I think here "open" means "not limited to internally-generated apps." Yes there are rules and guidelines that have to be met in order to publish an app to the App Store, but any developer can get published.

Whether you agree or disagree with those guidelines is a different question.

Garbidgecollect surfaces etc...

Oh yes im pissed off that proton and cedega are in the news but im not and there dead ans burried. Looking at some of the changes made to direct3d it seems steam os requires that apps dont count activex instization and it wouldnt suprise me if it forced software nulling of buffers because thease some things that make strict directx 3d slow and by passing them gives substantial performance increases unfortunally someone put me in a cardboard coffin before i was able to roll this out when i wrote dirextx9 for vanilla wine many moons ago. So, im going to revisit direct3d with levels of strictness vs performance with some of the features being able to be rolled out across the entire activex architecrure in wine. I also wrote a text literal pdf importer and some other funky stuff along the way so you should soon be able to edit pdfs with a text editor instead of current vecror implementations the lengths someone has gone to to prevent the release of this are outstanding so hopefully its as disruptive as direcrx9 for vanilla wine was back all those years ago. If you find my corpse somewhere you know why.

To what are you alluding?

Basically everyone who lives in the area or studies the climate or hydrology would tell you that you're insane.

More like a once-in-a-millennium event. Though I suspect it's going to be considerably more common going forward.

Deserts have some amount of normal precipitation, too. And when you get a lot less than normal, that's called a drought. Yes, even in a desert.

We do have pretty good data from tree rings. Unless you think the trees came from somewhere else?

Opps, I got sidetracked and jumped to airline fees...but my point stands. The fuel surcharge isn't going to go away if/when fuel prices come down.

The pessimist in me says this is one of those temporary fees that will get removed...never. It's the airlines' way of boosting ticket prices without boosting ticket prices themselves. Think the fee will get dropped once fuel prices go down? No, neither do I.

Can confirm Bazzite. 85/90% there I'd say, which means there's still a bit of "tread carefully" for people. I'm very happy with the running, but I'd be less than truthful if I said it was completely frictionless.

For example, 90% of my gaming is on Elder Scrolls Online, the 'play' button on Steam runs the Zenimax launcher not the game itself and there's also an annoying recent'ish (few months) bug where it seems games launched from a 3rd party launcher don't know they've got the foreground focus. Steam thinks the launcher has the foreground., andn ESO this manifests as not autoswitching to the main game window after you've gone through the Zenimax launcher, no sound and sometimes stuttering frames because the ESO game window still thinks its in the background somehow. Random'ish alt-tabbing and clicking will bring it back, but it means there's a a) a small bit of friction where there was previously none and b) some change or regression because all this used to run fine without that issue.

I played Rez:Infinite. Great game, but it has an "Attack" mode which will crash after the third level or so. Again, friction.

I play Skyrim. Setting both Skyrim and ESO up for modding, including running some Windows binaries required by the mods, was a relatively painful learning experience.

I have a friend who wanted to switch but didn't because of kernel DRM in some of the Windows games. Once again, friction.

I'm very happy with the switch and wouldn't go back, but I'm experienced with Linux (Slackware 0.9 alpha being my first distro, and I'd installed before distros like that existed as well - anyone for Minix on an Atari ST?). I can see people not quite as annoyed with Windows as me not really seeing the benefit. For me, it was one giant Co-pilot advert too far that made me say "right then, done". After I'd told it no god knows how many flaming times, Windows popped up some "Let's get ready in your new Co-Pilot account!" thing that literally just had me hard power off and wipe the OS away. My PC is purely for gaming, I use a Mac laptop for my desktop work, so I get that luxury.

(as an aside, I do wish Steam would ban using launchers when it itself is the launcher. There's no reason for that Zenimax launcher to exist in the Steam version of the game, and it's annoying as hell because it prevents me from using Big Picture mode and just treating the whole thing like a console. That's true for either Windows or Linux, this is a 3rd party launcher thing and not an OS thing).

Even worse is when they compromise the VPN operators and then monitor your usage until you do something that makes them decide to crack down on you.

People erroneously think of VPNs as privacy protectors. They aren't, not unless you have very good reason to trust whoever is running the server. If you don't, then they're concentrators for likely subversive traffic and its origins.

The solution to this is to join a party and get involved in the decisionmaking. It's a lot easier than you might think, and you can have a lot more influence that you might expect, precisely because not that many people do this.

Concur to a point...a little fire (drill) and flooding (drill) to get the blood moving periodically is good.

Meh.

It would undoubtedly be very expensive at first, and therefore only available to the very wealth (probably not ultra-wealthy -- even without automation, caring for such a clone wouldn't be a full-time job, so call it maybe $30k/year -- within the reach of the upper middle class). But competition would drive automation, and we already have most of the techniques required, having developed them to deal with coma patients and the like, but at lower cost because this case would be dealing with a fundamentally healthy body. My guess based on some napkin math is that cost could be driven down as low as $10k per year. Maybe lower.

$10k per year is expensive, sure, but having an immunologically-perfect organ donor could absolutely be worth it for someone making as little as $200k per year.

If the cost could be driven down to $5k per year... then it's in the range where most middle-class Americans could afford it, even if it meant that they'd have to cut back a little somewhere else; maybe drive an older car rather than leasing a new one, or similar.

I'm just talking about statistical patterns. I know little about Microsoft patches. I abandoned Windows in 2001, right around the time XP was released, and have never looked back.