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      Yes, you can play Starfield on Steam Deck, but really, you shouldn’t

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 6 September, 2023 - 20:09

    Character in Starfield addressing the player head-on

    Enlarge / Playing Starfield on the Steam Deck does not feel like reveling in mankind's great capacity for wonder and discovery. (credit: Bethesda Game Studios)

    Starfield , Bethesda's epic planet-hopping first-person RPG , is now widely available, and that includes on handheld gaming PCs. Both Valve's Steam Deck and the Asus ROG Ally picked up recent system updates that made it possible to play the game without crashes.

    I can confirm the game runs on both systems, having experienced early access crashes and now a bit of normal gameplay today. But I don't think there's much point to playing locally on either system. Streaming remotely with Game Pass, or locally with Moonlight or Xbox Remote Play , is a better option, presuming you can do so without much input lag.

    If you do try to force Starfield to load on your handheld, the graphics and frame rates will range from muddy to just acceptable, the battery life will be quite bad, and your experience with perhaps the best part of Bethesda RPGs—the sense of wonder and discovery in wide-open spaces—will be severely limited.

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      Getting AAA games working in Linux sometimes requires concealing your GPU

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 9 August, 2023 - 17:57 · 1 minute

    Hogwarts Legacy screenshot

    Enlarge / There are some energies you should not tap for sorcery, something both Hogwarts students and Hogwarts Legacy installs running under Linux should know. (credit: Warner Bros. Games)

    Linux gaming's march toward being a real, actual thing has taken serious strides lately , due in large part to Valve's Proton-powered Steam Play efforts . Being Linux, there are still some quirks to figure out. One of them involves games trying to make use of Intel's upscaling tools.

    Intel's ARC series GPUs are interesting , in many senses of the word. They offer the best implementation of Intel's image reconstruction system, XeSS, similar to Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR. XeSS, like its counterparts, utilizes machine learning to fill in the pixel gaps on anti-aliased objects and scenes. The results are sometimes clear, sometimes a bit fuzzy if you pay close attention. In our review of Intel's A770 and A750 GPUs in late 2022, we noted that cross-compatibility between all three systems could be in the works.

    That kind of easy-swap function is not the case when a game is running on a customized version of the WINE Windows-on-Linux, translating Direct3D graphics calls to Vulkan and prodding to see whether it, too, can make use of Intel's graphics boost. As noted by Phoronix , Intel developers contributing to the open source Mesa graphics project added the ability to hide an Intel GPU from the Vulkan Linux driver.

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      Rest in peace Bram Moolenaar, author of Vim and hero of many developers

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 8 August, 2023 - 13:18 · 1 minute

    Moolenaar in 2007.

    Enlarge / Moolenaar in 2007. (credit: Sebastian Bergmann via Creative Commons )

    Computing as we know it today was built in no small part by individuals who have written open source software—often for little to no personal financial gain—as well as by developers who use those tools. Few tools like that are as legendary and impactful as the Vim open source code editor, the first version of which was written and released by Dutch engineer Bram Moolenaar in 1991.

    According to a note published by his family to Google Groups this week, Moolenaar passed away on August 3 at the age of 62. The post did not share his cause of death, stating only that he had been suffering from a medical condition for a few weeks. They wrote :

    It is with a heavy heart that we have to inform you that Bram Moolenaar passed away on 3 August 2023.
    Bram was suffering from a medical condition that progressed quickly over the last few weeks.

    Bram dedicated a large part of his life to VIM and he was very proud of the VIM community that you are all part of.

    The note goes on to say that they are arranging a Dutch-language funeral service in the Netherlands for Moolenaar, but that a date has not yet been set.

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      AlmaLinux says Red Hat source changes won’t kill its RHEL-compatible distro

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 24 July, 2023 - 19:38

    AlmaLinux's live media, offering a quick spin or installation.

    Enlarge / AlmaLinux lets you build applications that work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux but can't promise the exact same bug environment. That's different from how they started, but it's also a chance to pick a new path forward. (credit: AlmaLinux OS)

    I asked benny Vasquez, chair of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, how she would explain the recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code controversy to somebody at a family barbecue—somebody who, in other words, might not have followed the latest tech news quite so closely.

    "Most of my family barbecues are going to be explaining that Linux is an operating system," Vasquez said. "Then explaining what an operating system is."

    It is indeed tricky to explain all the pieces—Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, CentOS Stream, Fedora, RHEL, Alma, Rocky, upstreams, downstreams, source code, and the GPL—to anyone who isn't familiar with Red Hat's quirky history , and how it progressed to the wide but disparate ecosystem it has today. And, yes, Linux in general. But Vasquez was game to play out my thought experiment.

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      Linux could be 3% of global desktops. What happened to Windows?

