vividspecter

US only I suspect, and likely to be gutted by the Trump administration.

I'm not really an expert, but I'll try and answer your questions one by one.

Don’t VMs have a virtual GPU with a driver for that GPU in the guest that, I imagine, forwards the graphics instructions and routines to the driver on the host?

Yes, this is what VirGL (OGL) and Venus (Vulkan) do. The latter works pretty well because Vulkan is more low level and better represents the underlying hardware so there is less of a performance overhead. However, this does mean you need to translate all APIs one by one, not just OGL and Vulkan, but also hardware decoding and encoding of videos, and compute, so it's a fair amount of work.

Native contexts, in contrast, are basically the "real" host driver used in the guest, and they essentially pass through everything 1:1 to the host driver where the actual work is carried out. They aren't really like virtualisation extensions as the hardware doesn't need to support it AFAICT, just the drivers on both the host and the guest. There's a presentation and slides on native contexts vs virgl/venus which may be helpful.

Where in that does Magma come in? My guess is that magma sits in the guest as the graphics driver and on the host before Mesa, but I know little about virtualisation outside of containers.

To be honest, I don't fully understand the details either, but your interpretation seems more or less correct. From looking at the diagram on the MR it seems that it's a layer between the userspace graphics driver and the native context (virtgpu) layer on the guest side, which in turn communicates with another Magma layer on the host, and finally passes data to the host GPU driver, which may be Mesa but could also be other drivers as long as they implement Magma.

The broader idea is to abstract implementation details, so applications and userspace drivers don't need to know the native context implementation details (other than interfacing with Magma). And the native context layer doesn't need to know which host gpu driver is being used, it just needs to interface with Magma.

I'd probably get the 9070 XT over the 7080 XT, just for full performance FSR4 (there's some compatibility with it on Linux, but it's slower). Maybe even the non-XT model for the same reason.

I feel like you might be able to do better price wise on the RAM, although I'm not up to date on current prices for DDR5.

EDIT: I see you have an itx case, so maybe that limits your GPU options a bit.

The sandboxing sometimes breaks applications or requires additional configuration. And I don't like that it's a separate thing I need to maintain, although some package managers pair main package updates etc together.

And as a NixOS user, I prefer to use nix to handle as much of my system as possible, although flatpak at least is useful as a fallback in a pinch. Of course, this is a niche within a niche and mainstream users, particularly those using immutable distros can and do benefit from flatpak.

"Globalism" invariably means some sort of conspiracy theory, usually about Jews. Given this party are also anti-vaxxers, that's the most plausible conclusion.

And a broader coalition among the rest of the Western countries including Europe and Australia/NZ etc makes more sense than duplicating effort in every country.

Good - Leaptel, Superloop

Good but expensive - Aussie Broadband, Launtel

Okay - TPG, Spintel

I avoid Telstra and Optus and most of the other providers, so can't comment on those.

Typically, I switch back and forth between Leaptel and Superloop as they normally have 6/12 month deals. One downside with Superloop is that you are expected to give 1 month notice when switching away. Sometimes you can get away with not, but I wouldn't rely on it.

I'll add that Exetel is owned by Superloop now, so experience will be roughly the same (but they use PPoE which is slightly annoying).

The other points have been answered, so I'll try and give a surface view of Magma. It's basically an abstraction layer for virtual GPU drivers used in VMs. Currently, you need specific implementations to handle all of the pathways between different types of VM guests and hosts, which gets complicated fast, and duplicates a lot of work. The idea is the Magma abstracts this away, and so host and guest GPU drivers only need to interface with Magma. Which means you can swap out different host OSes/GPU drivers and different guest OSes and GPU drivers, and as long as they interface with Magma, they should "just work".

Of course, whether it will work out that way in practice remains to be seen. I think Google is using it internally but it's not in Mesa yet, so it may not even roll out widely. You can follow the MR if you want more detail or to see its progress.

If you're wondering why Google is implementing this it appears to be for Fuschia and Android, and compatibility between those two and with desktop Linux, with Windows support also supported as an additional value add. Chromebooks in particular should benefit from this, since ChromeOS is being retired I believe.

And as an aside, unlike some of the traditional GPU implementations you'd find in VMs, these are or will be pretty much just the normal graphics driver that you'd use on the host. They are generally called "native contexts" and have been implemented for AMD and Intel at the least, but only on non-Windows systems for now. These implementations alone, once they are widely supported, should result in near native GPU performance in VMs, without having to use GPU passthrough (I.e. passing through a physical GPU to the VM guest). So even without Magma there's some promising stuff happening, albeit mainly on the Linux host -> Linux guest pathway.

And even if they could, it wouldn't save them, as being "one of the good ones" does nothing to prevent deportation or worse.

I'm guessing it's the AI agent stuff. Which at the moment is literally just automating browsing through a website.

Apparently there will be APIs to do this in the future. Ironically, AI wouldn't even be needed for that to be useful.

Valve is one of the main contributors to the RADV Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs, and a bunch of other parts of Mesa and the open driver stack in general.

I should probably add that some of this work is on RDNA3 FSR4 support, which isn't even supported on Windows. It's not amazingly fast, but it's now faster than native and that might be enough to make it worth it (especially in the cases where it improves image quality due to poor TAA implementations).

mpv supports Dolby vision (along with the Jellyfin clients that depend on it), but if you mean with streaming services, that's unlikely to happen due to DRM.