Assuming you had a pretty decent monitor and graphics output in the 90s, it may have been 800x600, but more likely 640x480, and you’d have been using the standard issue bitmap font with no anti-aliasing, blitted to screen using software rendering. Probably in a single colour, too.

Alas, the problem with that is that it doesn’t scale. On xterm a 4K monitor, I can watch Vim redrawing the screen, paging through logs is painful. Use Kitty for the same, it’s instant, I can flip through tabs and split screens too, and have niceties like anti-aliased fonts and transparency if I want them.

Some people spend a lot of time in the terminal, so I can’t fault them for taking the time to make a nice working environment and sharing that work with others.

Ah, fair enough - thought you might have only seen a picture like this if it, which doesn’t give a good impression if it. Apologies.

The original is quite large-print. Also, completely gorgeous as OP notes. This image could do with a few more of them pixels.

Bear in mind as well that the Scottish government rejected a lot of the privatisation that the remainder of the UK went through, so ‘government’ doesn’t just mean civil servants in offices, it means things like Scottish Forestry and Scottish Water as well. Need to manage small teams of people over very large areas who are frequently out of mobile phone contact, as well as sharing information with subcontractors who will frequently be one-man-band operators who may just have a van and a mobile phone; no laptop, no IT team.

So ‘convenient’, but also ‘almost nothing else would be practicable’.

I’d probably go with a “kitchen” metaphor here.

The executable for a program is a list of instructions for the CPU to execute. Windows and Linux gaming machines will usually use x64. Most of the instructions are logic eg. how to add numbers together, what comparisons to make, what to copy from one place to another; and they’re exactly the same on both Windows and Linux, you can run them as-is.

Some instructions ask the operating system to do things, like open a file to read. Windows and Linux do these quite differently, but you know how one works then you can change it to the equivalent ask for the other machine. Making the translation takes a moment, but some things are faster on Linux than Windows, so it’s not very easy to generalise as to whether it’ll be faster overall to do certain things. The really important operating system calls for games tend to be messages to pass to the GPU, and the Proton team have put a lot of work into making these as fast as possible.

If you think of it like following a food recipe, then given the ingredients you’d expect that most people would produce exactly the same meal by following it. Most of the steps will be exactly the same for everyone. However, if a step requires a piece of equipment that you don’t have, then it might take longer to follow the recipe if you’ve got to make do with different stuff. Similarly, you might be able to prepare things quicker if you’ve got a whole pile of restaurant-level gear and can do some of the steps differently.

Flightless Mango used to have some good comparisons, but they’re about four years out-of-date, now. Even then, you’d expect between 10% worse and 5% better on Linux. https://flightlessmango.com/benchmarks/

Forbes article here is from this year; expect between 5% worse and 25% better when running on Linux. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2024/08/21/linux-scores-a-surprising-gaming-victory-against-windows-11/

General experience is that generally there’s no noticeable difference at all; some games that use new features might have bad performance until the new features are implemented. Last game I really had a problem with was Horizon Zero Dawn. Elden Ring had bad performance on launch day, but was fixed the next day I think.

Yang Tengbo; “businessman” rather than anyone particularly public.

Good news is that it’s such a bastard to program efficiently that most games don’t make full use of it and you can get away with a certain amount of approximation in its behaviour for speed. Nice work, Sony.

Compare that with z80 or 6502 based machines, where you need to be beyond cycle perfect in some cases. Need to simulate every rising and falling edge for the CPU and its coprocessors in a SNES if you want to avoid every edge case, for instance.

Thought they were running GPT on a Playstation3 cluster, there. Sure, get the PS3 for cheap, but spare parts will be a bastard.

At first, the air of mystery suggested hidden depths, but increasing exposure revealed that it was all just woven from thin air and would routinely come out with increasingly absurd stories that contradicted previous statements.

Also, the X-Files.

Yeah. It’s essential that filesystems are actively supported, as they’re so core to the operation of the computer. ReiserFS isn’t supported, and in addition is built on unscaleable ideas, the behaviour of fsck is unjustifiable, and requiring a reformat to upgrade is unacceptable. Use ext3/4 for performance, BtrFS for the journaling properties and checksumming, or ZFS for cluster availability instead.

Am so done with these sexy hedgehogs. You put your prick into them, you get hundreds back.

For the love of God, Montresor!

What a shower of twats. Don’t block the request in that case, just redirect it to your local server that returns a 1x1 transparent png for all requests.

Invested in a water cooler setup back when I had a Bulldozer chip, which was near essential. Now on a Ryzen, and getting it to exceed about 35 degrees is very difficult. Been very good for long-term stability of my desktop - all the niggling hard disk issues seem to just go away when they’ve not subjected to such thermal cycling any more.

Fantastic chips.

By the time you’ve paid for the game, a headset, a suitable graphics card, and about two dozen pairs of trousers to ruin for every hour of gameplay, then that sounds a pretty expensive hobby.

IVEBEENUSINGTHISKEYBORDFORWHOLEMONTHNDMMOREEFFICIENTTHNIVEEVERBEENBEFORE

No ‘a’, so it’s perfect for ordering some piss.

Clicking the ‘Activate’ link prompts you to enter your shoe size and postal address, so that you may receive a shark plush toy and your own pair of The Socks.

Impressive, since “network effects” are what keeps people on a platform. Why move off Xitter or FB when everyone’s on there, and not on the new place? Keep moving a significant fraction of a million people every week, and pretty soon, it’ll be where everyone is.

My partner, who is very non-technical, signed up for a BlueSky as well this week: “all the teacher blogs have declared that they are moving over”. Looks like everyone has had enough.