WereCat

A lot of that really doesn't matter as much anymore on the x86 generation of consoles and there also wouldn't be any regressions for basically anything going between Zen 2 to Zen 3 or 4.
 
The bigger reason is this is still a custom monolithic SoC and it's not a direct Zen 2 architecture, it's a custom one designed with Sony so if the CPU were to be changed then it would be an entirely new SoC and require to go through a lot more design and manufacturing validation which is costly. Beefing up the GPU while requiring a lot of work doesn't require changing anything about the the CPU aspect of the SoC or likely any of the physical lay out of it.
 

 
The entire left side is most likely going to be unchanged and unmodified.
 
One of the key things about something like a PS5 Pro is cost, less work = better. So I don't think compatibility is the issue but the underlying reason is much the same. Also anything that runs on the PS5 Pro still has to run on the PS5 and if you give 50% more CPU power then you also run the risk of games being created to use that (intentionally or not) aka not running on the PS5.

Will vary wildly from game to game. My 3900X was holding back my 3060ti in some CPU intensive games at 1440p while being more than enough in GPU intensive games.
And what I mean by "holding back" is that I got only around 60-90FPS instead of 120FPS+.

Will vary wildly from game to game. My 3900X was holding back my 3060ti in some CPU intensive games at 1440p while being more than enough in GPU intensive games.
And what I mean by "holding back" is that I got only around 60-90FPS instead of 120FPS+.

Depends on the game but certainly nothing to hold you back from going through with it. You'll game just fine, this issue is massively overblown and really affects people with much more severe discrepancies in CPU/GPU power. Think 10400 and a 4090 @ 1080p.

How much % better does it make? 
 
15-20 FPS without context is meaningless info. 15-20FPS more when the other one is at 40FPS is a lot. 
15-20FPS more when the other one is at 120FPS is not really significant. 

How much % better does it make? 
 
15-20 FPS without context is meaningless info. 15-20FPS more when the other one is at 40FPS is a lot. 
15-20FPS more when the other one is at 120FPS is not really significant. 

How much % better does it make? 
 
15-20 FPS without context is meaningless info. 15-20FPS more when the other one is at 40FPS is a lot. 
15-20FPS more when the other one is at 120FPS is not really significant. 

I have not looked at when they were released. There is around 40 monitors with filter for 16:10 display on that website and I just took a screenshot of what fitted on the screen. Just pointing out that there ARE still 16:10 being sold and there is enough of them to pick from.

There are still 16:10 monitors but the price is ridiculous considering you can get 1440p at that price even at higher refresh rate.
 

sure !
Sorry for that

I think you should do:
 
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There's no such thing as a "higher level distro", what you're referring to are derivatives. The point of them varies but generally they spawn when a group of people like a given distribution, but want to change a few things. For example manjaro is for people who generally like using Arch, but prefer a less involved installation process and having some sensible defaults out of the box. Artix is mostly Arch but without systemd. And so on.
Ubuntu has almost nothing to do with Debian anymore, it's not just Debian with a nice installer. Mint is an effort to have either of those distros with an out of the box light and convenient desktop... maybe it's not to your taste but saying it has no reason to exist seems a little much.
Linus was trying to run non-native software through a compatibility layer, using a distribution that is not that widely used (mainly because it's designed by a manufacturers specifically for their hardware) and expecting it to magically work without a hitch. He said at the time that this just indicates Linux wasn't ready for mainstream gaming, and you know what? I agree - if you want to run windows games without issues then just use windows, duh. But I wouldn't blame that on Linux or pop_os... it's just an unrealistic expectation.
 
Personally I wouldn't recommend pop_os over Ubuntu if you don't have a system76 system for a variety of reasons, but it doesn't mean pop_os has no reason to exist. On system76 hardware it's probably a very smooth experience.
Perception isn't objective so it's never really right or wrong... but I will say you tend to have strong opinions about things you don't necessarily understand very well.
You also have to add the extra repository, and either way if the driver isn't present in the installer you might be stuck with a black screen before you even get started. That's increasingly rare because the foss drivers have gotten better, but it does happen at times.
Yeah, there's more to these distributions than just taking debian or arch and adding a graphical installer... lots of preinstalled services that are enabled by default, for example. If you use arch, try counting how many systemd services you have enabled since first installation just to get a usable desktop...

