Has anyone produced a proof of concept for such a system, for gaming or otherwise?
Given that a certain amount of windows gamers have been having issues making sure their PCs complied with the config requirements for the latest COD/Battlefield, it would seem an even higher bar for a consumer targeted bit of software that needs to do more to be running securely (or add a different mode to your distro install and reboot to it), alongside the wider variety of distros/configs. Distros advertising themselves for gaming or getting people to migrate from windows are also trying to keep barriers to entry low or to appear simple.
Another aspect to "just work" is it'd be great if component vendors mentioned the state of linux support. For example with motherboards it's expected that there will be windows drivers and tools there for all the functionality, but while the source of software support is different under linux from looking at a random product page it's a big question mark on which one is wise to buy to get the best experience or if full/partial support is available now or soon. Even for Asus gear which I'm aware has efforts going on for linux (or just their laptops? just their ROG branded laptops?) there's precious little mention of it on product pages to confirm the status.
It doesn't help that GPUs have also generally gone up over the past decade because there's more market for them besides gaming, along with how they benefit from being hugely parallel and the larger you can make them the better, and fabrication costs are shooting up. I think there was a GamersNexus video at the launch of one of the previous GPU generations that noted that there was a move from "more for your money" each generation towards "more for more", i.e. keeping the value roughly static and increasing the amount they charged for a more capable product.
I recall reading that a major candidate for any early colony is in lava tubes, dust on the would be one factor, but radiation shielding is another. Either you have to ship materials from Earth and build them, consume whatever is available and useful locally, or make use of whatever Mars-nature provides. If you can get away with lighter materials to build below surface then it seems better compared to more durability/shielding requirements above.
It's good while the software you run on it still supports that OS, for example the big one would be anything build upon Chromium (or electron) framework which deprecated win7 support when Microsoft ended ESU support (EOL +3 years).
For a while I've been wondering if the push to DX12 or vulkan as the "better" APIs has been a factor in the big engines becoming a near monoculture with games development. Games are very varied in what they require, some push the limits but many releases are more modest yet lots of them are gravitating around full featured leading edge Unreal/Unity. Having a lower barrier to entry for graphics programming that lets them make something that's a closer fit to their requirements.
The other big push would be Epic cutting royalties until you're earning a significant amount, which would encourage studios not to hire or allocating as much resources to in-house.
I suppose a lot of people who like to try and predict the next big thing would try and guess what the precursors are. For example where would you be looking now for the equivalent of a camera OS that would end up being Android years later? That was at the tail end of the period where consumer compact cameras were a big thing (before they were bundled into phones), so it could be that there's a path of evolution from smartphones to the next big thing, but I wouldn't want to place bets especially if you're trying to judge whether there's an audience for it.
The other side is linux totally permits you to do whatever you like to your system, and then it's similar discussion to DRM (digital rights management, not direct rendering manager). When you're trying to the user from doing things they're not allowed to and the same user can fiddle with the system, there's no starting point for trust.
One aspect I wonder about is the move of graphics API from DX11 (or OpenGL) to DX12/Vulkan, while there have been benefits and it's where the majority of effort is from vendors they are (were?) notoriously harder to use. What strikes me about gaming is how broad it is, and how many could make a competent engine at a lower tech level, but fits their needs well because their requirements are more modest.
I also wonder about the developer availability. If you're capable of handling the more advanced APIs and probably modern hardware and their features, it seems likely you're going to aim at a big studio producing something that big experience, or even an engineer at the big engine makers themselves. If you're using the less demanding tech it will be more approachable for a wider range of developers and manageable in-house.
What I've occasionally seen pointed out for a whole range of separate microsoft software is it's not the merits of on individual bit of software that gets enterprises to use it, it's the M365 package deal of all of them, and once you're in that ecosystem then you might as well use it. Teams is the common example where this comes up, where it's shortcomings are well known but the costs of licensing and setting up an alternative can't get over the threshold.
Back then (probably xp era) I remember quirks like needing to configure the IDE controllers so if you didn't have both connectors on the PATA cable used it would spend a ton of time trying to detect a device where there wasn't one. You needed to go into device manager and disable that connector (unless you added a drive)
The other angle is that if annoying enough it gets people to make their own workarounds so it works as they want. The real trouble is when it escalates as each side wants to have authority over the other as they each think they know best, and you get things like laptops on standby waking to try and update themselves in a bag. I've been thinking for a while that windows has been going away from a 'personal computer' OS in that it isn't "mine", it's at the mercy of someone else and efforts to fight that aren't worth it long term.
On the UI side of things the trouble with 8 was the push towards touch as the latest shiny object to chase, coming a few years into the boom of smartphones/tablets. The start menu was full screen with no option and many OS applications were either full screen only or by default until you clicked a new title bar button. The 8.1 release pulled back from a lot of that.
Any chance you can remember the package name? It's not mentioned in the article or ones it linked to, and I can't quickly find it on my phone. There is the vaguely named "application recommendations" that going by a quick search should be com.samsung.android.mapsagent
I think it all depends on what their mission is, what bits of the larger ecosystem does valve care about or not care about, what do they want to defend or destroy. I'm tempted to say "defending the store is existential for them" but the scale of it likely gives them an extremely big comfort zone. Whatever OS the users have isn't going to affect whether they can do commerce through them unless MS does something unhinged like getting rid of win32, or as the fear around win8 that they'd centralize all windows software through their channels.
