In addition to what Wolf told you, here’s a few little extra tidbits:

Some games have native Linux versions. If they don’t, you typically play them through Proton, a gaming-ready version of the Wine compatibility layer. Steam directly supports this through compatibility settings (Steam -> Settings -> Compatibility for default settings or Game properties -> Compatibility for per-game settings). Sometimes specific Proton versions will be better for specific games but usually you don’t need to worry about it much.

Proton is damn good. Expect performance for most games to be within ± 5% of the performance you’d get on Windows. Yes, some games run better on Proton than on native DirectX.

Valve recently decided to enable Proton by default for games that don’t have a Linux version. You can enable it yourself in the settings if it isn’t enabled yet.

You can even force games with a native Linux version to use Proton by setting it in the game’s compatibility settings. In that case Steam will download the Windows version.

Seconded, with caveats. Garuda is basically a gaming-ready Arch with a few of the rough edges filed off (and a 1337 G4M3R desktop theme preinstalled). I quite like their convenience stuff but in the end it’s still Arch.

Pros: It’s easy to set up and conveniently comes with everything you need to start gaming. It defaults to the KDE desktop, which will feel fairly familiar to Windows expats. It allows you to do whatever you want to do, in true Linux fashion. Cons: It’s still Arch-based so you will be living at the bleeding edge. A certain amount of occasional instability is to be expected. The default theme might put you off if you’re not into the whole gamer aesthetic but it’s easy to change.

I also see people recommending Bazzite and similar immutable distros and honestly, I can see the appeal. They’re harder to break and Discover (or whichever Flathub frontend you use) is very welcoming and convenient for managing your installed apps.

Pros: You’re less involved with the OS’s technical underpinnings than with an Arch-based distro. Immutables are designed to be robust. The Flatpak-centric workflow feels slicker than a traditional package manager. Cons: The design restricts your freedom to a certain degree. Flatpak has a few caveats compared to native software packages.

In the end I’d say that Garuda is great if you’re interested in learning more about how Linux works and want to be able to tinker with the system. There’s a ton of resources on technical stuff in Arch and all of them apply to Garuda as well. On the other hand, an immutable like Bazzite is great if you’Re not interested in Linux internals and just want something that works and is hard to break.

To quote that same document:

Figure 5 looks at the average temperatures for different age groups. The distributions are in sync with Figure 4 showing a mostly flat failure rate at mid-range temperatures and a modest increase at the low end of the temperature distribution. What stands out are the 3 and 4-year old drives, where the trend for higher failures with higher temperature is much more constant and also more pronounced.

That’s what I referred to. I don’t see a total age distribution for their HDDs so I have no idea if they simply didn’t have many HDDs in the three-to-four-years range, which would explain how they didn’t see a correlation in the total population. However, they do show a correlation between high temperatures and AFR for drives after more than three years of usage.

My best guess is that HDDs wear out slightly faster at temperatures above 35-40 °C so if your HDD is going to die of an age-related problem it’s going to die a bit sooner if it’s hot. (Also notice that we’re talking average temperature so the peak temperatures might have been much higher).

In a home server where the HDDs spend most of their time idling (probably even below Google’s “low” usage bracket) you probably won’t see a difference within the expected lifespan of the HDD. Still, a correlation does exist and it might be prudent to have some HDD cooling if temps exceed 40 °C regularly.

Hard drives don’t really like high temperatures for extended periods of time. Google did some research on this way back when. Failure rates start going up at an average temperature of 35 °C and become significantly higher if the HDD is operated beyond 40°C for much of its life. That’s HDD temperature, not ambient.

The same applies to low temperatures. The ideal temperature range seems to be between 20 °C and 35 °C.

Mind you, we’re talking “going from a 5% AFR to a 15% AFR for drives that saw constant heavy use in a datacenter for three years”. Your regular home server with a modest I/O load is probably going to see much less in terms of HDD wear. Still, heat amplifies that wear.

I’m not too concerned myself despite the fact that my server’s HDD temps are all somewhere between 41 and 44. At 30 °C ambient there’s not much better I can do and the HDDs spend most of their time idling anyway.

Entra isn’t Azure. Entra ID is what they renamed Azure Active Directory to. But not always; there’s also Azure Active Directory B2C (yes, that’s the fully expanded name). And various other Azure-branded things that may or may not belong together.

Microsoft are spectacularly bad at naming things.

It’s a miracle they haven’t renamed Windows 11 to “360 365” or “Live 6.5” or “Active-DOS Series X” or something.

Honestly, I’m still very much in the “classes define what a tag represents, CSS defines how it looks” camp. While the old semantic web was never truly feasible, assigning semantic meaning to a page’s structure very much is. A well-designed layout won’t create too much trouble and allows for fairly easy consistency without constant repetition.

Inline styles are essentially tag soup. They work like a print designer thinks: This element has a margin on the right. Why does it have that margin? Who cares, I just want a margin here. That’s acceptable if all you build are one-off pages but requires manual bookkeeping for sitewide consistency. It also bloats pages and while I’m aware that modern web design assumes unmetered connections with infinite bandwidth and mobile devices with infinitely big batteries, I’m oldschool enough to consider it rude to waste the user’s resources like that. I also consider it hard to maintain so I’d only use it for throwaway pages that never need to be maintained.

