Sony used to make compact variants of their flagship Xperia phones. Good specs. Good battery life. Good camera. Good display. Good sound. Good reception. Headphone jack. SD card slot. Unlockable bootloader, so they could be de-googled.

Sadly, the “compact” models grew slightly larger with each model year, and even a not-so-compact one hasn’t been released in a while.

There isn’t a browser suitable to replace Firefox in the official Debian apt repos.

However, as far as I can tell, Mozilla’s recent Terms of Use apply only to the Firefox builds downloaded from Mozilla, not to the built-from-source versions that you get from the Debian archive using apt.

You can use the Debian build under the terms of the Mozilla Public License. Read /usr/share/doc/firefox-esr/copyright for details.

To me, Nvidia isn’t worth the trouble on Linux unless you have specific (non-gaming) needs that can’t be met with AMD or Intel hardware.

With this in mind, I kept using my last Nvidia card until it needed replacing, and then switched to AMD. Seems like that might make sense for you, too.

Assuming it works as advertised, I would use this one, in part because it’s not a bloated Electron app like Heroic. (This one is written in Python, and presumably not so wasteful of system resources.)

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Yes, and I could see wind turbines charging batteries during the windiest hours, and the batteries powering the moisture collectors during foggy hours.

Let’s also remember that high voltage doesn’t necessarily mean high wattage. This prototype runs on a small battery.

That build should handle 1440p gaming for more than a few years to come.

You might want to consider swapping out the Ryzen 7 7700X for an X3D model. Many games get a significant boost from the extra cache. It can also make game performance less dependent on your RAM speed.

Maybe wait until the upcoming hardware releases hit the market, because those can drive down the prices of the stuff you intend to buy.

I don’t know of any generic controllers, and wouldn’t trust them to have consistent hardware between production runs. All the worthwhile controllers I’ve used have brand names. Having said that…

Logitech makes decent, affordable, basic controllers. My only complaint about the F310 / F710 is that the analog stick dead zones are a little bigger than I like. (Maybe I’m just spoiled by Sony models, though.)

Sony’s DualShock 4 v2 and DualSense are great in my experience, and not terribly expensive when they go on sale.

Blizzard games have always run very well in Wine.

They run, but I wouldn’t say very well. A few counterexamples off the top of my head:

• Wine raw input patches are required to avoid subtle mouse glitches in Overwatch.
• Saving Overwatch highlight videos doesn’t work.
• Battle.net launcher changes have made it unusable in Wine more than once, leaving people suddenly unable to play for days or weeks even when the games themselves would run fine if they could be updated and launched.

You might not notice the problems (or not as often) if using Proton. That’s because Proton includes a load of Wine patches for stuff like this.

It would be nice if Blizzard tested on Wine and worked with the maintainers to ensure things stayed smooth.

Please let us know how it goes.

It’s is (usually) not so difficult, and this is no exception.

Look up the game’s system requirements. Frostpunk’s say this:

Minimum:

Processor: 3.2 GHz Dual Core Processor
Graphics: GeForce GTX 660, Radeon R7 370 or equivalent with 2 GB of video RAM

Looks plain as day to me. Your hardware doesn’t meet the published requirements, or even come close.

Keep in mind that CPU-integrated GPUs like yours are not merely slower than the discrete GPUs listed as bare minimum; they sometimes also lack features that are present in the latter. Similarly, both of your CPUs are older/weaker than the minimum, and may lack some of the newer instructions that would be present in 3.2GHz+ models.

In cases like this, there’s no reason to expect the game to run on your hardware. This is not because you’re running Linux. It’s because of target platform decisions made by the game’s developers.

You might get lucky, or discover enough workarounds to get it running anyway with some effort, but it’s unlikely to be a good experience. If I were going to try anyway, I would start by enabling as much logging as possible, and searching online for any error messages I found in the logs to see if I could find someone else who had encountered and solved them. Be aware that troubleshooting like this can take a long time even if you’re an experienced software developer, and might not bear fruit.

There is stress-ng. Understanding the nature of its many tests can be a chore, but I have found it useful.

