In my experience, Seagate exos are only “loud/clicky” when under HEAVY write loads. Mostly they’re pretty quiet with a very low drone at worst. In any decent case it’ll be pretty negligible. With headphones on doubly so.

Yeah, logging in pulled across everything, as far as I can tell. Subscriptions included!

Grayjay on Android has been working damn near flawlessly for me. No clue if the parent company is to be trusted at this point or not- but I cannot argue with the results.

Absolutely this. Relatively quick and clean, no messing with installation or reconfiguration. That is, assuming your data isn’t completely corrupted and the old drive doesn’t just outright fail during transfer… But if that happens you were screwed to begin with.

Dark thick beer can also work in place of cocoa, in my experience.

Compatibility is unlikely to be very different. The key is immutability (easy to update, hard to brick your system) and some baked in nice to haves for gaming like some specific drivers/patches and controller support out of the box.

Cheaper than Spotify for the number of users it gives you (at least where I live) and the app itself has functioned significantly better than Spotify’s has in my experience so far while not depriving me of any of the artists and albums I listen to regularly. Early on in its life it was big time selling snake oil, but at this point it’s just a solid alternative to Spotify and YouTube music which have both, frankly, gotten “too big to fail” and have begun enshittification because of it. Man we need more competition…

Just tracking trended data in general would be sufficient to defeat a LARGE number of common cheats. One of the very few use cases “AI” might actually work for in a positive way. But that puts the burden on the developers and server hosters, and it’s much easier to just burden the players directly instead.

My old Nexus 5 was my first smartphone and probably still holds the top spot for price, performance and usability (at the time) of any phone I’ve owned. My current Pixel 6 is somewhat close- but there was just something SO solid and magical about the old Nexus 5.

If you’re gaming you might as well just jump on Bazzite if you’re already interested in Kinoite. Very similar base, but Bazzite has some extras Kinoite doesn’t and it makes a transition into an immutable distro easier.

AMD with ray tracing isn’t great. Not as bad as it used to be, but pretty lackluster overall compared to Nvidia (and to a lesser extent Intel’s GPU offerings). Linux ray tracing via Proton is also not as optimized at present, so that can take something “passable” in windows and make it unplayable on an AMD card in Linux. If you get something overkill for the resolution you’re playing at that can somewhat make up the difference.

If you’re doing 1080p the 6600 is pretty solid. Or 7600, really. It CAN do higher resolutions, but then you’d need to start doing FSR scaling or drop settings to keep things smooth/consistent.

I’m just here to say Bazzite all the way. No clue what that poster meant by breaking issues or problems with rollback… Bazzite is literally designed to be the antithesis of both. The ONLY time I’ve had a problem with it was rebasing my laptop between Silverblue and Bazzite. Technically allowed, but I wouldn’t advise it as that did cause me stability problems. I’d blame Silverblue more than Bazzite in that case, however. A clean Bazzite install has been solid ever since.

You seem to be arguing it’s all about the implementation of the phoning home itself- I’m arguing that running the entire executable/binary through a virtual environment likely has far more drastic performance implications than a phone home, regardless of frequency. It probably IS mostly an implementation problem, but I’m more inclined to believe that the implementation of the Denuvo virtual environment is at fault, not just a server call and response delay. **EDIT: Apologies, forgot to include a link- see HERE. Looks like a substantial/measurable difference. Not massive, as measured here, but certainly enough that if your hardware is just barely able to run a game it could easily make or break the entire experience.

Regarding performance implications: I believe Denuvo DRM runs through a type of virtual machine environment. While this theoretically should be relatively transparent, there are definitely documented instances of it negatively impacting performance, sometimes severely. Maybe the VM it runs in is just bad with certain instructions/calls on certain CPU’s or api’s, hard to tell for sure. But it’s not nothing.

Self hosting Mealie could be a great option to take things into your own hands.

To be more clear I was more focused on the not wanting a car that needs software updates part of the argument, less so the means of delivery. Obviously, having an always on connection absolutely sucks and I’d personally be super down with just pushing an update via a USB drive or whatever like you can a BIOS update. But a lot of manufacturers have it set up so that you have to either pay a dealership to plug in the USB for some arbitrary reason, or demand the always on connection to do it. In a utopia of software development where there are no critical bugs, we would all prefer a car that doesn’t need updates. I didn’t mean to imply that I was arguing in favor of remote connection by manufacturers, and it’s absolutely my bad in not wording it properly.

On the flip side: if a car stereo has a known firmware issue causing problems with say Bluetooth connection, I DO want the manufacturer to actually provide an easy means of fixing/updating the borked software. Better that the system was properly tested and feature complete to begin with- but I’m not delusional enough to believe we can truly have nice things.

Possibly dumb question: why not use an Authentik outpost with a reverse proxy to enforce SSO? It wouldn’t be “baked in” so to speak, but it would be fully OIDC and as long as you’re just running it through a web browser. Biggest downside is you’d need 2 logins (one for the outpost and one for the app). I’d assume the sso is specifically for the extra security though, so that shouldn’t be a problem outside of it being a little hassle.

For what it’s worth- I’ve used them plenty and it’s always appeared to be legitimate. They don’t “stock” every game out there, but they do have most things and they do usually end up being 3-5% cheaper than steam unless steam is having a sale.