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Comment Re:Works pretty well. (Score 1) 48

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).

Comment Re:They don't want to make other OSes more attract (Score 1) 118

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.

Comment Re:Soaring RAM prices (Score 1) 118

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.

Comment Re:They don't want to make other OSes more attract (Score 1) 118

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.

Comment Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score 5, Informative) 90

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.

Comment Re: a corporation gave some money... (Score 1) 31

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.

Comment Re:Who is still using VMs anyway? (Score 1) 31

If I could paraphrase slightly - "other than the primary use case, there are no use cases". What you describe is exactly the use case - people running full desktop environments or closed-off deployment environments on top of a VMware frame.

A migration for many organisations would be huge to organise and costly since big bang-style would be out of the question. Lots of migrations that kick off let's say today wouldn't have concluded within 3-5 years. Would not shock me if longer exists as well.

Comment Re:Killed by Nvidia (Score 1) 21

The point isn't to use it. The point is to stop you using the actually open source competitor. They're trying to get you concentrated on using nvidia kit until you're bored of AI, not on some general purpose kit until you're bored of AI. That's it - this isn't quite 'embrace, extend, extinguish' it's more 'announce, divert, extinguish'.

Less alliterative, but still true.

Comment Re:Oh no not again (Score 1) 10

Yes - Apple have testified that they do not link data from the applications together. The 3rd party ones do link the data together. Hence the law suit.
br I'm neither the defence nor the prosecution so I don't have internal Apple evidence. The case has gone through before though, hence my title of "oh no not again". The solution had been agreed by the competition regulators, this is the 3rd parties opening it all up again.

Comment Oh no not again (Score 2) 10

Been following this one out of morbid curiosity for a few months. The reason the Apple ones don't show the same prompts as the third-party ones is they don't do the tracking as those third-parties. If they do, they ask for the same permission. Apple don't want to prompt for permission to do something they're not doing (at least in that app).

Personally I hope all the ad tracking of both sides just dies in a fire, but it does seem completely reasonable not to be forced to prompt to get permission for something you're not actually doing or going to do.

Comment I had the luck to play with a pre-release Sony PSX (Score 1) 21

I knew someone who worked at Psygnosis (later Studio Liverpool, later dead...), and got to play early cuts of Ridge Racer and Wipeout. It was clear at the time that this was a step above anything else that was out and it was going to be a huge success.

I also remember hating the name when it first appeared as well - PSX was the pre-launch name, and it seems to have stuck around in people's consciousness since as well.

Comment Re:The Luddites are always right... (Score 1) 27

The real-life initialLuddites were protesting working conditions and quality, not the machines per se. They threatened to destroy the machines because of low pay and poor quality output when they were made to operate them. That movement changed, and did eventually look more like a full on "destroy the machines" movement, true.

It's a pet hobby-horse of mine - the origins of the movement are far more nuanced, and directly applicable in fact, than the dismissive way we use the word today.

Comment Re:Just another classistexploitive platform (Score 3, Informative) 66

And the home computer wars started before the console ways. British playgrounds in the 1980s were full of ZX Spectrum vs BBC Micro, and later vs Commodore 64. Throw in the Amstrads, Dragon32, Oric Atmos and I even knew someone with a New Brain and you've got yourself a party.

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