One aspect I wonder about is not so much about whether the collective gaming-on-linux effort can close the performance/features gap, but keep it closed. The story has been that windows is the main target system for "PC" game development and hardware/drivers (for good reason, it has majority market share), and then linux lags behind as various efforts figure out what's missing and how to implement.
Right now and for the foreseeable near term (3 years or so?) it seems like the focus on GPU advancements isn't aimed at gaming so will be a period of stability, but I wonder if/when focus does come back to gaming, when there's a new round of consoles, when a company wants a new feature set to distinguish a new generation (like geforce 20 series versus 10 and earlier), what can be done to make sure linux users aren't second class citizens. I'd also wonder about development tools, to use the most popular engine as an example, what could change with unreal engine to make sure it builds software that plays nice with the linux ecosystem even if the tooling works best under windows.
I think it's worth keeping something like the serenity prayer in mind, there's a wide range in how relevant different types of news are to each of us, and how it affects us or we affect it. Between the various types 24 hour news they seem to encourage a mindset that you need to stay on the firehose and be informed, which stepping back a bit any profession will try to highlight what they offer is of utmost importance. What underlies that and makes me uncomfortable is news as entertainment, even if it's in the background as opposed to something like music, the constant drip feed of negativity or hazard.
I hate to think how much has been written on whether icons need to be updated because the picture isn't literal to the device it uses now, compared that link broken years ago and being more abstract representing a concept. I wonder if in a few years when some cars may be driven by hub motors will there be some moaning that the icon in an engine check light needs changing.
There's so many options on what icons could be for the thing they represent you'll never please everyone, why is forwards a right facing arrow and backwards left facing? (Is this swapped for right-to-left languages?) Why not representing Z-depth away/forwards towards/back? What does reload have to do with rotation?
I'd say streaming radio in general is low profile in how it lets you discover new things. I use the search/directory built into foobar2000 or apps like radiodroid, but there are sites like https://www.radio-browser.info/ for the web. It's an interesting and low cost way to find things you wouldn't otherwise be exposed to and likely curated by whoever is running the station. What really stood out to me is how different countries or regions have their own tastes, or at least are likely to be playing something different to local broadcasts.
As someone mentioned upthread, that's fine until some software you rely upon starts using something not present on older versions. It's one of the points that I keep in mind with most "what OS?" discussions, the OS by itself isn't really that useful but what it lets you do is. When win7 +3 year extended support ended that was the time chromium framework dropped support, and when projects using it updated then they would also need to drop win7 support (or "your mileage may vary" territory). I expect 2028 onwards may see another gradual win10 migration wave.
I think the ipod being so common has helped it remain useful 20 years on. There's a lot of them being sold cheaply as people clean out old drawers, spares/replacements and upgrades are readily available, how to work on them is common knowledge and tools to work on consumer electronics is common, and rockbox is available for most of the range. MP3 players were a commodity good with a huge range of models available from practically any company capable, but most won't have the market around it. My ipod has a 128GB SD card instead of a HDD and a battery that lasts at least 5.5 days playback instead of whatever the original 650mAH allowed
I'd wonder how much that scales up though for the benefit of the companies that are each investing hundreds of billions and hope to see a net return. How many developers like you (presumably less of you seeing as each is more productive) or enterprises you work for paying fees (along with slimming down legacy costs paid to someone) does it take to get up in the 12 digit range?
Assuming you're already running a PC with a desktop OS, you can use virtualization to 'get your toe wet' and try linux without diving in entirely with a real install. On windows virtualbox is free for non-commercial use and pretty simple to set up.
If you've got a spare drive then install it on that leaving your existing install alone, or if you have spare space on your existing drive you can shrink a partition (backup important data first) and set up a multi-boot
My impression for the past decade or so is that Radeon for PC is AMD's way of keeping their GPU division's engine running between contracts for consoles or compute products. At the very least it's a welcome byproduct that provides a competent iGPU and a test bed for future 'main' products. It's been a long while since AMD has shown future vision for PC GPUs or they've led with a feature instead of following what others do.
