I try to use FOSS as much as possible, but I am not willing to give up video games, so I do have steam installed. I also need discord for communication with friends I am playing with. I only use these two on my desktop computer. On my laptop I don’t have any proprietary software running in userspace, but of course it still has proprietary firmware blobs and proprietary UEFI firmware. I also have an old Thinkpad X220 running coreboot and with ME disabled (HAP bit set, ME technically still runs, but halts after hardware initialization) and unnecessary ME components stripped using me_cleaner. And my home server also runs coreboot with ME “disabled” and stripped but it has a BMC with proprietary supermicro firmware and an LSI HBA that also requires firmware.

It’s just the easiest way to do this. Memory training is a very early step in the boot process. Firmware only has the CPU cache available as memory and most hardware in the system isn’t initialized yet. Most of this isn’t even done by the UEFI firmware itself, but by calling a binary blob provided by the CPU manufacturer, for intel it is called FSP and AMD i believe it is AGESA. I’d have to check, but I believe at the point memory training is running the PCIe bus has not even been brought up and scanned, so video output in this phase would require extensive reengineering of the early boot process from both the CPU manufacturer, firmware vendors and the board manufacturer. PCIe has DMA so making that work without memory might be a challenge. There are three easy to implement solutions though: post codes if your mainboard has a display for them, serial output if the board has a serial port (though this needs another device to read the messages) and the cheapest solution could be a flashing LED on the board labeled memory training in progress.

Yeah it’s a huge source of problems. If you are outside the US your IPv6 prefix is never gonna be correct in every GeoIP database, even if you send a request to have it corrected, so you sometimes get geoblocked and other sites just block you because it sometimes gets classified as VPN.

Also Nintendo and Sony are Japanese companies and Twitter is (or was? I stopped using Twitter even before it was sold, so I am not quite up to date) insanely popular in Japan, that’s most likely the reason why it’s Twitter.

I wouldn’t call it running well though. Just barely playable on PS3. It was possible to get into a car, drive down a long, straight road and then crash into an invisible building because some cars were faster than the console could load assets.

I tried various linux distros like ubuntu as a kid, but because of gaming I didn’t switch at that time, then around 2010 I got a home server and installed Arch on it. When Arch switched to systemd I switched to gentoo because I did not want systemd. In 2014 I switched to gentoo Linux on my desktop, but still had dual boot for gaming on windows. I tried various init systems on gentoo and then ended up using systemd anyways. Because I got sick of waiting for packages to compile I switched back to arch on my desktop. On my home server and laptop I used alpine linux for a while. I switched back to arch shortly after because I had too many issues with alpine on desktop. I still use alpine in VMs on the server, but others that I don’t touch as much like the print server run rocky linux. I also tried GPU-passthrough to game in a windows VM, but I never managed to resolve all the issues. Since nowadays most games run on wine and proton I never bothered reinstalling/fixing windows when it stopped booting a few years ago, so now I use linux only.

Well, that is just not true anymore and hasn’t been in a very long time. Probably everything made in the last 20 years has auto detection and doesn’t need a crossover ethernet cable. This was introduced as an optional feature sometime in the 100Base-T era and is required for gigabit ethernet.

Good thing I switched to Linux 10 years ago. No regrets.

I am worried about burn-in on computer screens, but at the same time I am just wondering about how others use their phones, my last 4 phones had OLED and I have never had any burn in occur. I bought a used Galaxy S4 mini at some point and when I got it had slight burn-in of some icons, but it didn’t get any worse in the two years I was using it. Am I maybe just too old because I use a computer while young people use their phones for 10 hours a day?