Damn, sorry to hear that, my experience with the 480 was really good. Admittedly AMD wasn't quite caught up yet with hardware video encoding at the time that card was designed (basically a reskinned 480). Specifically, hardware video encoding has gotten drastically better since then on AMD cards.

The only real answer lmao. People really out here thinking the funny symbols on the paper follow absolute laws. Crazy.

Have you seen protondb? A pretty impressive number of games just work. Really we are at the point now where games that don't run are more the exception, and usually it is due to Anti-cheat incompatibility or some very specific issue.

ALVR works great, assuming SteamVR in general works with your DE (no Gnome support atm but KDE works for sure).

That display out will be hard to match with an old optiplex or laptop, but I agree, the pricing is getting less absurdly low and more just moderately low.

Flatpaks have finally made most distros interchangeable for me, they're a wonderful tool. Not every single thing should be installed with them, but the current compromise of shipping core system components (including DEs in here) as native packages and user apps as flatpaks has drastically reduced the amount of troubleshooting I've had to do. When the vast majority of your tiny packages have no overhead, you can eat a few gigs for a nicer user experience. Even on my 120GB laptop that hasn't been a practical issue for me.

Death by 1000 papercuts, there's always a thing or two that won't work perfectly. Sorry to hear that man. It's really nice for those of us that don't have any issues like that. Hopefully when/if you try again in the future things go more smoothly.

Since you mentioned darktable I assume you already know this, but depending on the camera's raws and the presets that imagemagick has for converting these photos the results might be undesirable if not inspected or tweaked. Not disparaging any advice given here, just mentioning that generally raws are edited on a case by case basis to fix camera artifacts and color issues. Hope the solutions others have posted work out for you!

There are different reasons to support alternative browsers. While Firefox on IOS definitely does ad and tracker blocking (which is great!) Some people are concerned that the underlying engine is restricted on IOS to webkit. So it may very well be a better experience for you than safari, but that alone does not satisfy concerns of homogenization in the browser space on Apple devices.

Cool breakdown! Didn't realize that the material was so special. Definitely seems less practical than just a plastic case though. I'd like to see a case made out of the resin coated variant they used for the side grips. Seems like that would be an interesting look and a little more grime resistant.

Been using it exclusively for about a year. Very satisfied with the performance. It is a very no-nonsense service. They provide a VPN, anonymous payment options, and a flat rate regardless how much you buy at a time or when you buy (which is personally a big plus for me). They don't bug you to renew, and they don't offer any sort of auto-renewal. The only downside I could see is that if you are looking for a VPN provider that offers a large suite of privacy-adjacent tools labeled as a VPN app, you would be disappointed.

Do we have any reason to believe that it isn't? Generally I don't know if Apple has lied about what data is local before.