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Comment by TehCorwiz | Hacker News Reader

If they do it'll likely be part of an industry wide push to kill off the home-built PC market. It's no secret that MS and others want the kind of ecosystem Apple has and governments want more backdoor access to tech. And which mfg wouldn't want to eliminate partial upgrades/repairs. Imagine that the only PC you could buy one day has everything tightly integrated with no user serviceable or replaceable parts without a high-end soldering lab. Now, since it's impractical to build your own they can raise the price to purchase one above reach of most people and the PC market succeeds in their rental PC aspirations.

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You're not thinking big enough. Their ultimate goal is gaming (or any computing really) available only in the cloud.

Maybe then the year of Linux (or OpenBSD?) on the desktop would finally arrive. Maybe anti-trust could get used. Maybe parts could get scrapped from data centres.

Interesting times they would be!

It's already here right now, unironically. There's no need for Windows for gaming now. I just build a new rig with a 7900 XTX and with Steam on Arch Linux everything just works with absolutely no hassle or thinking. This was the only value Windows still had and now that's over.

There are still some pain points with Linux distros: With some, an upgrade can leave you unable to boot into a graphical login screen. This can also happen if you leave a Linux installation, like Manjaro, alone for a year and then do an update.

manjaro is arch under the hood and arch is supposed to be updated fairly frequently.

That is a problem if you happen to have a nvidia GPU, and, as the article says, by nvidia forcing it, you will not be able to have that brand of customer gamer GPU anymore.

The problem is you are exposing yourself to brain injury by trying to use Manjaro. Just Use Linux Mint.

Is it the best? No! Is it the most performant? NO! is it rock solid reliable out of the box? YES!

CachyOS and Fedora also looked tempting but bog standard linux mint is my powerhouse right now

This pain point being a common thing is mostly specific to Manjaro. Much more stable experience on any of the major vanilla distros.

Never have I ever once had a problem after updating Arch Linux. I always had problems with Manjaro when I put it on my ex's computer because I thought it would be easier. Wrong. Stop using Manjaro. It's much lower quality than a serious distro.

I broadly concur. These days, gaming is usually very easy on Linux.

Except: If I want to kill some time being chaotic in GTA:V Online, and do that in Linux, then that is forbidden. Single player mode works beautifully, but multiplayer is verboten.

(And I'm sure that there are other games that similarly feature very deliberate brokenness, but that's my example.)

This is the part where I just stick with console for specific titles, like the GTA franchise. I feel like Rockstar treats the PC as a second class citizen anyway.

I bought my PS5 Pro in anticipation of GTA 6 and the (hopefully) upcoming DragonQuest 12. May my prayers be answered.

Console doesn't work for anything but platformers. Competitive online gaming = PC (Aoe2, BF6, Dark and Darker, Swordai, MWO, The Finals, War Thunder, PS2 etc.).

144fps + Mouse + Keyboard is just superior.

I definitely get the appeal of running FPS and such on PC. I'm much more accurate with a mouse and keyboard combo over a controller, but I'm appealing to the strengths a console does have as well. I own both so I can change up my experience to whichever offers the best one for me.

Linux isn’t much use if you can’t get hold of (non-locked-down) hardware to run it on

For now, such hardware is readily available. Every Walmart, for example, will have it. Amazon has it. Pcpartpicker lists numerous other places that you can buy it from.

FOSS is more divided than ever, which is an interesting situation given the timing when they should be a solid place for individuals to turn to against the centralization of control. It's quite convenient that so many petty little wars have broken out across the FOSS landscape at just the right time.

This. Your home PC is just another appliance now. Welcome to your Copilot future.

Even bigger than that, it’s all a slow march to a sort of narcissistic feudalism.

Yeah they want a return to TV era where censors curtail content

Everyone will own a presentation layer device. Anyone who can only afford the 1GB model can only get SNES quality visuals.

Snow Crash and Neuromancer have displaced the Bible as cognitive framework for tech rich.

Am working on an app that generates and syncs keys 1:1 over local BT and then syncs them again to home PC (if desired). The idea being cut out internet middle men and go back to something like IRC direct connect, that also requires real world "touch grass" effort to complicate greedy data collectors.

Testing now by sharing IP over Signal and then 1:1'ing over whatever app. Can just scaffold all new protocols on top of TCP/IP again.

It’s not really about censorship though, it’s about having control over a rent economy where there is no ownership. It provides maximum profit potential

Different entities have different goals but are cooperating in making this happen so they each get what they want. Global corporations get guaranteed income streams from most of the population while governments and ideological groups get control over the flow of communication between people to ensure correct think.

