You’re welcome :)

Not a bad idea :)

You’re hitting a problem I have with Ublue as well. I wanted to experiment with immutable distros last year, but Ublue provided extremely little information on how their different flavors actually differed under the hood. I ended up having to search through their forums for like an hour to find snippets of how their different when some people asked, but it was never comprehensive.

From what I recall, Bazzite had a few kernel optimizations for gaming, and received updates at a faster frequency than Bluefin, with one of the devs saying that Bazzite would be more likely to experience regressions due to it being more bleeding edge.

Looking at Bazzite’s front page now, they actually seem to be doing a better job of mentioning what’s unique about it than when I last tried it. But Bluefin and Aurora are still ambiguous.

It’s always been based on stable, AFAIK.

Maybe the notebook needed newer kernel code?

If it was able to boot the Live USB to install it, I figure that means the kernel is new enough to actually run the laptop properly. I can only guess something in the installer itself was messing up somehow? Or perhaps it wasn’t making an entry in the boot table? That’s an odd one for sure.

Only Bluefin LTS is based on CentOS. Standard Bluefin is based on Fedora.

LMDE is not based on Sid, it’s based on Debian Stable. LMDE 7 is currently based on Debian 13 Trixie. You sure you had the right ISO?

Cinnamon was written from scratch to reflect a more traditional desktop metaphor. It was not created from existing GNOME code.

Many parts of Cinnamon were forked from Gnome 3 and Gnome 2 (Mate).

• XPlayer was forked from Gnome Videos (Totem)
• Xviewer was forked from Eye of Gnome
• Xreader was forked from Atril from MATE (itself a fork of Envince from Gnome 2)
• Xed is a fork of Pluma (itself a fork of Gedit 2)
• Cinnamon’s compositor, Muffin, was forked from Gnome 3’s Mutter compositor

Many other parts of Cinnamon are made from scratch, but it is not wrong the say it’s also a Gnome 3 fork in many ways.

Personally I think it matters in this case due to the odd way that Matrix is designed to share metadata with all federated servers, which means the one run by Matrix/Element basically has access virtually all metadata on the network, which considering their background, is concerning for me. I wrote more about that aspect here: https://lemmy.cafe/post/31672929/15961430

That would be impossible to enforce practically, and would devastate businesses, their main financial supporters.

Matrix is so laggy and clunky and slow and annoying. XMPP was just perfect. And the “Conversations” client, for XMPP, is so fucking fast.

I’ve noticed that as well, XMPP has never been laggy in my experience, it’s very snappy. Matrix is hit or miss, sometimes fine, sometimes a bit slow, especially in larger rooms.

How does XMPP’s E2EE compare to matrix’?

As far as I know, XMPP’s OMEMO encryption is modeled off of Signal’s encryption, but modified to function without a centralized server. It’s generally regarded as a very solid, strong encryption, even better than openPGP.

Matrix’s encryption uses Megolm or olm, which I believe is also regarded well as far as the encryption itself. The issue is that Matrix’s inherent design means it’s spreading copies of the metadata of those messages (though the contents of the message itself is encrypted) far and wide to many servers unnessesarily. Seeing as a lot can still be gleaned from metadata (when a message was sent, to who it was sent to), it’s a concerning model considering how big the main Matrix server is, which means that it usually always receives a copy of all metadata activity on the protocol, unless a self-hosted server completely kills federation (which defeats the point of it).

A good comment from an older reddit thread summed it up well:

matrix.org is unique because it hosts so many user accounts. As a result, it becomes a metadata honeypot for the entire matrix network. It’s kind of a design flaw in my eyes. Matrix is great. But it would be even better if it didn’t have this issue.

Xmpp is federated, but you have the option of not sharing chat metadata with other servers on the network. Matrix doesn’t give that option. matrix.org is effectively a central server due to the fact that a majority of accounts are hosted there, AND all metadata associated with those accounts, which includes metadata from other servers they communicate with, accumulates on matrix.org. I would suspect a very high percentage of matrix metadata, ends up on a single server. Xmpp just does not have this problem.

I’ve never used Instagram, so I wouldn’t know how it compares, but Movim looks like this, which is very Discord-like to me.

As I mentioned in my previous comment, the only thing missing from Movim is collections of rooms under a single group/channel, which the developer is actively working on.

It’s a downside in my opinion, considering the police in most countries assist in maintaining the control of corporations and authoritarian governments. To offer services to them knowing this is a negative ethical marker for a company.

Matrix because it seems like the most logical choice - largest platform that’s federated/decentralised and has end-to-end encryption.