It's interesting to see parallel development of certain features in the early 3D era and how they were used. The original Prey by 3D Realms was shown in demos in 1997/98 with portal tech including rotating it in a level prop, so it's interesting and ties into the game fiction instead of being only functional to stitch map areas together. There's likely more examples during that period when licensing an engine was less common.
The way I see live tiles is that it was MS abandoning widgets that existed since vista (although they were removed later for security reasons) and coming up with a new thing to start all over with, and didn't backporting it so the only way you'd get them is on the (less popular) new version of the OS. Also they were tied into the start screen/menu, you couldn't drop on on your desktop.
There's also the issue of distance for a mouse cursor to travel to select something. I think the general issue is imposing one interface for every mode of input instead of options, so either select an appropriate interface depending on how the start menu was invoked (even if it's just scaling it down to a confined space) or letting people select the default however it's invoked. Yes that's going to be more work, but when we're talking about the largest corporations on the planet I struggle to believe they can't afford it.
IIRC, win8 was the last windows to have thick graphical window borders, and that was after they got rid of the texture/aero look from vista/7, so at that point you at least had something graphical to grab onto which (mostly?) matched where the cursor was. Then in win10 onwards they shrunk the border down to one pixel with the zone around it where you can click off the window but still affect it.
On the back of my mind I think part of this was the move to fit scaling to large resolution monitors (i.e. 4k+) work better, as a graphical border of a fixed pixel width will shrink proportionally compared to a border that is as thin as it can be. For a while I've felt that it's a missed opportunity on high res displays to not use more detailed art for window chrome as pixel wide will only get smaller and more difficult to distinguish, such as the minimize/maximize/close icons which remain pixel wide line art even at big scaling.
One caveat, you might want to account for text that the writer deleted staying deleted/hidden. I'm not always the best at proofreading before submitting, but I'll often cut tangents I'm prone to ramble onto. Accidental pastes from other sources that are meant to stay private would be another issue if the history tracker grabs everything that goes into the text box.
It might depend on the distro, but were you running a 10 series or earlier? They dropped Pascal and earlier CPUs with the v590 driver, I know Arch migrated what the nvidia package installed in such a way that could leave someone without an appropriate driver unless they manually moved to a different source.
Then again Arch is one of those distros that has the attitude that you need to be a little engaged/responsible for ongoing maintenance of your system, which is why I'm against blind "just use (distro)" recommendations unless it's very basic and low assumptions about the user.
If anything this is the challenge with PC as a platform being so varied, any random software/hardware/config variation could bring a whole load of quirks.
That probably includes anything that isn't a PC in a time-capsule from when the game originally released, so any OS/driver changes since then, and I don't think we've reached the point where we can emulate specific hardware models to plug into a VM. One of the reasons the geforce/radeon drivers (eg, the geforce "game ready" branding) are so big is that they carry a whole catalogue of quirk workarounds for when the game renderer is coded badly or to make it a better fit to hardware and lets them advertise +15% performance in a new version. Part of the work for wine/proton/dxvk is going to be replicating that instead of a blunt translation strictly to the standards.
Personally I'd be interested to see what would happen if Sony/MS did what they could to make keyboard/mouse experience as good as possible on their consoles (I'm writing from a position of ignorance on the state of mouse/keys with current consoles) and encouraged developers to offer a choice in inputs, so that the locked-down machines can become the place for highest confidence in no/low cheaters. If other people want to pay through the nose to go beyond what consoles offer on the detail/resolution/framerate trifecta then I'm sure they could do so, but I really don't see how you lock down an open platform. That challenge has been going for decades.
And the decision to risk years of his life spent on a project that might not pan out. IIRC he was largely supported by his girlfriend during development and he worked in a cinema. That's in contrast to a job at a studio where you get a salary for your time whether it succeeds or not.
