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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 2nd, 2024

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  • I went from Sony, Samsung, and LG to now buying TCL. At under $1000 for a 65", they’re the best option.

    Anything under $1500 I’d bet on TCL. Keep in mind TCL manufacturers a great chunk of the worlds LCDs that aren’t just for TCL. Pretty sure they bought LGs LCD plants. Maybe Samsung too.

    Their TVs have a lot of dimming zones. Sony I don’t think makes LCDs or OLED panels themselves. At least one line of their TVs use TCL panels already. They buy from others

    Here’s a review for the model that came out last year. At this point where’s it’s regularly on “sale” for $1000. TVs are MSRP for like half a year and then the discounts always seem to me to be happening

    https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/tcl/qm8k

    1,680 dimming zones in the 65" model and from what I’ve read, the global models are usually one year behind China. So in 2025 China had TCL TVs with even more dimming zones. 8 years ago sub $1000 65" with array LED backlight zones were like 100-200 zones. OLED were incredibly better and would kill off LCDs when prices came down. The density of dimming zones I think progressed faster than people expected

    So TCL has solid image processing while Sony has great image processing but not so much better for me to think it’s worth it. Same with the $1000-2000 mini-led backlit LCDs vs OLED. Yes OLED looks better. Don’t feel like it’s large enough for me to go much higher than a $1000 TV. That’s a reality for home theater brands today. TVs, speakers, receivers/amplifiers, headphones, mics, etc - there’s good stuff at low prices.

    Everyone’s competing on value now. There used to always be rumors about a Apple TV (actual TV) and Apple EVs. Never hear about rumors for those anymore. Don’t think the quality difference possibility and profit margins exist to make those appealing anymore for Apple. Sony like Apple is increasingly a services/media company.

    Samsung - Tizen sucks. I don’t recall how LG and WebOS looks, but to me Tizen is leagues above Android and Roku in making your TV into a loud billboard. At least Android you can install a different launcher.





  • Switched when the OG Steam Machines came out. It wasn’t great then. It wasn’t really good until Proton Steam integration. Became great after the fast iteration with the Steam Deck

    I know the hot thing is Bazzite but if you want to use it as a desktop as well, please at least use Fedora Kinoite or Silverblue. Personally I use the latest Kubuntu release so now I’m on Kubuntu 25.10, will upgrade to 26.04 when prompted, do the same with 26.10. Update cycle not so different than the larger windows updates each year. Just that every now and then a new Windows software ports to Linux, it’ll almost always be a deb installer is reason enough to me to prefer Debian based distributions than Fedora or Arch especially for new users. Don’t need to get people to install distrobox and boxbuddy. Kubuntu should just be enabling flatpaks and flathub by default rather than it being a option in the software center settings










  • I’ve heard nothing but good things about Schedule 1. Haven’t gotten it yet since it doesn’t seem like has good gamepad control support yet but it’s planned. Modern gaming in practice, not as what’s most marketed as gaming, to me reminds me of the PS1 and back. A lot of really game-y games. Systems that you get really into. Learn the exploits. The patterns. Get high scores. Max damage numbers. The PS3/PS4 era is the cinematic narrative era. The late PS4 to present is a gameplay heavy era. Narrative heavy games may get the traditional media awards but it’s been a long time since I’ve felt like traditional media has been good at judging games for their gameplay. They’re more like junior film media. Felt that way to me at least ever since Starcraft 2 was topping/gave birth to Twitch.tv and then League of Legends and Counter Strike GO




  • I bought into AM5 first year with Zen 4. I’m pretty confident Zen 7 will be AM5. There’s got to be little chance for DDR6 to be priced well by the end of the decade. Confident that I’ll be on AM5 for 10+ years but way better than the Intel desktop I had for 10 years because I will actually have a great update path for my motherboard. AM4 is still relevant. That’s getting to almost 10 years now. It’ll still be a great platform for years to come. Really if you bought early in the life of first gen chips on the socket for AM4/AM5, you’re looking at a 15 year platform. Amazing






  • Windows is their #1 marketing platform for their other services. They crash and burned out of mobile and television so in the name of expanding their business into more and more subscription services, Windows is their only popular consumer platform and problem for them is that basic OS functionality that people want pretty much was reached with Windows XP. Everything new is an application that is easily installed afterwards or in a web browser. Packaging it into the basic Windows installation just bogs things down and makes it more busy. It’s a marathon. Linux will win eventually by having features and services out the box. Practically no services. No onedrive, o365, and copilot nagging





  • Before big commercial companies can succeed with the mainstream, flatpak permission handling that is as smooth as Android and iOS. Not everything is going to be in the distros base package manager and devs need a way to distribute software that can be expected to work on any of these devices. No confusions over why they’re system doesn’t know what to do with a deb or rpm file. Flatpak is the closest thing right now to something with universal adoption. After that it’s a slow and steady grind for market share. Like how Macs market share 20 years ago isn’t very different from where Linux is today

    I think a hardware company could succeed better by marketing the devices as creation devices. Focus on Blender, Krita, Ardour, Darktable, Kdenlive, etc. Pretty much the niche Macs were marketed as 25 years ago getting regular people interested with stuff like garageband and imovie