My cynical mind think link you but also comes to the opposite conclusion.
Everyone will be writing apps.
Almost every app will be as janky as possible and people will just take the jank as the normal thing and get used to it and working around it, just like they did when every company started using electron and fake mobile apps that are wrapped buggy webpages.
With fast updates that changes every feature across updates, breaking everything and people accepting as the norm.
It's already happening:
- you can see Show HN post making it to the front page full vibecoded with as much jank as possible and the all the comments praising it and not questionning all the jank.
- I've seen it in some popular open source projects when after updates existing feature started to break constantly. The whole thing is ai coded up to the handling of bug reports and feature request and have Claude as co-commiter. I've looked in the internet to see the perception no one is complaining about it
- same at work, managers accepting slop AI solutions that are wrong at so many levels simply because it's fast and complain about the symptoms months down the line without questionning the AI part.
I love what he'd done for linux gaming, but man the cult of personality for gabe is strong on the internet.
gabe is not a philanthropy who want to see linux gaming happen no matter what.
he's a reasonable man who saw a threat to his business when every operating system started making their own store and windows was directly trying to eat his lunch starting from window 7 and going at it the strongest in window 8 when they had their dedicated to game store directly pinned in the windows bar menu.
Microsoft's threat was more overt than that: the initial plan was for Microsoft to be the sole signing authority for Windows apps in Windows 7, while simultaneously locking down the OS from pre-boot onwards and not executing unsigned binaries. This would have killed not only Steam games, but Steam itself wouldn't be distributable. Microsoft forced Gabe's hand! Valve had to pivot away from being 100% dependant on Windows as a matter of corporate survival.
The Windows Store was introduced in 2012, 14 years ago, and promptly went nowhere; Gabe Newell is ex-Microsoft himself and undoubtedly had a good understanding of how dim the prospects and how poor the execution was for it. Yet he persisted in pursuing the Steam Machine and Proton long after it was clear that the Windows Store was a flop.
If you want philanthropy (or perhaps not), Gabe Newell has $1 billion worth of yachts and research ships.
So I dunno anything about Gaben’s actual motives, but I will say, I personally would not be assuaged just because the store flopped. The underlying problem is that Valve sells games, and games needed Windows, and that’s exactly the sort of dependent relationship that Microsoft (and others) use to extract value and dominate new markets. It makes sense to me that Valve looked at how hard it would be to break out of that, and decided that it would remain diligent regardless of how credible the immediate threat was.
Not a single one of the other gaming giants (Blizzard, EA, Epic, Activision, etc.) or marketplaces (Epic, GOG, etc.) who also depend on Windows bothered to counter this supposed threat? Doesn't sound like much of a threat then.
Really, they're probably more displeased about the Valve near-monopoly as a marketplace for Windows games than displeased about MS.
Better for you(the seller) vs better for me (the buyer)
Two agents with two different utility functions fighting each other, it's an adversarial relationship/game.
The fight is for your limited attention span.
Clickbaity titles or least informative ones, 20min of rambling for what could've been a 2min video or article, spreading the meat of the info in the later half of the video for better retention instead of the beginning, highly misleading previews at the beggining, etc ... are good for the content producer but not so much for the content viewer that has to sift through it only to reliaze that didn't care about that particular thing.
Not limited to videos, but also things to buy the meat of the technical/practical description of the product get worse and worse each year and the other proxy signals for them too.
Seems like marketing is a lot like military conflict drown the enemy in lot of noise to drop the SNR.
what's that you want to buy a 4k video projector and set a filter for it? here it is for cheaper. Oh, you wanted the actual dots on the wall resolution to be 4k instead of max supported input signal, oops.
You're used to higher price meaning better quality? guess we'll flood that price point with shitier quality progressively until we find your limit
It does matter, that's why those people quit because it's such a shitshow, progress happens at a glacial pace, more and more defects and slowdowns keep being created even if they have a big QA department/teams and the users are probably trapped because the software is the only thing in town, the bosses are the ones that makes the purchase decisions, or the it comes attached to big and/or expensive machines and they can't just buy another one for another X years.
yes, of course. I meant "it doesn't really matter" in the sense that businesses have been dealing with this since the beginning of software. Strong ownership and passion was one of the selling points of OSS, but that style of ownership was always very very rare in corporate. It just doesn't really fit with how businesses operate. The "passion" is ARR, not engineering principals. Most software is built, sold, and bought by people who don't use it directly.
> The code base itself has never and will never matter in the big picture
Clearing my throat: I am the first person to tell everyone on the team (repeatedly, until they are sick of hearing it) that the users, use cases, and organizational objectives are always more important than the technology.