Using Fedora personally and used to this, and the occasional issue with it not compiling the module properly on a kernel update.
 
I also tend to have more issues with booting the live USB to a black screen with KDE than Gnome, which is annoying as I prefer KDE personally.  That said, should be fixed now they released the firmware and I wont be updating my GPU for a while.
 
The issue is NVIDIA took forever to release the firmware to make the open source driver work on the last two generations of GPUs.  With an iGPU you can work around it by using that until you can install the proprietary driver, but even that is obviously a bit tricky if you aren't familiar with the song and dance routine. 

Also Steam can be a bit hit and miss on Fedora, slightly better if you use the Flatpak.  But I rarely game on Linux other than Steam Deck, keep a Windows 11 box for that.
 
So yeah, I can totally see the point of PopOS.

Run a systemd analyze critical-chain. As you'd expect the distros like Ubuntu that take longer to boot just launch services for "just about everything a random user could want/need" by default. 
That's the price to pay for an OS to have most things anyone would want on a desktop OS there ready for them without needing manual install/configuration, because no random user wants to have to manually install/configure something. So if a distro aims for general adoption it just has to do that. Conversely the average user doesn't give 2 hoots about 20 second longer boot times.
 
That said it's often the stuff the user installs that slows down boot times. When I did a fresh Ubuntu install on my laptop it started in <5secs, insane. Now it's more like 10-15 once I have my stuff on.
 
No different from Windows.

More often than not GNOME tends to work way better for me than KDE especially on a laptop when I use trackpad. It's much better and more thought out experience than KDE (in my opinion).
 
 
Pop OS for example does something you'd need a ton of plugins for to get it working. Very good tiling window manager out of the box with a propper tiling function that is monitor and worskpace agnostic. Even KDE Plasma 6 can't come close to that with it's features right now and that's comparing it to a GNOME 42 based distro... Obviously Cosmic DE will be something interesting to see once it's ready but we are not there yet.
Also big feature of PopOS is that you have option of NVIDIA or AMD/Intel support out of the box without hassle. They are now working also on hybrid graphics for Cosmic DE so that it will work with everything as well.
 
For other distros... it really comes down to what it includes by default. Some people want bare OS where they have to install and setup and tweak everything by themselves. I couldn't care less, imo it's just a waste of time. Just get the distro that has the most stuff you want already included and work from that. It's not like you can't remove the extra stuff that's of no use to you.
 
I'm not very well versed in Linux btw... I'm just noob user but I have been using it for a while and do have at least some experience. Just looking at this from my point of view.

My last experience with NVIDIA on Linux is like 4-6y ago so I can't really comment on that. But I remember it was a pain back then.
And the biggest issue is to actually get to the desktop without the driver rather than install it. If you are already versed in Linux it may not be a hurdle but if you're a new user you'll be left clueless.

I think you should do:
 
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More often than not GNOME tends to work way better for me than KDE especially on a laptop when I use trackpad. It's much better and more thought out experience than KDE (in my opinion).
 
 
Pop OS for example does something you'd need a ton of plugins for to get it working. Very good tiling window manager out of the box with a propper tiling function that is monitor and worskpace agnostic. Even KDE Plasma 6 can't come close to that with it's features right now and that's comparing it to a GNOME 42 based distro... Obviously Cosmic DE will be something interesting to see once it's ready but we are not there yet.
Also big feature of PopOS is that you have option of NVIDIA or AMD/Intel support out of the box without hassle. They are now working also on hybrid graphics for Cosmic DE so that it will work with everything as well.
 
For other distros... it really comes down to what it includes by default. Some people want bare OS where they have to install and setup and tweak everything by themselves. I couldn't care less, imo it's just a waste of time. Just get the distro that has the most stuff you want already included and work from that. It's not like you can't remove the extra stuff that's of no use to you.
 
