For what it's worth, my ASUS motherboard from 2017 has their overclocking utility branded as "AI suite 3" (implying there were 2 before). I think having a buzzword to slap on products that fits the latest trend is a checkbox for whoever is marketing these, whether or not it fits any textbook definition of that term.
It was also around the time of the early netbooks, when the premise was a lean laptop and you'd do tasks that'd usually be done with relatively demanding local clients by the browser, as google and others were improving their online app offerings. They'd be using things like SATA/IDE to compact flash adapters to keep power down and responsiveness up, they were an ideal candidate for early SSDs as they didn't need a lot of capacity to run a linux + lightweight DE. Then they became just cheap laptops running full windows.
That's an interesting dividing line, and I think also needs to be compared against big companies setting opt-in/out defaults or the "Yes/Maybe later" patterns. What I find curious is that there's been the opportunity for spam for a lot longer, in a way the Win8 live tiles were an evolution of the widgets that first appeared in Vista, and they introduced active wallpaper along with IE4 (or was it Win98?) although that opportunity would have been much less effective as internet availability was much less.
I'd say that comes down to the difference between requirements (i.e. will it run at all, does it use features only found in win11) and support, and the developer's decisions around that. I can appreciate not supporting win10 even if it runs as they have a written or implied burden to make sure it keeps operating correctly for the lifespan, and that may include keeping test systems around or handling bugs that turn up in the OS that's getting reduced support itself, or other factors like drivers. Then there's the question of whether people would be willing to pay for a "your mileage may vary" level of support on something commercial.
My sense of it is that as linux is gradually inching towards the general power user audience, there's a lot of "just use [distro]" or fashionable distros where they're all seen as flavors of one thing. In a sense that's true, but not in others like this. I'd also add the various atomic distros like Silverblue or derivatives which have other conditions you need to learn to work with. For AUR it seems to get recommended as a secondary way to get software, if it hasn't been brought into the original distros package repos then the next step is to just search AUR, make the shortest line to the goal and don't worry about the details.
As far as Arch goes, I wonder if Arch-based CachyOS is a factor as it's seen the high performance desktop linux.
One related question that you need to follow that with is the associated costs of switching the whole studio to another engine that's technically better, or if proposing teach studio tailor-make their own engine the costs of that engineering, if presumably they have or learn the expertise to surpass whatever they're using currently.
I'm not a game developer, but it would also seem to be a link between resource usage by the engine, and whatever content the production side are making. For all the commentary about how brilliant the id software engines are, if you examine the levels you pass through they're also very efficient with what they demand out of the engine - it's like an orchestra playing well together, not one instrument that means you can do anything.
The way of observing it I find concerning is if you look at PC gaming (or personal computing in general) as a population, with a rate of new entrants or 'birth rate' and people exiting or 'death rate'. It's hard to be optimistic with raising barriers to entry, upgrading or replacing failed hardware which seems like it'd shrink that population over the long term, and make it less attractive to invest in. This isn't even new with the influence of AI, crypto mining was similar but in retrospect just a taster course.
One tangent from this is that few of the big 'household name' tech products that have become infrastructure for modern life for huge amounts of people seem to be allowed to be mature and stable, they must be kept changing (beyond maintenance) or to offer some other new thing.
One of the biggest challenges with computer UIs is how you convey information to a user, and that goes especially for games where players often can't take much time to analyze complexity, and it gets boiled down into a light gem indicator. One of the things I really love about the Thief games is how intuitive they are because they're mostly relying on sight/sound senses, you can relate to how the guards/defenses are going to sense you because it's how you would detect someone. If you're noisy you know what will happen next, and the guards are extremely vocal in telling you their state.
Going beyond that simplicity to account for other factors you could technically improve the simulation with is where I'm not sure it makes it more fun. Ultimately a mission needs to be conquerable, how far can you go making it more challenging and leave space for the player to push through while remaining plausible. Silhouette, different areas of your body being lit/unlit, whether movement speed of a lit/partially lit person affects detection makes a difference, guards having long term memory and adapting to half of them - they all sound good but I'm not sure they'd actually be rewarding to players and the development studio that implemented them. How do you 'tell the story' of a guard that spots your shape, knows you're sneaking around acts accordingly to take you by surprise and ends your game.
Similar with armor systems in a lot of games, we can probably simulate a lot of coverage/protection and the impact on mobility, that characters ability to fight with various weaponry because of what they wear, injuries, and so on, but for most games it gets abstracted into categories or points. Even if computation challenges of physically simulating that were overcome for dozens of characters in a fight, how do you convey all the consequences to the player to suggest how they can change things.
