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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2025

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  • Picking up any hobby from scratch is going to have a learning curve. If you can deal with the teething issues then gaming is one of the easier hobbies to get into. If you can follow guides then it’s pretty easy to get set up, and as a bonus if you aren’t an asshole about things and follow instructions reasonably well then finding someone to help you with getting specific issues resolved is pretty easy.

    Like with any hobby you can really get into the weeds as far as what’s “easiest” because everyone is just going to recommend the setup that works for them and that may not work for you out of the box. You are going to need to put some legwork into figuring out the hardware no matter what you buy. PC gaming is by far the cheapest and most flexible, full stop. You don’t need a new PC to play games either, there is this odd misconception that you need high end hardware for anything and… No… Just no. You can play anything up to the Xbox One/PS4 generation of games (including PC) on computers that were midrange in 2018.

    Grab an old PC collecting dust in the corner somewhere, install Fedora or Mint on it, and just use steam to launch anything you want to play. Explore the built in software repositories, those games are completely free, run on anything, and are surprisingly good in a lot of cases. If you end up wanting to play more and feel held back by the computer then look into something better. If you feel like you aren’t enjoying it and want to upgrade the hardware just to see if that’s what will make it click then it probably won’t.

    If you are really sold on the idea of consoles then don’t discount modding an older system like an Xbox 360 or PS3, once they are set up you can just pick a game and go.

    At the end of the day just find a system that you already have or that you can get for an amount you wouldn’t care about losing. You don’t want to drop a grand on a computer or a console with a bunch of games and never use it. Try playing some of the good free stuff and see if it’s worth investing into first.




  • You need to set an override in your environment variables to force it to use the gfx1030 kernel modules, but otherwise you shouldn’t have too many issues.

    It’s unofficial, but the 6700xt uses the exact same core as one of the supported enterprise cards, so just using the drivers for it generally works just fine. I use a 6800M personally.

    If you are struggling to get rocm installed at all then stop using the amd guides and just install the pre built binaries directly. Fedora packages them in their repository and in my experience rocm just works once you run dnf install rocm*.




  • I just finished refurbishing an aging G5, and while it has some issues overall it has been an absolute workhorse. Especially given its price, not many laptops hold up to nearly 15,000 hours of power-on time between any major maintenance.

    Dell batteries also don’t balloon or catch fire when they die, they fail gracefully and just stop holding charge. Too many popped mac and Razer batteries sitting in the battery bins at my local recycler, but they have a whole shelf of used Dell batteries that have a couple more years in them.




  • Yeah, Razer does their own thing and they do it poorly. I do a lot of laptop and PC repair, and I take some pretty tough jobs. Razer jobs range from insane to impossible and will just break again a month later. They have awful cooling, their screens are completely glued, their hinges fail constantly, their motherboards popcorn if you try to replace components on them, and almost every one routes the screws on the motherboard through the power plane somewhere on the board, making even a hair of an overtightened screw cause a fried board.

    Did I mention the ribbon cables? They make them out of the most fragile material and use way more than is necessary. They are worse than a New 3DS as far as how easy it is to break both the ribbons and sockets.

    They are so bad. I will take a recent Alienware or a new MacBook any day of the week.







  • New instructions and only having to deal with one codebase are big, but there are some fringe reasons regarding security that I could see also being a factor. A 32-bit processor means something like a thunderbird athlon on the high end, maybe an old Pentium 4. Single core and pushing 30 in the best cases. You need an operating system that supports that chip, and there really is only so much you can do to make that setup even work in 2025.

    It’s more a matter of why support that? Trying to run steam on a single core Athlon from 2000 would be painfully slow, to the point of being unusable. You couldn’t reasonably even keep steam running with a game, it would hog too much CPU. It’s possible to try it if you have an ancient tower laying around (don’t use your real steam account online with something like windows XP, it will be compromised in seconds connecting to the internet).

    People with systems like that are going to need to use gog installers or use period accurate methods to install games. 32-bit only processors were already on the chopping block when steam came out, they really can’t handle modern steam. It would be a bit unreasonable to expect them to add a separate version for those chips, especially with the vulnerable operating systems they require going online being an issue, so we are left with a vestigial feature of 32-bit support for no great reason.

    It really just makes more sense to cut it than keep it for the sake of novelty. There is some liability in keeping it, as well as technical overhead.

    Sorry for the ramble.