I'm not very well versed in Linux btw... I'm just noob user but I have been using it for a while and do have at least some experience. Just looking at this from my point of view.

Not sure "higher level" really fits here. I think the primary reason many distros exist it because they have different goals. At the same time starting your own distro from scratch is hard, so why not use another one as a base. A distro based on top of another distro doesn't really imply anything about how stable it is, how performant it is and so on. It really depends on what the goal of its maintainers is.
 
For example Debian is mostly geared towards stability, which is great for servers, but on desktop has the drawback that a lot of stuff tends to be quite old. So it may not provide the features you want, e.g. latest GPU drivers and so on.
 
So you get something like Ubuntu, which sits on top of the unstable branch of Debian (i.e. Sid), so it has a lot of newer stuff. But they add stability fixes of their own, to turn it into a distro people can actually use as a daily driver. In return Debian should benefit, because software gets tested by more people before it moves down into their more stable branches (unstable > testing > stable)
 
Arch on the other hand is bleeding edge and doesn't have a graphical installer, so not necessarily the easiest distro to get into. So you get something like Manjaro which adds a slight delay to updates to go from bleeding edge to cutting edge, while adding some nice features like a graphical installer, a desktop with certain plugins pre-applied and so on.
 
To each their own. Not a fan of vanilla Gnome with the huge title bars, but Manjaro happens to come pre-configured with the plugins I'd install anyway, and that just works for me. I tried KDE and on the one hand customization is nice, but I never managed to get a layout that quite works for me and then I always end up accidentally breaking it again by clicking in the wrong spot.

I know there's more than a few FFXIV players here. It has been announced the Dawntrail stand alone benchmark will drop tomorrow (14 April), 7AM UTC, midnight PDT.
 
I'll jump to the most interesting technical update: support for FSR and DLSS!
 

 
FSR 1.0 will be the default option. User has a slider for 50% to 100% render scale.
 

 
There is an option for dynamic resolution. In the above screenshot the dynamic resolution setting, while not selected, shows it could be active when below 60 fps. Be interesting what other options are there as they weren't shown.
 
If DLSS2 is selected, the game takes over resolution scaling and dynamic resolution. I'm not sure about this and static user settings outside of dynamic resolution would have been nice.
 
Dumb upscaling has the potential to look horrible for a game like this, but I expect they do it right. Only the 3D parts of the world should be upscaled (characters, NPCs, monsters, the world itself) and not UI related parts (e.g. name indicators). 
 
The benchmark usually exposes the same graphical settings as the game, so it should be possible to test some things out once it is released. I was originally thinking it'll be a simple comparison vs Endwalker benchmark, but this could get a lot more involved as it becomes a bigger quality vs performance tradeoff that wont be static if dynamic resolution is used.
 
A reminder of the updated requirements from the graphical update:

 
 

4060ti often can't even beat 3060ti while 4070 is quite a bit better than 3070.
4060ti is really one of the worst value cards. IMO either stick with your 4060 or go all the way to 4070.

AK620 is plenty for a 7800x3D.
 
A lot of people make the mistake of thinking the 7800x3D is hard to cool. Its really a 45W TDP CPU in most games, but goes up to ~120W. It'll just run hotter than what most people expect because of the 3D v-cache mod, which adds two extra heat transfer layers between the IHS and CPU die (the 3D v-cache mod itself and its copper bonding).
 
All core, the 7800x3D won't really go past 4.9GHz, even with a beefy air cooler. Its got a max boost of 5.05GHz as well, so there's little extra room without going into BCLK overclocking. Delidding would likely let it maintain 5.05GHz all core, but I'm not ballsy enough to delid my 7950x3D to find out. That has a max boost of 5.25GHz on CCD0 comparably.

LF 2 & 3. I don't know what was the 1st one. 

Arctic uses their own stuff AFAIK. 

Arctic uses their own stuff AFAIK.