Something I've noticed as a general trend is that tech news has seemed to breed an optimistic fandom, that technology for the sake of technology must be good. It's exciting and dramatic, it's science fiction becoming reality. Concerns about needing to adapt around it are diminished even when it could be devastating (losing their job) to those involved, and it's unlikely much assistance will be given to "just" retrain.
I wonder where the 'extents' of the game product/service you buy can be defined. I could foresee a game client/server/toolkit like Bioware's Neverwinter Nights being released but as a barebones legally compliant framework that lets you play. Then on the other side of the line they have an optional online service that provides a scenario to play in (running the same server the public has), if that service goes away the game still works, just as buying a load of D&D kits doesn't give you a DM to run games in perpetuity. As another example, there's a lot of servers for games like Counter-strike where the experience and how it runs the gameplay is modded server-side only.
The "files and folders" hierarchical tree model for a file system is one where I wonder about the limits or effectiveness of the skeuomorphism approach to convey such a concept. If you're coming from a place where information was generally held and organized on paper, it _should_ be natural that you can group files within a container like a folder, and the kind of folder the iconography showed should be able to contain sub-folders.
While many did pick up on the idea, where were the shortcomings? Were the early graphics not enough to build the mental link. Was it the common grid view of icons. Was it the icon being an abstract thing you needed to open to see the contents instead of looking at it directly (as previews on the icon which came later), was it things opening in separate windows. It's not as though other more visually 'rich' methods to show a file system such as 3D or animated took off.
There's also the modern version that gets brought up occasionally where people who are using devices with mobile instead of desktop OSes apparently don't know how to work with file systems to manage data, and presumably they'd have even less exposure to the physical paper concept that inspired it.
Something that has been largely forgotten about is that it used to be routine to see pictures of smoggy Chinese and Asian cities, this was a problem for them that they solved. I can't help thinking we can't get this kind of preventative action on any large scale, we need to have severe issues first and that's not accounting for longer term/cumulative effects.
The other recurring theme is a mantra along the lines of "ends justify the means" when it comes to building data centers and all the consequences of that in the present, for some promise that AI will somehow have a net benefit to all eventually while hand-waving the details.
I think one precursor could have been EA's debacle with Sim City in 2013, when they apparently had a huge wave of disappointed customers doing chargebacks. I'm not aware of any public statement/evidence of this, but it really wouldn't surprise me if their payment processor leaned on them to provide a better means of accomplishing that, and it gave them a way to portray their store as customer friendly.
Another angle is the processing cost, I assume Google is seeking to offload the computation for whatever features this covers from their own data centers to end users. On the scale of billions that's probably measurable and from google's side worth doing whether the users is paying for the service or not, and each of them will have more power usage with some reduced battery life on portable devices. At that scale I'd also wonder about efficiency based on what proportion of end users are using AI or running it on CPU/GPU/NPU.
It's an aspect I've wondered about, constraints do make you consider what's essential. For example in btop (screenshot in the article) the graphs are rendered with dots at low resolution, if there was another version where those graphs were full resolution is it telling you meaningfully more?
For a long time now I've found it weird that people who like single player games on PC (and to a lesser extent older consoles which had piracy enabling mods) didn't acknowledge the long game consequences of their actions, or at least were willfully ignorant to them because everyone loves getting something for free. It seems to be a variation on Goodhart's law - you get what you reward - if the reward for a company (big or small) in spending lots of time and money isn't as good as other options, those other options will get more investment in the future and the ones you do like will get less.
The other option I can see for the large companies is that any project involving tens or hundreds of millions of dollars is likely to be insured, and a condition of that insurance is they take all reasonable options available to get the most success out of it that they can. If they don't they need to reduce the risk which probably means less resources allocated which again may not be interesting to the companies capable of making grand experiences versus other options.
I think the challenge is where do you draw the line between the OS and the set of baseline applications it comes with, and then further questions on what is included in that (default?) set or how full featured they are. What is a feature of the OS? That's before considering how users discover and manage other software for activities not covered by whatever is OS provided.
24 is another one that was at the right time, although the big one was not under their control. It started showing 2 months after the 9/11 attacks. More to the general point, it was also at the time that computers and internet usage was fast growing, but gaps in the digital side meant it was still plausible that field agents were important. They also had plot lines such as the bad guys using online video game chat (a smaller but growing thing in the early 2000s) as a hidden communication channel which I believe is pulled from real events.