I just did, have you actually tried using them side-by-side? It's hard for me to look favorably on kid3. I actually gave myself 5-10m to try and learn kid3 and a lot of what seems like obvious ways to accomplish a task like 'rename these files using their tags' didn't do anything. I even broke out the manual which didn't help/explain if there was a different mindset I need to adopt. I could manage to manually edit tags/rename file by file, but that seems like table stakes for anything that handles media files (even a file manager) let alone an application that is meant to be a specialist in that area, and we're not into any advanced functionality yet.
More generally though it's not about one specific type of tool, it's that windows and linux have been different ecosystems for decades and that has encouraged different strengths and weaknesses. To catch up would mean a lot of effort even if you're just aiming to be equivalent, or use projects like WINE to blur the lines and use the win32 tool as though the specific platform doesn't matter so much.
Depends on what task you're doing, and to a certain extent how you prefer to do it. For example sure there's plenty of ways to tag/rename media files, but I've yet to find something that matches the power of Mp3tag in a GUI under linux.
Another factor is the increased importance of software part of the product, and how that changes via updates that can make a manual outdated. Or at least a printed manual, so if they're doing updates to product launch it might not match what a customer gets straight out of the box or any later production runs where new firmware is included. It would be somewhat mitigated if there was an onus to keep online/downloadable manuals updated alongside the software. I know my motherboard BIOS no longer matches the manual, but even then most descriptions are so simple they do nothing more than list the options with no explanation.
I think the issue is a bit out of the author's control, where tools like this are word of mouth advertised as 'one simple trick' by geeks to a broad audience to fix what they see as wrong with windows. People love convenience and adding "oh by the way, make sure you read/understand the docs first" rarely happens. I think it's part of the move for computing to being appliances that ongoing maintenance isn't seen as needed
If you look at AMD's CPUs there's indications they do that. When Zen1/1+/2 came out they were priced below intel's products as they needed to rebuild mindshare with their promising new chips, from Zen3 onwards where they started building a performance lead in many categories as well as core count they jacked the prices up because they could demand it.
Similar with nvidia, you've got to consider what partner companies AMD likes working with. AMD/nvidia design chips, contract TSMC to make them, then sell the chips to the likes of ASUS/MSI/gigabyte/etc to put them on cards the consumer buys. The other market AMD serves is Sony/MS for their consoles and I'd argue they're a major motivator driving radeon development as they pay up-front to get custom APU chips, and there's synergy there with Zen and more recently the AI demand. Ever since ATi bought up the company (ArtX) that made the Gamecube GPU it seems to me that the PC side is keeping the motor running in-between console contracts as far as gaming demands go, given their low market share they definitely don't seem to prioritize or depend on it to thrive.
Although it might be more broadly applied to 'computers', Asimov's stories around AI and tangents like robots often have the underlying message that it's not so much the technology, so much as how humans use, react and interpret what it's doing.
I'd wonder how much Valve has agreed to buy other parts and tooling/manfacturing services. Then they could have scenarios where they have a pile of AMD chips and the rest of the parts, but limited or no VRAM/RAM/NAND to complete the systems so they can be sold, or they've spent a pile of money designing and working with a manufacturer to get to the stage where they can start making batches, but can't get the volume to bring in a real benefit.
Being pragmatic, I wonder if Valve benefit from the health of the PC market, whether they'll also put efforts into helping people get more life out of their existing machines, or individuals/businesses refurbishing to sell on the used market with more confidence. There's already an angle for reducing e-waste with the win10 end of life if it can be tied into installing linux.
I wish convenient ideas like that which become memes would die off as I really doubt there's any rhythm at Microsoft that causes it, for example I doubt they have alternating teams for every other version. More to the point, from an outside perspective I don't see any change in direction that would drastically change windows for the better within foreseeable future or the timespan a "windows 12" would release.