ForbiddenRoot
Is this a smart idea?
For Roblox and Minecraft, a TV should be perfectly fine and in fact excellent. I will go out on a limb here and say that even for most ‘real’ games a TV is fine. The latency associated with TVs is most noticeable in FPS games. For other genres like strategy, third-person adventure games etc, I do not think it matters as much if at all. Many people, especially those who have not used a low response / gaming monitor, do not even notice a lag at all (Note: You will find many such people in real life but never ever on the internet). It would be nice of course if your TV had a “Game Mode” which lowers latency, but it may not necessarily be there in a 10-year-old TV (though it was not that uncommon even back then, so do look for it in your TV settings).
Regarding programming on the TV, I think the situation is slightly different. Using small text in general doesn’t work for me at all on a TV. Most TVs, other than OLEDs or recent non-OLED ones, don’t seem to handle text well enough in my experience. There’s either ghosting or some other manner of artifacts which makes the text harder to read compared to a monitor (apart from the distance from TV involved). I commonly see this issue even with office televisions used for mirroring laptop output. Maybe playing around with sharpening and other settings might get it to work well enough though and it really depends on the specific TV in question.
Overall, I feel you should be fine, at least for gaming, but probably for programming as well. I have a couple of gaming rigs hooked up to my living room and bedroom TV’s and I quite enjoy gaming on them. The much larger screens and ability to lounge about while gaming more than make up for any perceived or actual lag for me.
I hope your kid and you have a great time with your new setup. Have fun! :)
I somehow entirely missed the hype around this game and came across it again only accidentally on early release day when looking at some other sale on Steam. Been playing it and it seems fine to me in a vague Skyrim-in-space sort of way, which is all what I was expecting from a Bethesda RPG.
The world seems alive enough and there are plenty of side-quests and amusing / interesting things to discover. Now suddenly I have been coming across a bunch of posts everywhere where the game is supposed to be terrible or something. Still seems fine to me, but maybe I have lower standards after decades of gaming. shrug.
Onboard Intel/amd? “Discrete” Intel/amd/nvidia?
I have two laptops of this sort in use currently: One is a more recent AMD (5600H) + Nvidia (3080) and the other is an older Intel (some 10th-gen mobile) + Nvidia (2070). Both combinations work fine without any particular fiddling, apart from installing Nvidia proprietary drivers, on mostly any recent distro.
My use case is general desktop usage, Rust / C development, and occasional Steam-based gaming on these machines. Both laptops run pretty much the same as they did on Windows (GPU-wise). Fedora seems to work the best for me with everything setup nicely out of the box barring non-free stuff required from RPMFusion. On the Intel + Nvidia one, which is my distro-hopping laptop, I have used pretty much all distros without issue as well. Nix is however not included in the list of distros I have tried, but Arch is.
To eliminate this confusion I propose the days of the month should start from 13.