One problem with FOSS alternatives is that their test results won’t be comparable with what you see in most hardware reviews and forums, where Windows software is generally used. Having the same tool available on both OS would allow apples-to-apples comparisons, so this announcement seems like good news.

I believe you’ve checked this correctly, but I want to clarify something: Even if the display is plugged into the graphics card, it’s still possible that your CPU’s integrated GPU (or even a CPU core) is being used for rendering, before sending the output to the display.

In other words, we’ve been asking where it’s plugged in not because that would definitively pinpoint the problem, but because it could influence what’s going on behind the scenes.

I hope System76 was able to help.

Yes, I’m aware of that justification. I like the idea in principle, but it doesn’t hold water in this game, because the mechanics they used to simulate ultra-realism are not realistic at all. Picking up a weapon in real life doesn’t impose a state of bodily malfunction where you have about as much control of yourself as a blind drunk standing on one stilt. I’ve used swords and bows, and trained in a fair number of other physical skills. Even my very first time, there was never a point where I suddenly found my arms or legs failing to work. The most forgiving way I can describe this implementation would be to call it a ham-fisted attempt.

Clearly, though, there’s an audience for it

It seems so. If some people enjoy slogging through those mechanics, then I’m happy for them. I have better things to do with my time.

I loved the environments in RDR2, but holy hell, the missions’ persistent denial of player agency drove me up a tree. Railroading is annoying in the best of cases. I could tolerate it in The Last of Us, which limited the places I could go but offered a wonderfully engaging story in those places and never dropped a 10-ton FAIL anvil on my head for trying something creative. In an open world game (a genre that I like because I’m encouraged to find creative solutions) I find it unforgivable.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance drove me away for similar reasons. I like games where the challenge comes from learning how to work with available tools and moves, developing my skill with them, and figuring out how to use them most effectively. Making progress that way is satisfying. KC:D chose the polar opposite of that, interfering with my ability to control my character until I slogged through seemingly endless time sinks thinly disguised as “training” sessions. This mechanic had nothing to do with developing my skill as a player, but instead just arbitrarily denied me agency. I hated it, and since the reports I’ve read suggest that the sequel does the same, I won’t be buying it or anything else from those game designers.

I guess my point is just to let you know that you’re not alone. :)

The problem didn’t affect all systems.

I would have expected System76 to ship it with all the necessary updates for the GPU, too, yet we haven’t seen any evidence of it, and we are seeing behavior consistent with it not being done. Maybe a human made a mistake somewhere along the line.

DXVK, vkd3d-proton, MangoHud, and libstrangle all offer ways to limit a game’s frame rate, and some games have their own setting for it. I don’t know how their efficiency compares with whatever approach SteamOS is using, but you could experiment.

BTW, I edited my comments; you might want to re-read them if you didn’t catch the edits.

Don’t worry. This seems more like a software setup problem than faulty or weak hardware.

Good luck!

Do any of your underperforming games have a screen that shows which GPU they are using?

I haven’t found any that do but I can try launching a few and searching.

Take a look in each game’s graphics settings. Not all of them show it, but some do. In Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s shown in Options: Video: General: Display Adapter. In Elite Dangerous, it’s in Options: Graphics: Display: Adapter. There are other ways of trying to determine which GPU is likely to be used by default, but seeing it directly in-game is the best way to be sure.

Does an overlay appear in the top left of the screen if you put DXVK_HUD=devinfo %command% in an underperforming game’s Steam Launch Options?

For the 3 I’ve checked so far no, I don’t see that.

The fact that you see no DXVK overlay when using that launch option suggests that either none of the games you tried use DirectX 9/10/11, or there’s something missing/misconfigured/old in your Vulkan driver stack. I would expect System76 to be able to help with this more efficiently than we can, since they sold you the system for use with Linux and are known for being competent.

EDIT: I just noticed your other comment that shows Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS as your Linux distro. That release predates your GPU model by about a year, I think. It seems likely that you just need to get a newer kernel, firmware, and graphics drivers installed. This stuff is available upstream of your distro, so it shouldn’t be too hard for someone who knows Pop!_OS well, like System76. :)