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).

In short, Java was invented for a reason, and while it has become a victim of legacy cruft as well, the underlying concept of truly portable apps, with a minimum of fuss to jump from platform to platform, still ought to be the preferable path. The problem is that that true platform neutrality/ambiguity pretty much kills Microsoft in all but a few niches, like gaming, but only because hardware vendors put less effort into drivers for other operating systems.

Yes, Office is still king, although I think that crown is beginning to slip, and it may end up being Excel, with its large list of features, that may last the longest. But it isn't 1990, or even 2000 anymore. Developers have multiple ways of developing portable applications, and while MS may (for the nth time) update or swap out its toolchains, the real question is will developers really care?

Mostly agree. I abandoned the Mac around Systen 7.5 era for the 486DX 66Mhz. The multitasking and protected memory spaces put it in advance of the Mac, and the CPUs started to lag the competition as well.

I came back in the OS X era (can't remember if I ever had Cheetah, but I definitely had Jaguar) where although the chips were a bit slower overall it didn't matter much because the OS was just better. Now the chips are better, the OS is better (for versions of 'better' that don't include gaming)...but the OS as compared to its own standards is worse than it used to be. Better than Win 11 - hmm. Not the highest bar anymore.

Which, to be honest, fundamentally misunderstands used RAM readings. Vast majority of that 'used' RAM is in easily discardable caches - Apple had the same PR problem with misleading reports when they released whatever the version was about 4-5 years ago and their tools reported full memory.

Windows does use more RAM than most, but it showing almost all the RAM full is the same kind of caching strategy that macOS uses. Apple eventually started calling this "Memory Pressure" and gave it a simple traffic light system. RAM is doing you no good if it's free, might as well use it to cache if there's not a hard requirement for it right that moment.

I strongly believe Word peaked with Word 4.2 on the Mac - System 6, 1Mb RAM. There are those who would argue 5.1a on the Mac because it included envelope printing, but it was much, much slower and needed more like 2 or 4Mb.

Then they unified the version numbers across the platforms and moved to this pcode stuff in v6. This was so bad and so slow on the Mac that they actually issued an apology for it. Things have gone downhill since then, and v6 was released 1994.

>arguing it unfairly advantages startups

Way to say your dealers suck.

Simplify. The best part is no part. The parts omitted never fail. They don't require maintenance, supply chains, continuous improvement.

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

You haven't? How about this evidence, or this evidence, or perhaps this evidence, or...

You get the idea. The article doesn't say anything about a court order one way or the other, so we simply don't know the state there. Given previous track record, it's likely the request was made legally if Apple complied with it.

Aaak. I think it was. That'll teach me to work off of decade old memories...

Well, it probably won't teach me.

The Moon is target practice. We need to get away from innovative bespoke engineering, into industrial mass production with continuous improvement. To do that we need to fly often. Mars just doesn't have the launch window availability. The biggest part of the challenge is that we were born in the bottom of a deep well. To toss enough stuff out of the well for a long journey is critical. Boosters that reliably fly on time often and cheaply enough to get ships and fuel out of the well. Ships that carry fuel into orbit and return over and over since the vast majority of the material we need to send out of the well isn't payloads or ships, it's fuel. Kilotons of fuel. Once the factories and processes are set up for that going far beyond the Moon is fairly easy. But with a narrow opportunity every two years that's not going to happen in a human lifespan. It's not enough refinement cycles per year.

I see this accelerating the Mars objective, not deferring it.

You''ve added the word 'more' here and that wasn't in the original statement. The original statement is 100% correct. It would also be correct for Java, Javascript , C#...but it's still correctly used here.

That other things are also bad is no reason to not try to look at and change your own situation.

This debate has been going on for at least a couple of decades. I remember back in the Usenet days, when AOL and other early ISP users first started showing up in droves with whacked out untraceable bang paths that people were trying to sort out technical solutions, usually involving some servers tarpitting some domains, with the inevitable consequence that valid users (by whatever definition any given Usenet group had) were blocked.

In a way, AI bots aren't any different than the spam problem on fax machines and email; universal low-barrier delivery meets large scale programmatic swill. AI allows complexity that earlier spambots couldn't dream of, when the most sophisticated way of defeating filters was spelling "porn" as "pr0n" and a bit of header fuckery. In the end there is only two ways to go; either do what filtering you can and accept some degree of false positives, or go to identification systems that will, one way or the other, compromise anonymity, because make no mistake, once you start storing any kind of data linking an account to an actual human being; biometric, picture ID, phone number, mailing address or whatever, it won't take long for the court order to show up demanding you hand over all the de-anonymized account data to find the person distributing child porn, drugs, or calling their local political representative dirty names.

Neo and Android-based Chromebooks, and "good-enough" Office alternatives like Google Docs and I would argue even LibreOffice (I use it almost exclusively these days), mean Microsoft is suffering a differentiation crisis. They'll likely have the corporate lock for some time to come, though they've managed to fuck up Outlook so badly that I have to be wondering if the only thing really keeping the big guys locked in as Teams at this point.

MS's ability to leverage Windows as the platform is decaying, and the "bells and whistles" approach has managed to alienate a lot of users. People are at the point where they use Windows because they have to, but there's enough platform-agnostic functionality out there that the old lock-ins they relied on to keep Windows dominant are becoming more like prisons for their own development teams.