But, in "the big picture" - the Linux codebase doesn't matter? The codebase that powers AWS doesn't matter? Hell, the Microsoft Office codebase doesn't matter? Look at what's happening to Windows when they treat it like the codebase doesn't matter.
For a tech org, the codebase is the reification of all of your objectives, all of your knowledge about your users and use cases and processes. Long term, a mature codebase plus people who understand it is one of the most valuable things you have. When orgs don't realize this, when they treat their workers and their work product as disposable commodities, we call this "enshittification."
This likely won't need billions of Euros to implement and will be an earmark in the budget. My point being it's not such a grandious project, from a continental perspective.
I don't know what "workarounds" you're talking about, or what unwanted behavior that I presume you're talking about. Would you be more specific?
I ask because just a few minutes ago, I ran VRRTest [0] on my dual-monitor machine and saw no screen tearing on either monitor. Because VRR is disabled in multi-monitor setups, I saw juddering on both monitors when I commanded VRRTest render rates that weren't a multiple of the monitor's refresh rate, but no tearing at all.
My setup:
* Both monitors hooked up via DisplayPort
* Radeon 9070 (non-XT)
* Gentoo Linux, running almost all ~amd64 packages.
* x11-base/xorg-server-21.1.20
* x11-drivers/xf86-video-amdgpu-25.0.0-r1
* x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati-22.0.0
* sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-6.18.5
* KDE and Plasma packages are either version 6.22.0 or 6.5.5. I CBA to get a complete list, as there are so many relevant packages.
(I'm posting in a reply in part because the edit window is long since past.)
Yeah. I'm actually quite interested in hearing what "workarounds" and/or misbehavior you're talking about. 'amdgpu(4)' says this about the TearFree property:
Option "TearFree" "boolean"
Set the default value of the per-output ’TearFree’ property,
which controls tearing prevention using the hardware page flip‐
ping mechanism. TearFree is on for any CRTC associated with one
or more outputs with TearFree on. Two separate scanout buffers
need to be allocated for each CRTC with TearFree on. If this op‐
tion is set, the default value of the property is ’on’ or ’off’
accordingly. If this option isn’t set, the default value of the
property is auto, which means that TearFree is on for rotated
outputs, outputs with RandR transforms applied, for RandR 1.4
secondary outputs, and if ’VariableRefresh’ is enabled, otherwise
it’s off.
The explicit mention that the "auto" enables TearFree only for secondary outputs and rotated and/or transformed outputs if 'VariableRefresh' is disabled seems to directly contradict what I think you're saying. And if "auto" enables TearFree on secondary displays, my recommendation of "on" certainly also does. But, yeah. I await clarification.
That’s not true, at least in France. Perhaps it’s true in some other dialect, e.g. Quebec French; I don’t know.
From Wiktionary, the pronunciation of English bit is /bɪt/, and French bite is /bit/. The sounds represented in IPA by ɪ and i are not the same, which is precisely why “bit” and “beet” sound different to Americans.
It's pronounced the same only by people speaking English with a French accent. An American, Brit, Indian, or any other native speaker of English absolutely does not pronounce "bit" the same way a French person pronounces "une bite."
Rather than measuring whose French pedigree is longer, I will put down a wager on this. ₹3? :D
I don’t doubt that you speak French. French people tend to have difficulty distinguishing those sounds because they are not distinguished in French. In English, they are: English has a much larger inventory of distinct vowel sounds than French (or indeed most European languages). In typical French-accented English, “bit” is indeed pronounced like the French word “bite”, but in native speaker English, it is not.
I am a native speaker of American English and also speak French quite well. If you neither accept personal experience, nor what is written on Wiktionary, what evidence would you accept?
Everyone will be writing apps. Almost every app will be as janky as possible and people will just take the jank as the normal thing and get used to it and working around it, just like they did when every company started using electron and fake mobile apps that are wrapped buggy webpages.
With fast updates that changes every feature across updates, breaking everything and people accepting as the norm.
It's already happening:
- you can see Show HN post making it to the front page full vibecoded with as much jank as possible and the all the comments praising it and not questionning all the jank.
- I've seen it in some popular open source projects when after updates existing feature started to break constantly. The whole thing is ai coded up to the handling of bug reports and feature request and have Claude as co-commiter. I've looked in the internet to see the perception no one is complaining about it
- same at work, managers accepting slop AI solutions that are wrong at so many levels simply because it's fast and complain about the symptoms months down the line without questionning the AI part.