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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • All that needs is some flux and more solder per joint.

    Alternatively (and what I personally prefer), you can tin both ends and then join them together. This works because most solder has flux inside of it (specifically, solder is a hollow tube with flux inside).

    In chemistry, the rule is called “like likes like” or “like dissolves like”, which means that similar materials like to join together, and dissimilar materials don’t.

    Oxide layers on metals prevent other metals (like solder) from joining to it. What flux does is it chemically cleans the surface as it heats up, removing that oxide layer. This then makes it easier for solder to join to metals such as copper.

    A common, more obvious form of an oxide layer on metals is a rust (iron oxide) layer on iron. That rust has very different chemical and physical properties to iron, as it is now a fundamentally different material.


  • Not having fully functional Vulkan is going to make gaming on Linux a real pain. WINED3D (DX to OpenGL) works well enough nowadays, but DXVK and vkd3d-proton (DX to Vulkan) is where the real magic is.

    With Vulkan, very low level programming is possible, which means translation layers and HLE emulators benefit a lot in terms of accuracy and speed.

    I would strongly recommend upgrading your hardware if at all possible, not just because of performance, but because of up-to-date Vulkan driver support. AMD GPUs work best on Linux. Avoid Nvidia if you can, but if you literally can’t get anything else, it will also work. Modern Intel should also be fine, but not as mature as AMD.

    If you really want to run games on these computers, you will need to force enable WINED3D via an environment variable, either in Steam, or in whatever launcher you’re using.

    There is a fork of Proton designed specifically for old GPUs. I would use this if you absolutely cannot upgrade: https://github.com/pythonlover02/Proton-Sarek













  • Only potential issues I can forsee are audio driver and networking driver, but I highly doubt either of those will be an issue with any modern motherboard.

    I would just buy whatever and install Linux on it. As for which one to buy, just get one from a reputable brand (Gigabyte, ASUS, ASRock, MSI, and whatever else I’m missing).

    The CPU and the BIOS/UEFI/other primary bootloader are all that really matter from a software freedom perspective (hardware freedom is a different beast altogether that still has no truly viable solution for 100% freedom from head to toe yet), and unless you go with an old mobo supported by libreboot or canoeboot, then you’re going to have to deal with having Intel ME or AMD PSP, which are segmented processors inside of the CPU that has full memory access and runs proprietary code along with having a proprietary BIOS.