CSS frameworks are like inline styles but with the styles moved to classes and with some default styling provided. They’re not comically bad like inline styles but still not great. A class like gap-2 still carries no structural meaning, still doesn’t create a reusable component, and barely saves any bandwidth over inline CSS since it’s usually accompanied by several other classes. At least some frameworks can strip out unused framework code to help with the latter.

I don’t use SCSS much (most of its best functionality being covered by vanilla CSS these days) but it might actually be useful to bridge the gap between semantically useful CSS classes and prefabricated framework styles: Just fill your semantic classes entirely with @include statements. And even SCSS won’t be needed once native mixins are finished and reach mainstream adoption.

Note: All of this assumes static pages. JS-driven animations will usually need inline styles, of course.

“Legally required”, so they’re seeing it in the local laws. Some countries require websites to disclose who operates them.

For example, in Germany, websites are subject to the DDG (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, “digital services law”). Under this law they are subject to the same disclosure requirements as print media. At a minimum, this includes the full name, address, and email address. Websites updated operated by companies or for certain purposes can need much more stuff in there.

Your website must have a complete imprint that can easily and obviously be reached from any part of the website and is explicitly called “imprint”.

These rules are meaningless to someone hosting a website in Kenya, Australia, or Canada. But if you run a website in Germany you’d better familiarize yourself with them.

Because JavaScript and its complete absence of a standard library is a horrible abomination that should’ve been put out of our misery years ago.

Full stack developer:

The lightbulb is broken. Deploys a lightweight fix that involves 17 metric tons of chandeliers, stadium floodlights, sconces, and the necessary infrastructure to operate the street lights for a city of 500.000. His solution delivers a solid 100 lm of light using only 175 MW of power.

There’s a reason why oldschool X-Com players kept coming back to the games despite technical issues like the Groundhog Day bug. (Thank all applicable deities for OpenXcom solving those issues, though.)

They’re probably not pivoting but in FY2023 Azure made up 38% of their revenue, followed by Office 365 at 23%. That’s a lot of cloud service revenue.

Is it sustainable? Honestly, it might. They sell a lot of stuff under the Azure umbrella and corporations lap that shit up. (Seriously; my employer is about ready to hire consultants to come up with additional eggs they can put in that particular basket.)

Here’s my source; I couldn’t be arsed to look it up in MSFT’s statements directly.

That’s still not cheap when you account for inflation. Of course there’s a world of difference between “not cheap” and what they charge these days.

When did it just become expected that everybody would upgrade GPU’s every year and that’s suppose to be normal?

Somewhere around 1996 when the 3dfx Voodoo came out. Once a year was a relatively conservative upgrade schedule in the late 90s.

My most used features so far are vertical splitters, vertical nudging, and the new placement modes for conveyors and pipes. With an honorable mention going to conveyor wall holes, which also free up a lot of design options.

Honestly, though, just about everything in this update has been a godsend. Priority splitters are the only thing I haven’t really used yet. Even the elevators rock; being able to zoop up to 200 meters up or down in one go can make them useful even as a temporary yardstick for tall structures. (Also, I did end up needing to go 150 meters straight down to get at some resources and can confirm that elevators handle their intended purpose very well.)

Never use Amazon for expensive electronics. There’s too much nonsense going on.

I tried to preorder a phone once. Sony offered a pair of earbuds as a preorder gift and I wanted that specific phone anyway so hey, why not. Unfortunately, their fulfillment partner happened to be Amazon.

Instead of my phone I received a book about Lemmy Kilmister. Oh, and they couldn’t correct the error; all they could do was to have me send the book back and get a refund and buy the phone again – which of course took me out of the preorder program.

Yeah, no. There’s too much bullshit with Amazon to trust them with expensive gear.

Very true. Good coworkers can make work a lot more bearable.

Looking a bit into the company’s business can help, too. If they do something vaguely interesting that can be a bonus. I ignored that once in favor of perks and that got me into the complete disaster area that is fintech. Don’t make the same mistake.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I fully agree. Undefined behavior is terrible UX and a huge security risk.

Undefined behavior was kind of okay when RAM and storage were measured in kilobytes and adding checks for this stuff was noticeably expensive. That time has passed, though, and modern developers have no business thinking like that, even ones working on low-level languages.

I should’ve phrased my comment differently.

Yeah, that’s basically the kind of logic you use when designing a low-level programming language: If we didn’t define what happens here then anything that happens is correct behavior and it’s up to the user to avoid it.

Of course applying that logic to a GUI application intended for a comparatively nontechnical audience is utter madness.

That one’s easy. Is the crash part of the program’s design?

If not: It’s an implementation bug, the program is not behaving as intended.

If yes: It’s a design bug, crashes shouldn’t be intended behavior.

Ever since the BE200 debacle I don’t know if I can trust Intel to deliver. Sure, the stuff that’s already out there works but who knows if any of their future stuff will?