20 years ago is also the time frame for when AMD acquired ATi (who IIRC were 99% on gaming graphics), and AMD was floundering in the following decade. They made the choice to prioritize the CPU side of the business, but on the GPU graphics/compute side it's hard to see that they've got much vision for how they want to steer the future to go and the ability to make that happen with their partners.
The issue that has occurred a few times is that some windows updates will decide that they 'own' the disk it's installed on or knows better than whoever is running the system, and overwrite any other boot manager with window's own and you may need to break out a live boot to recover it. Using a single isolated disc at OS install time (if you can have multiple physical drives) and using a motherboard boot selection hotkey means that risk likely goes away.
I see it as similar to virtual reality, it was born and grew up with gaming demands and influences, but other disciplines may be more attractive for a mature product
The other elephant in the room is the consoles, and even if they're capable of RT they also have to consider the performance capabilities versus visual payoff. As I see it the PC versions of games like Control from studios like Remedy are trailblazers, it's an early implementation (geforce 20 released in 2018, Control was 2019) as the ultra option to shakedown their implementation and start iteration early so future games will benefit, however the baseline is non-RT.
Many sellers will cut whatever corners they can to get a lower price point, as that's what purchasers look for. The one that stands out to me is shipping, sure go for for cheap shipping on a trivial cost item, but I question doing the same when you're buying something expensive and not consider spending some proportion of the price on a better courier/service tier to have more certainty the item will get to you and in good condition, assuming the seller doesn't bake-in the cost of upgraded courier.
The other aspect I find interesting is the February spike in win10 usage, presumably from Chinese users. Where will they migrate to over the coming years as support goes away. They seem to be both resisting win11 and resisting linux perhaps as either it's not suitable for the games (online?) they play or not great for Chinese users, or perhaps along with the nvidia spike because of getting more out of those GPUs on windows.
IIRC GoG has a pretty poor history in actually turning a profit with the exception of when CD Projekt release on of their own games, and even then they do the vast majority of their business on steam or the console stores. If GoG was a decent money-spinner then CP projekt wouldn't have split if off. Even a niche has a cost to operate, and that's with GoG being a pretty plain service on top of game downloads.
I can't help thinking the battle was lost before it even started, no matter how good the offering was because the PC and mobile platforms (where epic operate their store) have 99.9% already decided who owns them. The way I see it Epic wanted to copy what Counter-strike and HL2 was to Steam, but using Fortnite to push their store for a fresh generation of gamers. The problem is they couldn't replace or exist alongside the incumbents while trying to bring in more than a trivial amount of income. The only way I can see the outcome being different is if they were in the position Valve were in around 25 years ago with a fresh or poorly served market or something other than video games, few remember Stardock Desktop as a place they got their games.
What I wonder about is if MS wants to keep people on windows, what methods they can use to do that. For simple desktop stuff I don't think they have many options to lock in other developers (and their audiences) to windows unless they want do so themselves (putting aside web based or not PC-desktop).
Bleeding edge gaming and multiplayer anti-cheat is one area where I think having a big company owning the OS probably helps them stay ahead, as that structure probably lets them work with hardware designers to get the capabilities in use (i.e. in new versions of DirectX) and available to software developers first. There's generally a lag in adoption for new features within Vulkan and then usage downstream in wine/proton to get compatibility parity with windows, then the games themselves being able to run feature/performance parity. It'd be interesting to see what cooperation would be needed to have the linux gaming stack equal at the point new features are released, and with the least amount of manual hacks or command line tweaking required for the users. As discussed a few weeks back, tough anti-cheat for linux seems like a paradox with the current methods.
Another aspect to this is that I really doubt consumers would go to linux if there was any pay-wall or 'donate for more features' type aspect to it. Something that really isn't emphasized much is how lots of OSS/linux work is done by the various big corporations often for goals that are not aimed at the small scale users, and it's a happy byproduct that many aspects of their system may run better just by swapping OS, all free to them. Similarly Valve's efforts seem tightly focused on what matters to their products/services and being available to everyone is a byproduct.
The windows cost gets hidden/de-emphasized when buying a PC, or other users just ignore it which is seems to be below MS's pain tolerance for lost revenue on those users. If there was a price of admittance to linux for any other company to devote resources to work on it where it couldn't be treated as a loss-leader for something else, it'd be an even tougher struggle to migrate users over. (and it's likely right now most people moving to linux are somewhat enthusiasts)