Ask Lemmy

Yes

I use mine mostly for work. But also games, music, and movies.

I mostly use mine to program. I started gaming again after barely playing them for a decade, but that is not my computer's primary purpose. Otherwise, I do dumb online browsing, play D&D with friends (used to...), fiddle around with art (mostly do that on iPad), 3d printing or electronics related things. Random shit like that.

Anyway I'm just wondering how common it is to use computers more for coding and other technical non-game stuff.

I'd estimate gaming is <5% of my use, probably lower.on my PC

Id say maybe <10% on my phone

I have no console. I had a WiiU as my last one and sold it during Covid as I never iswed it.

Have been thinking aboit a Steam Deck

Am old as fcuk, used to wrote my own games in machine code on my Commodore 64.

Funny thing I thought about when coming back home..

My work laptop has been used more for gaming than my gaming pc has, and inverse of that my gaming pc has seen more work done than my work laptop

Why? I don't fucking know why it just is

I use an HTPC that happens to be powerful enough to be a gaming PC, I also have a media server facing the internet for use on the go.

Most of my pc use nowadays is for media consumption and analog to digital conversion for backups (VHS to HDD and eventually M-Disc for long term storage).

I do a bit of emulation, most of that is done with an ARM handheld PC but it's an SP form factor and I don't really think it counts. I do a bit of PS2 emulation as well on my HTPC but mostly just to verify good rips of my physical games which I have backed up.

I'm a recreational coder first and foremost. Sometimes I play games, but rarely all the way through

I pretty much stopped gaming when I started working serious jobs after college. I was a designer and front end dev, then design lead for a startup (where I allowed myself to be overworked, especially around deadlines). It’s a lot of screen time and playing games when I got home lost it’s appeal. Plus I’d switched to Macs, and my favorite multiplayer games were being over run by cheating (mid 2000s).

Linux stuff

Technically for me it's work now

A lot of people in IT, especially programmers I have met, are completely uninterested in gaming.

To be sure, there are PLENTY of gamers in IT, but many people I have met are done with computers once they get home.

My main use is for porn.

What’s a computer?

• I work with computers, so: work
• I mainly consume media (tablet, phone) or read (e-ink) these days.
• Raspberry Pi handles my home automation, and I’m always futzing with it
• my laptop plays games about once a month or taxes once a year

Audio! I'm a hobbyist musician.

Gaming is a close second.

No games here, I never have found them interesting for whatever reason. Because of this my laptop is a 2018 Chromebook with reflashed BIOS running Ubuntu. It has significantly less processing power than my phone but is plenty sufficient for everything I ever need a computer to do.

I never play, i always code.. And i am not even that good at it 😢

I do 3D animation and illustration. Fortunately, running games requires the exact same kind of hardware so my workstation doubles as a playstation

i dont really game. my hobbies are more self-hosting, service related stuff. giant media library.. distributed av system. lots of docker, server stuff.

the selfhosting communities have some interesting traffic

4 hours and 52 comments, and not a single mention of what we all knew even before Avenue Q:

The Internet is for porn. Everything else is just what happens between porn.

More seriously, my desktop is where I do larger research that will require more than a couple of tabs. Little to no gaming there. Other PCs are mainly for videos.

Does making game code count? I like making game things and binning them before they resemble something playable! :)

Besides that... I mostly... no that's it, I rarely play things, unless that time every 6 months that I get really into a top-down RPG. For a weekend, my main use is exploring a colorado wasteland or a small town, but it's followed by me starting to make a game aaaand giving up again... but it's fun! :)

I really should make music, I sometimes feel the spark went and it's sad. :(

I have games installed but I mostly just write programs for fun now. I usually don't get a ton of time to play games, plus they haven't been as fun as they used to be as a kid.

I still play games but now I have more things to do with computers. I started helping out an open source software project learning how to code basic things in lua, how to contribute using git pushes. make art texture graphics in gimp, mess with sound effects in audacity, clip videos together using kdenlive. I hope to learn how to use blender and do modeling. I test and review fellow devs stuff to try helping them out. As long as I learn new things and contribute it helps me feel like my computer time is more productive.

Then I got in on the local LLM scene a year ago with the release of llama 3.1. I'm a science nerd who genuinely thinks the study of neural networks is cool. The idea of getting computers to simulate thoughts to help solve problems is a neat thing. Also I wanted to see how far we came from cleverbot days. It inspired me enough to dig out the old unused gaming desktop and really extract the most potential out of my old 1070ti.

Now I wish I had more vram not for chasing high end graphics in video game entertainment, but because I want my computer to simulate high quality thoughts to help me in daily life.

I mostly use my Mac for business stuff, art and coding. The PC spends most of its time on offloaded AI tasks and rendering jobs. It was originally a toy for gaming but I’d rather use my Steam Deck for that now.

Hmm it's difficult to quantify. On workday I spend an average of probably 6-8 hours on a computer with job related tasks. Not really coding most of the time, since we're maintaining and building a network, so it's more configuration, planning, coordination, and documentation work. Some days we're out to actually deploy hardware, or run around and debug stuff, so it's hard to estimate the average screentime.

My free time involves a lot of computer time too, but it is split up into more smaller categories, either on the desktop computer or the smartphone computer. Manga, Games, Youtube, Movies, Anime Series, Lemmy, Pornography, News, Banking and Investments.

In the end I think my job is the biggest unified chunk of time, but that's kind of arbitrary, if I started subdividing it into different tasks maybe gaming would become the biggest chunk.

I use the crap out of my computer.

-Video editing -Music editing -Word processing -Spreadsheets -Microprocessor programming -YouTube viewing -Image editing -Shopping -Investing -Web surfing -3D printing -CNC Routing -Website development

• Oh and gaming.