but I think it's the same kinds of people. I would do all kinds of crazy jumps down stairs and super dangerous stuff, not sure how I didn't die or get disabled honestly. I guess when you are young you can fall down and get hit and nothing happens. I'm to the point where I can get hurt stepping to cross the street now, not so much fun.

                              Darn.I feel so tired, yet I can't get any sleep. In the next 6 minutes, it's going to be 1 o'clock in the morning where I live.

                                Audiobellum My favorite trick is to down coffee and do something until sleep takes you. If it doesn't work, you should see a doctor.
                                My other favorite is an herbal substance that's legal in my state, but could be taboo here. It's probably fine to mention it it's medicinal, right? It was a doctor that suggested it to me in the first place, I think that counts as a prescription.
                                If you want to avoid drugs in general whether it's caffeine, melatonin supplements, or federally questionable plants, try going for a walk. Walk where it's dimly lit and smell the night air. Your body should take care of the rest. Wear a coat to stay warm if that's a problem. Doing anything that raises your body temperature like running will get in the way of the production of melatonin, the sleepy (sometimes sad) brain chemical.

                                  Audiobellum It just gets worse with age. I was fine till I started working night shifts. Now I usually sleep 3 or 4 hours at night and take a nap or two during the day. Oh that used to be so nice getting all my sleep at once.

                                    Hmm... yeah. I have this weird sleep disorder or something. I can stay up for a week straight, just napping like an hour or two here and there. Then I will have to do the opposite, basically sleep for a week and wake up for a few hours to take care of stuff. Luckily I work from home and I'm my own boss, but I've lost jobs in the past because of it. Sort of why I ended up in the freelance thing. Thankfully I just woke up today, got a lot of work done I've been putting off. I do take medication for it, it was much worse before that. But I kind of got used to it even though I know it's likely not good for me.

                                    Does anybody at all remember Senses Fail? Do I remember whether or not I already asked? The answer to one of those is "no"

                                    duane There are Haskell bindings for Godot, but I'm lucky to do what I do with Gdscript. My games are hardly mission critical.

                                      Also Rust. About to become second Linux kernel language, though it may stretch a bit the pure functional paradigm. And I am waiting for a "how to shoot yourself in the foot with Rust" :-)

                                      Has anyone here dabbled with google's carbon language yet ?

                                      Dear NSA, we're not always of the same opinion, and I always expect second thoughts from the likes of you, but in this specific case I grudgingly agree 😬

                                      As soon as my OS has Rust natively in the Kernel (next major release, I believe) and most of the libraries are rusty as well or at least offer bindings, I'll switch.

                                      😎

                                      I kinda don't really like C/C++ anymore. I use it because it's typically the only (or best) choice for low-level stuff or integrating SDKs.

                                      Rust looks pretty nice, actually, just read some tutorials. Still will take a while for everything to be updated. Also Google is pushing Carbon as a C++ replacement.

                                      And C# is nice as a language, I just don't like the disconnect between using managed and unmanaged code. But I think it's fair to say C/C++ is on the way out.

                                      Does anyone know of any free software that can increase the resolutions of videos?

                                        I don't know of any specific software to upscale or upsample videos, but there surely are several converters or so out there. Would have to search for your OS.

                                        Without checking, I'd say FFMPEG can do everything. Everything ? Everything. But has a learning curve.

                                          Audiobellum https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

                                          nevermind he uses a feature in the paid version. Kinda akward since they already have a resolution limit on the free version limiting you to 4K exports. Bah.

                                          edit 2: I did recall correct, the feature used to be in the free version without watermark before they added the AI enhancer to it. Download version 15 non studio flavor(thats the free one) from here leftmost column scroll down:
                                          https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support/family/davinci-resolve-and-fusion

                                              Pixophir The answer to everything is FFMPEG, and yet I have never bothered to learn it. That's a lie, I know you convert file type by changing the file extension in the output. I use that and optipng to jam as many assets in my HDD or whatever is inside this laptop.
                                              I think it's flash based PCIE something something. lsblk returns nvme0n1, and I'm obviously a linux magician, so I think I'm right.

                                                Speaking of hard drives, I have 3 naked ones I use when flash drives aren't big enough. I'm listening to whoever has a good way of storing and handling them with little chance of them breaking.
                                                I just dropped a 500GB back up drive of old project files, and typing this as I'm recovering from mild cardiac arrest.

                                                  You can get USB enclosures. This will keep them safe, and also allow USB access. However, if they are traditional spinning disks, they don't last long. I think in the 10 to 15 year range before you start to lose data. Flash drives and SSDs are more stable (no moving parts, less room for wear and tear). You can probably get a good 512GB drive for like $50, and then transfer everything important to that. I actually bought an M-Disc drive, which is a form of Blu-Ray and lasts 1,000 years. Yes, one thousand years. The discs are DVD/Blu-Ray shape and go up to 100GB. The issue is that they are just a pain to work with, and you can't really used them as a USB disk, they are for archiving or writing once. Plus, even if the disc lasts for 1,000 years, it's doubtful there will be any working drives or computers as we know them to read the disc in the year 3022.

                                                  packrat

                                                  Last time I checked LTO tapes are still king for long term storage and you can probably pickup an old LTO 5 drive/tapes for cheap (3TB per tape). If it's really sensitive then keep them in a Faraday storage box to ensure they don't degausse during the next X+ class solar flare lol.

                                                  If you want plug and play day to day expandability though, I've seen versions of these caddies that support 4 drives:
                                                  https://www.umart.com.au/product/simplecom-sd322bk-dual-bay-usb-3-0-aliminiumdocking-station-for-2-5in-and-3-5in-hard-drive-35336

                                                  They often come with nice features like a drive cloning button too which is cool.

                                                      My favorite part of game development? Throwing paint like a 6 year old to piano renditions of My Chemical Romance I found off torrented files from who knows where.
                                                      Yours?

                                                      Bimbam I am using one like that as we speak, only there's no features beyind flashing the blue light when a disk is being read.
                                                      As for safely handling them, all I found was WD orientation videos boiling down to "less butterfingers, discharge static before touching"