Recommendation would be to use a Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter so it can directly connect via PCI Express. These USB Ethernet dongles are often crappy.

USB-C is fairly open, and USB4 can do most things Thunderbolt 3/4 can do, but there are exceptions like daisy-chaining. Thunderbolt 5 is also out now, and it has no open counterpart. And Thunderbolt is very much proprietary, requiring licensing and certification from Intel.

To be fair, USB-C, especially with Thunderbolt, is much more universal. There are adapters for pretty much every “legacy” port out there so if you really need FireWire you can have it, but it’s clear why FireWire isn’t built into the laptop itself anymore.

The top MacBook Pro is also the 2016+ pre Apple Silicon chassis (that was also used with M chips, but sort of as a leftover), while the newer MacBook Pro chassis at least brought back HDMI and an SD card reader (and MagSafe as a dedicated charging port, although USB-C still works fine for that).

Considering modern “docking” solutions only need a single USB-C/Thunderbolt cable for everything, these additional ports only matter when on the go. HDMI comes in handy for presentations for example.

I’d love to see at least a single USB-A port on the MacBook Pro, but that’s likely never coming back. USB-C to A adapters exist though, so it’s not a huge deal. Ethernet can be handy as well, but most use cases for that are docked anyway.

I like the Framework concept the most, also “only” 4 ports (on the 13" at least, plus a built-in combo jack), but using adapter cards you can configure it to whatever you need at that point in time and the cards slide into the chassis instead of sticking out like dongles would. I usually go for one USB-C/Thunderbolt on either side (so charging works on either side), a single USB-A and video out in the form of DisplayPort or HDMI. Sometimes I swap the video out (that also works via USB-C obviously) for Ethernet, even though the Ethernet card sticks out. For a (retro) LAN party, I used 1 USB-C, USB-A (with a 4-port hub for wired peripherals), DisplayPort and Ethernet.

SMS, iMessage and now RCS have been working well for me and I’ve been (primarily) using iPhones for the past 8 years now.

The Messages app shows what type of message (iMessage/SMS/RCS) you’re about to send in the text field and displays which (sent or received) messages are what as well.

One thing I could see going wrong is that a given phone number is registered with iMessage and it hasn’t been disabled after switching to an Android phone for example.

Another (imo more likely) thing is that if it’s using RCS, some carriers don’t seem to work too well with it as of now. iOS seems to have implemented the base standard, while Google added proprietary extensions to said “standard” in Android, like end-to-end encryption. I never had issues sending or receiving RCS messages from/to Android devices, but there might be some hiccups for some people as RCS - even though it’s called a “standard” - isn’t really standardized.

Not sure what’s so insane from Apple’s side about any of that.

Your company should provide you with an Apple ID (or “Apple Account” as it’s apparently called now), no…? If they didn’t but one is required, ask them.

Yuzu is also a citrus fruit, so it at least makes sense.

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The 7950X3D or 9800X3D are both faster (besides the 7800X3D you mentioned).

GPU-wise this is obvious the best AMD has to offer, but an RTX 4090 is obviously faster still. With the typical caveats for NVIDIA on Linux.

I have several components in my network that are at least 6 years old. Is that a problem…?

Does the CLI still work? If so, you could download and play all the Windows 7 compatible, DRM-free games in your library just fine. Alternatively, if you already had these games installed, they’ll work fine without launching Steam first.

full mirrors of YT

Yeah…not going to happen.

Sounds cool, I just fail to understand how this takes Cinnamon “out to the real world”.

The feature itself is great. It records the last two hours by default and lets you easily create clips from that. The editor is right there in the Steam overlay, it’s pretty great.

I only used it under Linux, and that’s where I’d say it is still very much a beta experience. I have an AMD Radeon 7800 XT. Most of the time, Steam picks up on its hardware acceleration - sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it falls back to CPU encoding (obviously) which occupies around 3-4 cores on my 7950X3D to record 3440x1440 at the highest quality setting. GPU encodes are H.264 even though the GPU is perfectly capable of encoding AV1. Performance impact ranges from almost zero to as much as 30%, which seems a bit excessive. On some games that have a splash screen (Sea of Thieves for example), all it will record is said splash screen, even when it’s not shown anymore: you get gameplay sounds, but the video is just a static image with mouse cursor artifacts. It didn’t record sound from one of the microphones I tried. After swapping it out for a different one, my voice is being recorded. At least one session the shortcut for saving a clip just resulted in an error sound instead of a clip being saved.

So it’s a bit disappointing so far. Yeah, Linux shenanigans and relatively small user base, but Valve out of all companies should treat Linux as a first-class platform. Yes, they do a lot for Linux, with Proton and whatnot. But ironically Steam itself is only in an “okay, it kind of works” state. No official packages for anything but apt-based distributions and Wayland (scaling) support is meh at best.

It did seem to work a lot better on the Steam Deck with very little performance impact in my short testing, so there’s that.

What’s Ullr?

Let me guess without reading: kernel-level anti-cheat?

Sounds about right. There are some valid and good use cases for “AI”, but the majority is just buzzword marketing.

Technically, wired charging degrades the battery less than wireless charging, mainly because of the excessive heat generated by the latter. The same way slower wired charging generates less heat. Lower and upper charging limits also help (the tighter the better).

But I personally don’t bother with it. In my experience, battery degradation and longevity mostly comes down to the “battery lottery”, comparable to the “silicon lottery” where some CPUs overclock/undervolt better than others. I’ve had phone batteries mostly charged with a slow wired charger degrade earlier and more compared to almost exclusively wireless charging others. No battery is an exact verbatim copy of another one. Heck, I had a 2 month old battery die on me after just ~20 cycles once. It happens.

Sure, on average you might get a bit more life out of your batteries, but in my opinion it’s not worth it.

The way I see it with charging limits is that sure, your battery might degrade 5% more over the span of 2 years when always charging it to 100% (all numbers here are just wild estimates and, again, depend on your individual battery). But when you limit charging to 80% for example, you get 20% less capacity from the get go. Unless of course you know exactly on what days you need 100% charge and plan your charging ahead of time that way.

Something I personally could never be bothered with. I want to use my device without having to think about it. If that means having to swap out the battery one year earlier, then so be it.

Even if all of that worked, why would I want it?

Yes, you’re probably confusing this with them lacking behind on DisplayPort versions.

I can see a world where when the Fediverse/Lemmy grows more, a big corporation buys out the top 10 (or whatever) Lemmy instances, combines them and defederates from all other instances. Add a new frontend, a shitty app, and run ads and et voilà.

The majority of users (“normies”) won’t switch instances and so the cycle repeats.