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 12 July, 2023 - 21:47

    Linux on the desktop, only going up

    How can you argue against these numbers? (credit: 20th Century Fox / Aurich Lawson)

    According to one measurement by one firm, Linux reached 3.07 percent market share of global desktop operating systems in June 2023. It's a notable first for the more than 30-year-old operating system, though other numbers in Statcounter's chart open it up to many more interpretations. It's either the year of the Linux desktop or a notable asterisk—your call.

    As Statcounter explains , its numbers come from tracking code installed on more than 1.5 million websites across the globe, capturing roughly 5 billion page views per month. Statcounter says it does not collate, weigh, or otherwise adjust its data aside from correcting for bots and Google Chrome's prerendering. Laptops are included in "desktop" because there is no easy way to separate them. And they're subject to revision for up to 45 days after publication.

    Five years ago , Linux made up 1.69 percent of Statcounter's June numbers. In the year between June 2022 and 2023, Linux unsteadily crept up from 2.42 to 3.07 percent, jumping past 3 percent for the first time between May and June. If you regard Chrome OS as a Linux system, you could add that 4.13 percent and get to 7.2 percent.

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      Two core Unix-like utilities, sudo and su, are getting rewrites in Rust

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 1 May, 2023 - 17:05

    Two of the most fundamental tools of the modern Unix-like command line, sudo and su, are being rewritten in the modern language Rust as part of a wider effort to get critical but aging infrastructure pieces replaced by memory-safe counterparts.

    As detailed at Prossimo , a joint team from Ferrous Systems and Tweede Golf , with support from Amazon Web Services, is reimplementing sudo and su. These utilities allow a user to perform actions with the privileges of another user (typically a higher-level superuser) without having to learn and enter that other user's password. Given their age and wide usage, the Prossimo team believes it's time for a rework.

    "Sudo was first developed in the 1980s. Over the decades, it has become an essential tool for performing changes while minimizing risk to an operating system," writes Josh Aas. "But because it's written in C, sudo has experienced many vulnerabilities related to memory safety issues."

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      Linux Improves Its Random Number Generator

      Bruce Schneier · news.movim.eu / Schneier · Wednesday, 23 March, 2022 - 15:41

    In kernel version 5.17, both /dev/random and /dev/urandom have been replaced with a new — identical — algorithm based on the BLAKE2 hash function, which is an excellent security improvement.

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      System76’s updated 15-inch Pangolin laptop ships with Ryzen 7 5700U CPU

      Jim Salter · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 1 September, 2021 - 19:30 · 1 minute

    hero shot

    Enlarge / System76's Pangolin is a lightweight and relatively slender 15" design with a 1080p matte display and RGB-lit keyboard. (credit: System76 )

    Specs at a glance: System76 Pangolin
    OS Pop!_OS 21.04 or Ubuntu Linux 20.04
    CPU Ryzen 5 5500U or Ryzen 7 5700U
    RAM 8GiB DDR4 (upgradable 60 64GiB)
    GPU AMD Vega 7 integrated
    SSD 240GB to 2TB NVMe
    Battery 49 Wh LiOn
    Wi-Fi Intel dual-band Wi-Fi 6
    Display 15-inch 1080p matte
    Camera 720p
    Connectivity
    • two USB-A 2.0 port
    • one USB-A 3.2 port
    • one USB-C 3.2 port
    • one gigabit Ethernet port
    • 3.5 mm phone/mic combo jack
    • DC power jack
    • full-size HDMI 2.0 out
    • Kensington lock slot
    Entry-level price $1,200 (Ryzen 5500U, 8GiB RAM, 240GB NVMe)

    This week, System76—probably the best-known Linux-only laptop vendor— announced the latest update to its lightweight 15-inch Pangolin laptop series. The newest models of Pangolin are available and shipping today; customers have a choice between a six-core Ryzen 5 5500U and an eight-core Ryzen 7 5700U processor.

    Pangolin was already the first System76 laptop model to offer AMD Ryzen processors, with last-generation Ryzen 4500U and 4700U models announced last December . This year's model bumps up both the processor generation and asking price significantly—last year's Ryzen 4500U Pangolin started at $850, offering 8GiB of RAM and a 240GiB SSD in the entry-level trim. The new 5500U-powered Pangolin runs $1,200 for the same specs.

    AMD Ryzen + Linux for the win

    The increase in price likely reflects additional public awareness of mobile Ryzen's outstanding Linux kernel support as well as its significant raw performance advantage over most competing Intel CPUs. Although we didn't get the chance to test System76's Ryzen 7 4700U, Acer's 4700U-powered Swift 3—which isn't even designed as an OEM Linux laptop—remains one of our all-time favorite systems for dedicated Linux users.

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