This is a case of you having some very specific requirements that can only be met in a certain way, that being Windows in this case. Whether or not a switch makes sense depends on how important those requirements are to you. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

I personally found the ability to override a game’s rendering settings to only be worth it in very few cases but that’s me. But if you use it a lot then you use it a lot.

As for AI upscaling, my main issue there is that Nvidia chose a name so generic that it’s hard to google. And then they made a second unrelated feature with a very similar name.

There is AI video upscaling for Linux but it probably doesn’t work quite the same way Nvidia’s offering does. That might be a problem or it might not; I admittedly only invested a minute to look it up so I don’t have any details.

The same applies to SDR-to-HDR. There seems to be something but it probably doesn’t work like what you currently use.

So in the end you’ll have to decide whether you’d be more annoyed by not having those features or by having to use whatever zany shit Microsoft come up with. Not a great decision but that’s life.

I personally might have stuck with Windows longer on my desktop if my 4080 hadn’t turned out to be wonky and Nvidia’s driver hadn’t turned out to be so capricious that I had to spend two months ruling out plausible error causes. That drove me back to AMD, which made the switch easy. But again, that’s me and not you.

Ah, the old Nvidia problem. It’s true that Nvidia’s Linux driver isn’t very good (although I don’t think their Windows driver is very good either, it just has more features).

The 3D Settings page is specific to the Nvidia Windows driver. Even an AMD user might’ve been slightly confused (although AMD ships comparable features, just located elsewhere under a different name). This is indeed something the Linux drivers plain don’t have in that form, although I can’t remember the last time I felt a need to really muck around in there.

Admittedly, overriding game rendering behavior might not even always be possible, seeing that DirectX games are run through a translation layer before the GPU gets to do anything.

I wasn’t able to find solid info for AI upscaling even on Windows, mainly because of the terrible name of that feature and because Nvidia offers both “AI Upscaling” and “Nvidia Image Scaling” and I have no idea if those are the same thing. The former seems to be specific to the Nvidia SHIELD.

Unless you’re talking about DLSS, which is supported.

The HDR one is odd but might again be related to the Nvidia driver not being very good. This should improve in the future but they are admittedly trailing behind.

That’s less of an issue these days. In the 2000s it was like that, especially since people used all sorts of add-in cards. These days a lot of those cards have merged with the mainboard (networking, sound, USB) or have fallen out of fashion (e.g. TV tuners).

The mainboard stuff is generally well-supported. The days of the Winmodem are over. The big issues these days are special-purpose hardware (which generally doesn’t work with later Windows versions either), laptops, and Nvidia GPUs (which are getting better).

Tossing Gentoo onto an old Pentium III box, typing emerge world and coming back four hours later to see if it’s done was awesome.

And no, it wasn’t done compiling KDE yet.

But I definitely wouldn’t want to experiment with Linux on my only PC with no way to look things up if I break networking (or the whole system). Thankfully, this is no longer an issue in the age of smartphones.

There are many OS-related diseases. Many Linux users are affected by or at least know someone who suffers from the compulsive need to mention that they’re using Arch. Then there’s compiler flag addiction, which can develop in Gentoo users. iDependency, the pathological need to purchase any product Apple releases, has financially ruined many macOS users. Windows users’ feelings towards Windows Update and the associated increase in heart rate are known to substantially increase the risk of a fatal heart attack.

Knowing how to operate TempleOS is considered a mental disorder under the DSM-5.

They did PR campaigns against Linux and OpenOffice for quite some time – until cloud computing took off and it turned out they could earn more money by supporting Linux than by fighting it.

In fact, Microsoft weren’t happy about FOSS in general. I can still remember when they tried to make “shared source” a thing: They made their own ersatz OSI with its own set of licenses, some of which didn’t grant proper reuse rights – like only allowing you to use the source code to write Windows applications.

You’d need to fork if you decided that you don’t like the direction an engine is moving towards. Other than that there’s no real reason.

You could technically fork Blink but the question is whether you have the resources to keep up with web standards. The Web is effectively the universal UI toolkit these days and the pace of development reflects that.

Hurd?

Modern ANC is impressive.

When I’m on my bike I actually have less wind noise with my earbuds in than with my bare ears, which was a pretty odd feeling at first.

I also have a pair of over-ears, Sony XM5s, which have even better ANC. Used those while vacuuming and didn’t hear the motor of the vacuum cleaner. I heard its wheels, though. Freaky.

Of course all of this is tied to the usual Bluetooth headphone drawbacks so YMMV.

On the other hand Bluetooth can crackle if the airwaves are too noisy, you have to spend more for the same audio quality (and it’s still going to take a nosedive when calling someone because A2DP codecs like AAC or AptX aren’t available in HSP mode), and the buds have limited batteries which makes them unreliable for long-term wear.

It’s all about trade-offs and individual requirements. Of course these days you’re pushed to get wireless ones because most phone manufacturers are too cheap to include a headphone jack.

Eh. I went for TWSes for my latest purchase because I wanted anti-wind ANC. I still have a wired pair (and one of those silly USB adapters) for long-term operation, though.

The TWS equivalent to that is one of the buds no longer turning on. I just had to RMA a pair because of that.

And I wouldn’t know where to start using it. My problems are often of the “integrate two badly documented company-internal APIs” variety. LLMs can’t do shit about that; they weren’t trained for it.

They’re nice for basic rote work but that’s often not what you deal with in a mature codebase.

Like every time there’s an AI bubble. And like every time changes are that in a few years public interest will wane and current generative AI will fade into the background as a technology that everyone uses but nobody cares about, just like machine translation, speech recognition, fuzzy logic, expert systems…

Even when these technologies get better with time (and machine translation certainly got a lot better since the sixties) they fail to recapture their previous levels of excitement and funding.

We currently overcome what popped the last AI bubbles by throwing an absurd amount of resources at the problem. But at some point we’ll have to admit that doubling the USA’s energy consumption for a year to train the next generation of LLMs in hopes of actually turning a profit this time isn’t sustainable.

New poll shows whether Harris or Trump is leading in favorability rating

A recently-released poll purports to contain information about the current relative popularity of presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump with voters. We heard reports that the poll’s findings are “informative”, yet “probably outdated in two weeks”. The intended target audience is people with an interest in American politics who can read and compare numbers, although sources informed us that one or more graphical representation (or “graph”) is provided for less mathematically-inclined people.

At press time, the Democrats have confirmed that the poll indeed shows relative popularity numbers while Donald Trump merely remarked that “we have the best polls, tremendous polls, everyone tells me about the numbers, it’s great”.

Pundits suggest that this kind of poll is commonly associated with the election season and that further polls are likely. We will keep you informed as the situation develops.

I just use the Europass CV Builder. Works fine for me, has been for well over a decade now.

Definitely one of the more subtle benefits of the EU: They made a perfectly serviceable resume builder.

(But yeah, a LaTeX template would also just work forever. This stuff is what TeX and its derivatives are great at.)

That’s why they’re on the plane; they’re working overseas.

Given that I literally said I personally encountered this problem: Yes, it does. It’s mostly just an annoyance that goes straight onto the “Windows Update jank” pile but I have wasted quite a bit of time helping people deal with connectivity issues that could down to “tinc_vpn” getting automatically renamed to “Network Connection 7”.

Tinc gets broken by Windows updates every once in a while. The problem is that the update sometimes renames the network connections and Tinc needs the connection to have a specific name to work.

That’s the one I personally ran into several times now.