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Cake day: August 17th, 2025

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  • Two things especially worth noting from the article.

    If you have a non-Google build of Android on your phone, none of this applies.

    This means that at least GrapheneOS will be unaffected for now. Other ROMs without gapps will be unaffected only as long as you don’t install gapps. Since Graphene has a sandbox for them, I’m assuming it’ll be fine. That is, unless Google decides to lock the bootloader entirely.

    In September 2026, Google plans to launch this feature in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. The next step is still hazy, but Google is targeting 2027 to expand the verification requirements globally.

    So most users worldwide still have at least 1.5 years until it’s implemented. Plenty of time to get a Pixel and install Graphene on it. Or to figure out some other plan.

    Don’t get me wrong - this is insane, unreasonable and horrible news for everyone. We should push back as hard as physically possible against it. However, at the very least we still have some time to figure things out before the policy rolls out.


  • (…) if Russia can’t even win against Ukraine how would they ever fight against the EU, our army is both larger and much better equipped then Ukraine.

    The problem is, the EU isn’t united nearly enough to fight a war together. If, for instance, Russia attacks, it’ll be mostly Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia defending. Maybe Romania too, and maybe with some support from the rest of the EU. As it stands right now, the EU is divided on many issues, with some countries (notably Hungary) intentionally sabotaging it from the inside.

    Even if - and that’s a big if - all or at least most of EU member states can come to agreement and cooperate in a conflict, our militaries aren’t very well prepared to work together. This would require years of cross-border military drills between all of the member states. Especially considering the fact that the vast majority of all EU soldiers have never seen any real combat. Russia may be losing a lot of soldiers in Ukraine. But those who survive become extremely valuable assets for the military, since real world combat experience is infinitely more useful than textbooks or casual training exercises.


  • You’re also massively wrong about DirectX on Linux, DXVK and VKD3D both work to run various versions of it on Linux.

    I very clearly wrote that Linux does not support DirectX. Which is 100% true, no matter how you look at it. Just because there are translation layers, it doesn’t mean Linux ‘supports DirectX’, because it doesn’t. It supports Vulkan, which DXVK and VKD3D translate DirectX API calls to.

    Let’s say you can’t read Spanish, but you hire a translator to translate a text for you. Now you can read it. Does that mean you can suddenly read Spanish?


  • They created the Game Porting Toolkit a while ago

    Hmm… Must have missed that. I’ll need to take a look. Might be the exact same thing I mentioned and I just had no idea it was already released.

    The RaspberryPi has existed for ~15 years at this point, the platform is far more mature than Windows on ARM and rivals macOS for support.

    I wrote “From my experience” and “Might depend on the device though.” Also, RaspberryPi is not a daily use device. At least not for the vast majority of people.

    If Linux works on ARM for other people - great. I’m hoping to be able to switch to it sometime in the near future. However, the last time I tried it was horrendous. A lot of programs I use were completely unavailable, with no compatibility layer that I know of. That was about 2 years ago.

    That said, I also tried Windows 11 on ARM around the same time and it was great. Practically everything worked out of the box and worked flawlessly. It was basically the same experience as on amd64.


  • After introducing Metal (their own proprietary graphics api), Apple killed OpenGL support and never implemented Vulkan support. Almost every single video game nowadays uses either DirectX (Microsoft’s proprietary API) or Vulkan for 3D graphics. 2D games use OpenGL and Vulkan. OpenGL and Vulkan are both open source and cross platform.

    Windows supports everything, Linux everything except DirectX, and MacOS (for Apple Silicon devices) only supports Metal. You can still play OpenGL games on Intel-based Macs. Steam tells you which games won’t work on recent Mac systems.

    In order for a game to run on ARM Macs, it has to either be ported to Metal, or there needs to be a compatibility layer like Wine and Proton. However, neither of these two work, since Apple no longer supports OpenGL or Vulkan. Theoretically, it is possible for people to write a new compatibility layer, specifically for Metal. The problem is, nobody wants to, because it’s a lot of work (as usual with development for Apple devices), and you never know when Apple may decide to drop support for some other libraries/APIs/drivers.

    Additionally, Apple seems to be working on their own Metal translation layer. Leaks show impressive performance in Cyberpunk 2077. However, nobody knows what the availability will be like or when it releases.