Flatfire

Streaming infrastructure is expensive, and all these smaller networks that decided to spin up their own didn't seem to realise that. Prices go up, ad tiers get added because none of them are actually making any money. It's just quarter after quarter of loss even with substantial revenue due to the fact that producing content, hosting and then scaling globally to make it available to a wide variety of geographic locations just isn't cost effective. Even Amazon, the lord of cloud compute itself, hasn't been able to maintain this.

So in this case, competition limits the only way they make money: people subscribing. Greedy bastards.

So far, I've not actually had this problem. It was a huge issue in Windows 10, but every setting (aside from audio devices being a little weird due to their own drivers) works pretty much as needed now.

It's frustrating. There's a lot of Windows 11 that I do actually like: Massively improved HDR support, far better DPI scaling features, tabbed file browsing, a unified control panel again (yes I know if you look hard enough you can find legacy panels), configurable snapping regions for Windows, gaming focused features with screen recording, intelligent capture, etc. On the power user side: the terminal, winget, built in ssh support and broader compatibility with Linux development toolchains, and if you're the kind of person with a family or friends you do tech support for regularly the Quick Assist's current iteration is a godsend.

But then the tradeoff is ads, increased telemetry, AI integrations, inability to move the taskbar, a piss-poor local file search, increasingly restrictive desktop customizations via third party tools, shorter support periods for Windows feature updates, and generally a lack of overall feature control due to low level integration with core Windows services.

I don't think Windows 11 is a bad operating system in the sense that I believe it to be a marked improvement on a feature by feature comparison to Windows 10. But it feels like two development arms at Microsoft are consistently at war with eachother. Some want to implement really cool features and tools for end users, and the others are hellbent on locking the system down and forcing this Apple philosophy of "use it like we want you to".

If your only intention is to use the card for encoding, I recommend picking up an A380 instead. The A770 is a surprisingly performant gaming card for newer titles, but all of the available ARC cards have the same encoder.

Since the A380 is typically single slot, and fits within the 75W spec, you don't even need an extra power cable for it if you wanted it as a secondary card too.

Intel seemed to fall behind kinda hard w/ regards to CPU/Motherboard features until much later on. Supposing you aren't working with parts you already have, everything from 1st generation Ryzen onwards would have rebar support. They can be had very cheaply too, and work on any AM4 board.

You may also find a BIOS update allows some older chipsets to support rebar. It's a tad flaky depending on the manufacturer though.

The launcher is a fair point. Though for me at least, not having the spotlight-esque search hasn't been a problem. Appearance is an odd one, since the best part of Both Gnome and KDE is the wonderful flexibility in visual customizability. At the end of the day, I suppose I'd happily use either. Right now, I think Plasma's big features for me has to be window snapping and, once 6.0 releases, hopefully HDR support.

Maybe I'm missing some of the nuances between KDE and Gnome, but I've enjoyed the out of box experience with KDE far more than Gnome. That said, perhaps I've simply timed my switchover to Plasma such that I missed its teething pains. I say this as someone who used pretty much exclusively Gnome over the years.

What would you say sets Gnome apart?