you know what's bullshit? the way windows 10 shuts off audio output when your screen turns off on a timer.

it's like they don't even think about the energy-use impact of people who... just want to listen to music!

i always have my screen timeouts quite short but. on osx and previous versions of windows stuff would keep playing.

it's good to be able to have the screen off. the screen uses like half or more of the total power of a computer

@kit win10 also won't let you just reduce the screen brightness to 0 manually e.g. settings slider / meta key combos which is also hecked

@bleak eugh

@bleak that's the worst on a laptop D: especially because most of them don't include a screen off thing in the F-row keys, which like, every laptop i ever saw 10 years ago did, it's weird

@kit mine blessedly does have this key combo but i hear ya. MS hates letting users have control

@bleak yeah. the pc i built for pan, has been using win10 since the final day of Free Upgrades (largely to be sure to get security updates for longer and not need to pay), and the audio going off with the screen is like one of the biggest annoyances i've noticed her have

how i use my gaming box (rx 480 with minimal everything else to support it) means i don't really run into that problem though. my main things are 5 year old apple hardware (before the DVD drive died) so, i use osx mainly

@bleak which is fine by me because it's basically BSD but without needing to configure so much stuff. also you can turn the screen off with ctrl-shift-eject so, thankfully, i am able to do that.

@bleak i like that what was the best ultrabook (of any brand) specs you could get in early 2012 (i didn't buy my desktop or laptop mac for myself, , btw, it was one rare moment of kindness from bio-mom [which she ofc kept bringing up for ages so i do wonder if she did it to have talking points]) is now like. the kind of specs you get in a £130 ultrabook like the HP stream

i think my laptop's CPU is still a bit better and has a bit more storage, maybe? but it's got the same core count and RAM GBs

@kit is it just me or has computer hardware gotten like, pretty stagnant in recent years?

also lol yeah i wanted to mention *nix but i didn't want to be one of those people yfm

@bleak it feels more like... people's needs have finally hit a point where there's very little that can be pushed as needing an upgrade every 2 or 3 years... except perhaps RAM with how JS-happy a lot of websites are.

but yeah i guess like. ~the Industry~ has been into the idea of a system focused purely on using the web since like the late 90s, but in the last 5 years it's become really much more viable

@kit yeah i've definitely seen that with the advent of e.g. chromebooks, although i feel like it's an evolutionary cul-de-sac unless someone does some drastic paradigm shift within web browsers overall

and now it feels like the only thing driving computer hardware to be better is games, the people who make them, the film industry, and like. scientific research/medicine. big yet esoteric stuff

@bleak yeah totally. i mean, for 2d games the mobile graphics card in my imac is still more than enough to kill them.... i had to turn off vsync in binding of isaac to get rid of speed issues (their literal fix from devs.. thanks) and now it's going at a few hundred fps, which i don't really need but like. that was considered fairly weakish midrange in 2011 >.>

2d games with lots more shaders (like ori) and 3d games are still pushing, hence my rx480 now

@bleak but yeah like. for most people, the computer they've ahd even from 10 years ago is probably enough.

and i think that's good, to be honest.

the ppl i know who got an HP stream got it to replace a 5y/o laptop with fans, DVD drive, hard drive... they got it largely because they don't need to plug in hardly ever now with the stream, and the much faster boot time, chrome launch time, etc. but they really don't need anything else. it's fine for HD netflix & that's the most taxing it'll do

@bleak i guess i'm kinda glad that like. a lot of the focus is being put on getting the same compute power out of less wattage, too? like even if the capabilities of "for net only" machines are similar today as they were 5 years ago... they use a lot less power for that. and i like that

and similarly the big serious chips for, Gamers, or video editors, or photo editors, or people who do tons of shit with 7zip (for some reason) all day.. get to get loads more cores at once (like with ryzen)

@bleak though actually the ~low power~ i7 in my laptop gets its CPU maxed playing youtube now, because of vp9... i have the bandwidth so i would prefer an option to choose h264 on this laptop instead, bc the CPU has hardware accel for h264 but not vp9 yet. (on my desktop i have enough headroom that i don't really care.... turns out the i7 2600 is still beefy enough to handle basically anything. guess ppl saying it's overkill back then were right but. it's nice to still not feel limited today)

@kit absolutely cannot wait for the day when low power screen technology becomes ubiquitous myself, and at the same time the more power efficient laptops become the less fun or useful it is to run linux on them :'(

@bleak i don't quite follow how more power efficiency makes linux less fun tbh

@kit the funky new power efficiency co-processor getup that nvidia and intel slapped together for my laptop has absolutely no driver support, and EFI/UEFI stuff also increases the asspain for even putting a linux kernel on there in the first place. linux on laptops has always been bad but it's currently getting worse unless you have a mainline (for linux core users e.g. thinkpads) laptop

@bleak well, lack of drivers certainly does suck. though i'm not really sure how that ties into, specifically, because it's higher power efficiency? seems more like a parallel development to me

like intel's current 6W chips would work like any other x86, it's more the mobo chipset's fault about being driverbad, right?

i guess i've lucked out in that the UEFIs i've tried have had secureboot off or disable-able, though i've not played around with many other people's laptops so

@bleak at any rate i certainly think i'd have a smoother time trying to get freeBSD to behave on, like, a chromebook from this year, than my ibook G4 >.>

(it is technically working on my G4 but it's still missing so much stuff i have to compile....)

(also yeah i know chromebooks are like thinkpads in that they're traditionally the most supported in ~the linux community~)

@bleak semi related i'm reminded of trying to find roms for obscure android phones, versus like. nexus phones and the galaxy s series

@kit this is death too, i have a droid inc one that i love and want to use but cyanogenmod i do not love and want to use