Ok hear me out. I’m a book author, I write a book and try to sell it for £100 while all my peers are selling books at 60 or 70. I spend the most money imaginable making my book. It’s quite possibly the largest book in existence thanks to the effort of me and 5000 other people. I lie awake at night worrying that we’ll never make back the money we’ve spent on it.

Wait what’s this? Some team of less than 10 people has written a 3-page book and sold it for 2.50? And people are… Buying it?! But why? Look at the size of my book, clearly it must be better because it’s so big, so fancy, so expensive! Every letter cost me millions! I read the 3-page book. It doesn’t have money dropping from each letter like mine. It has a beginning, middle and end but mine has 500 acts each more expensive than the last. Surely it’s not that good… It’s pretty great actually. I have learned nothing from this experience, even though it’s happened a hundred times. I will still make more money than entire countries, somehow.

I’ve never known any of my immediate circle of friends and family to have any interest whatsoever. Windows 11 has been the nail in the coffin for one, the steam deck has piqued the interest of another. Year of the Linux desktop is a pipe dream but any step towards greater adoption is a great thing.

I heard a journalist use similar language to describe skibidi toilet recently like it was just the one video. You’d think journalists would know better.

The thing we should be more concerned about are the parts that Steam haven’t opened up, for example Steam input. However they’ve done everything as openly as possible for the move to Linux and I applaud that. If steam goes away or stops being so open, we still have proton and wine and other projects that mean we’re not locked in to a Steam-specific OS, so we avoid the android problem there too.

The ELI5 version is that developers can make a lot of assumptions about what a Windows pc means and what features are available. A while ago if you had videos as part of a game (for example a cutscene) it was actually played through Windows Media Player, which was virtually guaranteed to be present on the user’s computer. Sure you can play that video with other tools like VLC or Quicktime, but you couldn’t guarantee they were installed, so Windows Media Player was a safe bet. Nowadays that’s not how video is handled but the point remains for a few other things. For example if I need to load an image, maybe a background, I would look it up using the windows filesystem, so probably something like C:\Program Files\Steam\common\mygame\images\background.png. That’s not the same in the Linux or another os. Also the piece of software that handles loading images might be different, which means how we execute that load operation is probably different, and so our Windows-focused version of our game just doesn’t work.

Fortunately nowadays that’s a mostly solved problem with Steam investing a lot of time into Proton, what they call a “compatibility layer” that basically translates all of the windows-specific stuff to work in Linux. That’s a very simplified explanation but you get the idea. The games that still won’t run have kernel-level anticheat (Valorant, Helldivers 2) or are so dependent on things only available on Windows that even Proton can’t fix it. Some anti-cheat software doesn’t run properly so then you can’t go online, like Warhammer: Vermintide 2. That’s mostly a commercial decision rather than technical, they could make it work they just choose not to.

The fact Microsoft isn’t mentioned astounds me.

The issue for me as a potential advocate to my immediate circle of friends and family is that I don’t want to become the only source of tech support. Now realistically they’ll probably have fewer issues, but as soon as they want to fix something they’ll have to come to me. No they won’t Google things, and if they do they won’t understand it.

I think my limiting factor is TPM 2.0 which I believe isn’t supported by the device but is required by windows 11

In my case my partner has a Windows 10 surface laptop. It’s perfectly functional and does what she needs it to do, but Windows 10 is dying next year, so I need to find some solution that is user friendly (meaning GUI-based in this case) to maintain her access to her OneDrive, or we throw away a perfectly good laptop to buy a slightly newer one. Besides the e-waste it’s just a waste of money. It makes some business sense, why make it easy to move away from windows? Except it also sucks on anything that isn’t a windows desktop, so they just expect people to put up with a subpar service essentially because their business users don’t have much choice. Dropbox was better 10 years ago than OneDrive is now, in terms of platform availability and usability.

Note: I’m aware we can access OneDrive and office via a browser, however it’s not the same as native and feels clunky. Throwing Linux on it and using a browser is probably going to be our solution if I can’t get rclone to work in a way she’ll be happy with.

Yeah it certainly is a hell of a lot cheaper if you’re copying an existing game scene for scene…

The main draw to the CLI for me is portability. I’ve been a dev for ten years now and used tons of different editors on different platforms and while each one had a different way to describe the changes, how to commit, or how to “sync” (shudder), the CLI hasn’t changed. I didn’t have to relearn a vital part of my workflow just because I wanted to try a different editor.

I think there’s something I’m not understanding with logseq because I use it and obsidian and massively prefer obsidian. I can’t pinpoint why or what the problem is but it never feels like I can access the notes that I want when I want them. Did you have any issues making the switch?

The self-contained electron app works better for most people I think.

Didn’t they effectively kill the oculus rifts with required logins and no more support?

Bit of an alarmist headline here. The vulnerability has been patched in the most common clients (openssh) and it was because the protocol wasn’t being implemented correctly. To say that the SSH protocol “just got a lot weaker” is just not true.