PopOS used to be my distro of choice as a de-crapified Ubuntu alternative until I realized I like the Cinnamon DE and Mint a lot better. Still exciting to finally see a 24.04 release!

I dual boot Windows for Cubase and Kontakt. Never could get Cubase working well on Linux and I probably could switch to Reaper and make Kontakt work with yabridge, but I have been using Cubase for over 20 years and haven’t had the inclination to switch just yet.

Automatic Theme Transitions: Configure when your theme will transition from light to dark and back

Neurodivergent people when it automatically switches to light mode:

Yeah, looking forward to the day when SoCs fully replace discrete GPUs for all the reasons you stated, and also when there are better options than Apple devices in that space. Pretty sure there have never been many render farms built from Apple hardware, though, and Mac Pros have never been the most cost effective option for applications requiring a lot of compute. MacBooks and phones, on the other hand, are more of a sweet spot, and the M chips have done wonders there to your point.

It’s a SoC and is certainly more power efficient, can fit into smaller form factors, etc. It’s definitely progress in the right direction, but is still to expensive to be a practical alternative to higher-end GPUs. What am I missing?

According to this Blender benchmark, a M3 Ultra with 80 cores is similar to a 4070 Ti. Too bad a machine with a M3 Ultra with 80 cores will cost several grand while a 4070 Ti can be had for a grand. I appreciate that a SoC can use RAM instead of the scam that is VRAM, but Apple needs to do something about that price, or otherwise, might as well get a 5090.

Blender 🥰

NVIDIA definitely dominates for specialized workloads. Look at these Blender rendering benchmarks and notice AMD doesn’t appear until page 3. Wish there were an alternative to NVIDIA Optix that were as fast for path tracing, but there unfortunately is not. Buy an AMD card if you’re just gaming, but you’re unfortunately stuck with NVIDIA if you want to do path traced rendering cost effectively:

https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=OPTIX&compute_type=CUDA&compute_type=HIP&compute_type=METAL&compute_type=ONEAPI&group_by=device_name&blender_version=4.5.0

Edit:

Here’s hoping AMD makes it to the first page with next generation hardware like Radiance Cores:

https://wccftech.com/amd-unveils-radiance-cores-neural-arrays-universal-compression-next-gen-rdna-gpu-architecture/

I ran it on a RPi4 years ago, but it didn’t perform well enough. It performs fine on an old laptop, but not so much in a Pi from my experience. Can’t speak to the RPi5, though.

There are unfortunately still useful things that only work on Windows, which is why I still begrudgingly dual boot. I like the idea of ReactOS, but development is slow-going and it’s still only alpha quality at the moment.