Those PCs we had back then weren’t necessarily smaller. 😅 I think we just cared less.

That said, Mini-ITX builds are pretty nice and also in fashion right now. And when it comes to beloved old games anyone can just get an old laptop for the price of one Domino’s Pizza off of ebay and start playing.

Got one of those here. Some old 15€ junker with Intel HD 2000, but that thing will chug through anything from Unreal Tournament to Quake, Age of Empires, Warcraft, Forsaken, Total Annihilation, Dungeon Keeper, Command & Conquer, NFS…

God damn it, you made me listen to my childhood again.

Ah, then you probably also got the Intel GPU and it’s a hybrid configuration with the Nvidia being the “high performance GPU”. If it doesn’t say “kernel driver in use” (at least once you open some demanding application) saying “nvidia” it might uses nouveau, which would be wrong. However given the hybrid configuration your Intel GPU should be the one in control of the display, so no matter what Nvidia screws up it shouldn’t affect your refresh rate settings… I think.

Guess it would be best to head to the linuxmint.com forums and ask there. It’s probably a small fix, like your intel driver not being fully aware of all display capabilities on this specific device (which you could set manually, I’d have to look up the exact xrandr command though - will also change in the future once Mint fully moves from X11 to Wayland).

Perhaps the nvidia driver doesn’t load correctly. Could you open a terminal, enter lspci -nnk and look for your GPU in the list to check if the kernel driver in use says “nvidia” and/or “nvidia_drm”?

That setting rings a bell, I think it was a year-long Nvidia screw-up (one of too many) that only recently gets slowly fixed…

Not having the problem on X11 either (had to go back due to Nvidia on one device). Would be a configuration thing then, it would be really weird for Mint to not have vsync on by default though.

Is this a Mint problem, or tied to certain hardware? I never had screen tearing for years now. Both adaptive sync in games as well as adaptive sync or vsync on desktop just worked out of the box for me.

Lol, stuff like Hellsing Ultimate must’ve given them a reality check.

You could try installing the newest kernel. Mint apparently comes with a great built-in tool to do so. It might contain newer drivers that fix your issues. I also see there’s a variant with Nvidia GPU… in that case it also might be Nvidias fault. Which would be not surprising at all. (Mint got a driver utility you could meddle with).

True, those are awful problems. The whole internet is suffering due to this, I constantly read about fedi instances being literally DDoS’ed by robots.txt ignoring, IP-block circumventing crawlers. Unfortunately there’s no way to prevent any of this right now with our current set of technologies… the best thing we could do is make it a state- or even UN-level affair, reducing the amount of simultaneous training and focus on cooperation instead of competition while upholding high worker’s rights. However that would also be very anti-capitalistic and supposedly “stifle innovation” (as if that’s important in comparison to idk, our world burning?), so it won’t happen either. Banning it completely of course is also impossible, humanity is still way too divided and its benefits for “defends” (against ourselves) too high.

In regards to running locally, we currently see a new wave of chip designs that’ll enable this on increasingly reasonable devices. I myself get a new laptop with XDNA2 chip and 32gb RAM today where I want to try running Codestral w/ Linux (the driver arrived natively in 6.14). Technically it should be possible to run any ~30b model on those newer chips (potentially slightly quantized), I’ll definitely try this a little bit and probably write a thread about it in the OpenSuse forums if you’re interested.

Completely with you on this one. It’s awful when used to generate “art”, but once you’ve learned its short-comings and never blindly trust it it is such a phenomenal help in learning and assisting with code or finding something you’ve a hard time to find the right words for. And aside from generative use-cases neural networks are also phenomenally useful for assisting tasks in science, medicine and so on.

It’s just unfortunate we’re still in the “find out” phase of the information age. It’s like with the industrialization ~200 years ago, just with data… and unfortunately the lessons seem to be equally rough. All the generative tech will deal painful blows to our culture.

It’s the 1 million Euro question.

Yeah, it’s way more sensible to use some of the available regex utilities like this. Although it’s always funny to see what an LLM comes up with.

The refresh rate problem is uncommon… do you use the “Edge” version of Mint or the normal one?

Unfortunately drivers for fingerprint readers (or the lack thereof) are often an issue.

He doesn’t have to hide pain if there is no pain.

Yeah, and if you call them out on it you’re getting pillaged by at least a dozen FOSS-bros telling you that anyone who can’t fix this on their own should go back to Mac or Windows, that it’s your fault, your specific distro’s fault or whatever their most favourite excuse for Desktop Linux’ shortcomings are.

I’m just happy both the Gnome Foundation as well as KDE e.V. are working to fix a lot of this with Flatpak (incl. a payment backend), proper unified development toolchains, Human Design Guidelines, etc… now if there was a nice way to more or less bundle a portable Flatpak package with all its dependencies and have it install neatly when executed (have it be opened by Gnome Software / Discovery), that would be awesome (yes I know about that USB-stick feature, no it’s not the same. Yes I know AppImage, no it’s not the same).

Of course there’ll always be those who’d like to stick with 90’s concepts, software and even languages despite all the problems and make sure Linux stays exactly the way it is.

but from my personal experience the “AMD works way better than Nvidia on Linux” mindset is no longer a thing.

Oh my god it absolutely is, and until NVK becomes the standard everywhere it will most likely stay that way. That shit breaks so often on a laptop I gonna sell soon, on my families’ computers and apparently also in computers from people in my local hackerspace. Some distros just managed to work around those drivers’ problems really well, sometimes by including them from the start of creating their own well-working packages (like Arch’s nvidia-dkms).

It’s already really good to hear you got gaming set up so quickly. A lot of people struggle with that as well either because team green (Nvidia) is involved since their drivers are utter garbage, or due to trying Linux on an older machine that doesn’t support Vulkan (which is a necessity if you want Proton to just work).

The value of getting a perfectly supported machine from a Linux vendor like System76, Tuxedo, Slimbook, StarLabs, NovaCustom etc. can’t be understated. Even more so since you also buy their customer support with it. We must not forget that, even though Linux runs on basically anything, most consumer devices are first-and-foremost Windows machines.

Ah yes, back when Windows Vista and KDE 3 were the hot shit… laggy shit, but still hot…

Putting aside the fact how little the median citizen earned more in wages in comparison to the prices going up:

No, of course not. However it’s not just the games and the console that we’re talking about. We’re talking about them monetizing every single bit more and more, especially adding subscriptions and taking away ownership. In regards to Nintendo at least they still ship real cartridges with the working game on them, but any digital purchase is neither owned by you nor can be preserved without the help of hackers. They try to continuously make money while giving less and then on top of that the prices went up.

Not to mention their patent troll, anti-preservation and fangame-killing practices. Just in case anyone wants to argue for the company being “not as bad as others” or sth.