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.

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.

Sure, but we’re talking about a handheld. Yes, performance is improving generation over generation, but in the handheld space power usage and heat dissipation are equally important. If you’ve been keeping up with recent innovations, you’ll see that generally we are making more powerful parts, but they’re getting much more power hungry for every little percent of improvement they bring in raw horsepower. So far it doesn’t look like you could even get Xbox series S performance in a handheld yet. At least not at a reasonably portable size, cost, or battery life. You could get a little better than PS4 pro performance in a handheld at present, based on what I’ve seen. Which is not a full generational leap over what’s out there.

If they released one NOW they’d probably be shooting themselves in the foot. At best they’d get mid-generational performance improvements whereas likely in the next year or two Valve is probably going to drop a true SteamDeck 2 with significant improvements. All speculation at this point, but if you’re a bean counter at Microsoft, speculation is like 90% of your job. Unless they abandon the standard console release cycle and shoot for faster iteration, they’ll want to come out absolutely swinging to compete.

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.

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.

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.

Both glowing portions are natural gas pipes. Perhaps it’s somehow ignited inside the pipes and is super heating them but also somehow NOT travelling outside the two glowing sections and burning the house down???

Adding repos can just be done inside a Toolbox, or even as Overlays. Grub can also be edited and changes applied to immutable OS’s like Bazzite/Kinoite. I’d definitely say give it a shot on a non-daily driver machine and see how you like it. Having the option to mess with the underpinnings can be nice- but not having to has a lot of value as well.

I know, right? It’s so hard to “really” mess something up and Toolboxes are very cool for things not served by Flatpaks or Overlays.

Regarding your not wanting to go with an immutable distro: what configs are you thinking you’ll need to mess with that makes an immutable distro a bad idea exactly? I was previously on the fence about it as well but Bazzite has absolutely served my needs and requires way less fiddling than my previous Nobara install did after major updates. I have yet to find any day to day configurations that I haven’t been able to overcome with OSTree overlaying. Aside from being immutable, Bazzite literally checks every other box you’ve got listed.

Why would I recommend Fileflows? It was a little more user friendly in my experience without requiring pulling in configurations from other sources. I know there are repos chalk full of Tdarr settings and configs, but for simple setups and DIY I preferred the Fileflows interface. The end result is basically the same, so pick your poison.

Isn’t AMD’s HEVC/265 still decent, specifically? I feel like I read that somewhere years back. 264 has always been a weak spot for them, however.

I might recommend fileflows over tdarr- but either way some kind of similar solution is almost mandatory with the grab bag of arbitrary encodings you find out there.

Atomic OS’s (especially Fedora based) with Nvidia are going to be a bit of a pain. Did you follow all the instructions found Here ? I personally gave up on silverblue/kinoite after I tried Bazzite. Similar bases, but the Bazzite devs paid special attention to GPU and accessory drivers/implementations that are otherwise much more painful in Fedora Atomics. You can always do a clean rebase then re-run the steps above (only the OSTree section).

Xbox controllers (Xbox One and newer) have been absolutely solid for me with the xone driver + xpadneo, regardless of distro. Bazzite has everything I need baked in, so it was completely plug and play. Not a very interesting answer, I know. But it still blows me away that it “just works.”

Very true. But brute force checking through tons of different settings for each camera you need to configure is not fun. I couldn’t seem to find any kind of “known working configs” database or anything either. Every camera seems to be different in what it expects, outputs, authenticates, etc. Once it’s set up, I agree, maintaining the config is easier. Having all your cameras match in model and firmware version probably makes the whole endeavor MUCH easier.