Stadia worked, when conditions were good, Geforce Now exists. No cheaters in multiplayer (though there are always new ones), it's a way to go. They're even doing a thing with cellphones as merely devices playing a full screen video stream that you can interact with.

See, I wrote that out but then I thought, “Nah, that’s too conspiracy for this crowd.” But lo! Yeah. Not excited about the emerging status quo.

That may or may not be an INTERNAL NVIDIA goal, or even a goal for multiple companies, however, that is NOT how the situation will play out.

The ecosystem isn't closed. TSMC doesn't exist in a vacuum. They may be the most advanced, however, there are a few reasons this will never work:

1) older fabs can be built in a garage by a smart person (it's been done a few times, I'd link the articles, but I don't have them handy)

2) Indie devs exist and often provide better gaming experience than AAA developers.

3) Old hardware/consoles exist, and will continue to exist for many decades to come (my Atari 2600 still works, as an example, and it it is older than I)

Sure, they MAY attempt to grab the market in this way. The attempt will backfire. Companies will go under, including possibly team green if they actually do exit the gaming market (because let's be real, at least in the U.S. a full blown depression is coming. When? No idea. However, yes, it's coming unless folks vote out the garbage.), and the player that doesn't give in, or possibly a chinese player that has yet to enter the market, will take over.

> "older fabs can be built in a garage by a smart person"

Yeah, with 1970s-era feature size. That's fine if your idea of AAA gaming is Hunt The Wumpus or Pong.

It's probably not an Nvidia goal no but the publishers want that too. It's the wet dream of copy protection for them. It's easy to record a cloud streamed movie but a game not so much.

I figured this out about 5 years ago. Its why each of my kids and my wife all have decent spec desktop PC's, and half of us use linux (I'll migrate the others later)

If they do it all gamers will boycott LLMs. Which would be a godsend. Decades trying to save power, moving to LED, trying to improve efficiency everywhere, and now... We are wasting terawatts in digital parrots.

You are vastly overestimating the standards of the median gamer.

Also the influence they have on the tech industry, consoles already dominate the market share

I think China will then try to sell their own PC parts instead, their semiconductor industry is catching up so who knows in a decade.

But perhaps then the US will probably reply with tariffs on the PC parts (or even ban them!) Which is slowly becoming the norm for US economic policy, and which won't reverse even after Trump.

US already banned Chinese EVs, even though, from what I've heard, they're excellent

> Imagine that the only PC you could buy one day has everything tightly integrated with no user serviceable or replaceable parts without a high-end soldering lab.

So.. a smart phone?

There is definitely a part of me which feels like with the increasing ram prices and similar. Its hard for people to have a home lab.

To me what also feels is that there becomes more friction in an already really competitive and high-friction business of creating cloud.

With increasing ram prices which I (from my knowledge) would only decrease in 2027-2028 or when this bubble pops, It would be extremely expensive for a new entry of cloud provider in this space.

When I mention cloud provider, what I mean aren't the trifecta of AWS,Azure or GCP but rather all the other providers who bought their own hardware and are co-locating it to a datacenter and selling their services targeted at low/mid-range vps/vds servers

I had previously thought about creating cloud but in this economy and the current situations, I'd much rather wait.

The best bet right now for most people creating cloud /providing such services is probably whitewashing any other brand and providing services on top that make you special.

The servers are still rather cheap but the mood that I can see in providers right now is that they are willing to hold the costs for some time to not create a frenzy (so they still have low prices) but they are cautiously waiting and looking for the whole situation and if recent developments continue happening in such a way, I wouldn't be surprised if server providers might raise some prices because the effective underlying hardware's ram/prices increased too.

Feel the same way here. Can't help but get the vibe that big tech wants to lock consumers out, eliminate the ability to have personal computing/self-hosted computing. Maybe in tandem with governments, not sure, but it's certainly appetizing to them from a profit perspective.

The end goal is the elimination of personal ownership over any tech. They want us to have to rent everything.

Honestly its not the fact that they want us to rent everything but rather that effectively an AI tax is happening on us general public (or even hobbyists) where the price of hardware/ram is increasing because of AI demands.

I don't exactly think that they did it on purpose to chokehold the supply but it sure damn happened and that doesn't change the fact that prices of hardware might / (already?) increase

That might be a bit on the paranoid side. It could just be that it's far more profitable right now for companies to sell only to data centres. That way, they don't need to spend money on advertising, or share their revenues with third-party sellers.

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