Personally I’ve had consistent problems with messages not un-encrypting in Matrix, requiring frequent re-sending of messages. I’m also not a fan of how much Metadata is shared across the Matrix network even with encryption, nor am I fan of the history of the group (Amdocs) who developed and funded it, or the willingness of the Matrix/Element team to sell their services to law enforcement (They had purchased a booth at a police convention).

Movim has all of the same features as Matrix without those downsides, if you’d like to give that a try instead.

The fascist noose is tightening the world over thanks to proprietary big tech. We have to escape now while we can to open-source alternatives.

Currently the best (in my subjective opinion) self-hostable, encrypted and federated (like lemmy/piefed) alternative is Movim.

It offers 90% of the features of Discord, including group video calls, group texts, and even screensharing with audio (must use a Chromium based browser currently to share the audio). The only feature missing is discord-style rooms, which the dev is currently working on to release as fast as possible.

It doesn’t even require an email to create an account, and runs right in your browser, so it has an extremely low barrier to entry. Give it a try with a friend to see if it can meet your needs! :D

For a more complete guide to swapping proprietary apps for safe open-source ones, I suggest referring to this post: https://lemmy.cafe/post/18663514

The fascist noose is tightening the world over thanks to proprietary big tech. We have to escape now while we can to open-source alternatives.

Currently the best (in my subjective opinion) self-hostable, encrypted and federated (like lemmy/piefed) alternative is Movim.

It offers 90% of the features of Discord, including group video calls, group texts, and even screensharing with audio (must use a Chromium based browser currently to share the audio). The only feature missing is discord-style rooms, which the dev is currently working on to release as fast as possible.

It doesn’t even require an email to create an account, and runs right in your browser, so it has an extremely low barrier to entry. Give it a try with a friend to see if it can meet your needs! :D

For a more complete guide to swapping proprietary apps for safe open-source ones, I suggest referring to this post: https://lemmy.cafe/post/18663514

I think you may have an unrealistic idea of how much power low or mid-range gaming PC’s use. Only at the very top-end of PC’s with extreme overclocked components pushed to the limit would you come near 1000w (a $3000 Nvidia GTX 5090 graphics card can use 575w, as an example).

The Steam Machine uses effectively a laptop CPU (35W TDP) that’ll likely use 40 to 50w max, and the GPU is also a beefed up laptop GPU with a 110W TDP (it’ll probably peak at 140 to 150w, I’m guessing).

Overall it’ll probably idle at 10 or 15w, and likely use around 70w under average gaming, or 150 to 200w when pushed hard.

The Steamdeck is certainly still more power efficient (it peaks at 25w when pushed hard), and if you find that it’s powerful enough for the games you play, there’s not much reason to consider getting anything else. But the Steam Machine will be pretty power efficient for a desktop. It kinda has to be, since it only has a single fan for cooling.

I doubt it would be feasible to replace the power supply with something that takes 12v DC

All PC’s run off a power supply that inverts 120/220v AC to 3.3V 5V, and 12V DC for the internal components to run off of. Your Steamdeck charger is no different from the power supply inside a desktop PC, it’s just smaller and put in an external shell.

Unless by 12v DC, you mean you’re charging your Steamdeck with solar panels or from batteries directly, in which case, you could use an Inverter to power the Steam Machine.

Cyberpunk for sure will play well, as it was one of the games that testers were able to play on one during a preview event. I believe it’s the most demanding game as well, so the rest of your list should work fine as well.

They played it at 4K on ultra settings (with FSR on), and had playable framerates. At 1440p or 1080, you wouldn’t even need FSR.

I’m happily playing with Intel HD 630 integrated graphics myself, though my taste in games doesn’t usually require a beefy GPU.

I think we’ll still get unoptimized crap, but it may sway some studios to consider that lower-end market. We’ll never truly know how much of a difference it makes, but it will undeniably be another data point they’ll have to consider in terms of potential profit.

The new Indiana Jones game straight up couldn’t be played past the first level with 8gb of vram (and their forced ray-tracing made it require a beefier GPU to get playable framerates), and I’m always curious if that noticeably lowered sales compared to their projections by locking gamers with lower-end hardware.

Unfortunately, I’m not very optimistic because of the Unreal Engine monoculture

That is a setback, and I’m not sure how much can truly be done for a studio that opts for UE, other than limiting their game to an artstyle that requires a lower polycount, and perhaps reducing the amount of assets in areas like they used to do for older consoles, but I too doubt that’ll happen.

I’m actually kinda glad it has only 8gb for an odd reason; I hope it encourages devs to optimize their games more so they aren’t locked out of the steam machine market.