If their mission is SteamOS, then I'm tempted to say they need to expand their area of influence beyond what they're doing with linux now which seems to be strictly game related, which likely involves whittling down the major or minor reasons people don't use desktop linux (and all the projects that comprise it) in general, not just their distro. So long as they're supporting (in one way or another) the majority of windows games in a foreign environment and the richness that mods can bring they could do with improving the experience of that relative to windows and not just the happy path of what happens if the base game launches. And that's before the enigma of anti-cheat. Then find some way to reap the rewards, if any, for doing that greatly expanded workload or investment.
I find the various privacy and 'feature' disabling scripts/utilities questionable for a similar reason, it's moving outside of the expected behavior of the OS for how applications and future MS updates expect things to work. The core issue seems to be you're working against what MS want and they provide a moving target, functionally it's their system, not yours.
This sounds like how most moddable games of the era released their SDKs. You could make a mod that changed gameplay and/or assets, but you needed the needed the original game itself for the engine and original assets as a foundation/runtime. One step further would be a 'total conversion' that replaced all the assets but you still needed the engine, and then you get later releases like the id GPL releases of the engine so you could have engine+gameplay+content all by yourself. Even then you'd still need to abide by the license of the original game or the GPL engine, unless you went and signed a different license with them including if you wanted to sell anything derived from their work.
There was a podcast episode linked here a while ago about how the software industry in Japan never took off as it did in America and it was a similar conclusion. According to the host, the product being sold was hardware, and software was a means to fulfill and then conclude the contract. After that you want the customer to buy the new model, primarily for the hardware and software comes along for the ride.
It should be obvious by now though that there's symbiosis between software and hardware, and that support timescales are longer. Another angle is that it's more than just AMD's own software developers, also the developers making products for their customers who in turn buy AMD's if everyone works together to make them run well and it's those second developers they need to engage with in a way their efforts will be welcomed.
I'm torn about whether I'd want a direct continuation. It has similarities to the changing tone of the spy shows/movies and their satires that inspired it in that things change over time, and the reception to the feminism angle would be different now. A sequel would likely mean moving the time period on again which has additional challenges.
I could definitely see starting over with a reboot, which would also give the studio involved a chance to dodge all the rights issues by doing a 'spiritual successor' and renaming everything. 25 years later you're likely trying to attract newcomers much more than you are fans of the old games that want specifically more NOLF. I'd also be interested in a cold war era spy thriller that played it straight, real spy history has a lot to pull from that could be weaved into an intriguing story to play through, and NOLF did touch on some of the issues around spying like taking advantage of people.
With Vista it was coming from the failed Longhorn project that was supposed to be transformative to windows and longer fixing up winxp than they wanted, but at least vista ended up as plain old windows then win7 was a polished up release. For the direction MS have taken win11 I can't see them turning it around so quickly especially while they're still driving full speed in the direction they think is right.
Really the question is who are they selling windows to and what do they put in it to try and make it an attractive offering. "Selling" might as well be figurative or literal seeing as they've now completely trained retail customers that they don't have to buy an OS even when before piracy was overlooked, and they'd need to be a significantly better offering than linux which is $0 and only getting better at undermining the core offering of 'running windows applications'.
Something I think contributes is that TSMC seem to be so good at making chips now, it seems like the defect rate must be low enough and they can produce huge chips in volume that a decade ago would be burning money. If you can do that, why bother making less lucrative smaller chips? Also while there's still benefits to shrinking an existing chip with a revised design, I'd guess we're into diminishing returns for what it offers a console whether the chip itself gets cheaper or lets them reduce the bill of parts in other ways.
This is also the first generation where prices have gone up IIRC.
If that's the case I think it's a hugely positive thing, and has gone away for newly bought hardware for a variety of reasons over the past decade. Having a basic PC and then upgrading it with a GPU used to be a realistic route to a respectable gaming PC, but I think that's largely gone away now (partially due to the death of the general "home PC" or many being on laptops. There are bargains to be had in the used market, but that comes with a lot of asterisks.
If they can get this to a large market I think it's great value, not just as a console-model PC but because a full featured desktop without lockdown is so near. It's a reverse of where I've thought MS missed a trick with the xbox, add a keyboard and mouse and let users have turn on a sandboxed lightweight desktop mode then funnel users to get software through their store, which would have been a great way to get xbox hardware installed in houses (especially the cheap S models) during covid when there was a sudden rush to buy PCs for home working that previously didn't need it.
This is targeted at the living room, but I'd love to see non-gaming uses highlighted and get the equivalent of 'deck certified' whether that's linux native or efforts into working well under wine.
They seem to have worked it out well by limiting SteamOS to their hardware, so they don't have to handle all the varieties a regular distro has to. There's a significant number of people who want an 'official' release as a regular installable distro but I doubt it'll happen and Valve are happy to delegate that to others
One big reason would be that the 360 controller was when they first made it standard USB to connect, and introduced Xinput with the standard set of inputs for games to target. I expect most gamers wouldn't find it pleasant if they had to assign buttons and axis before the joypad would be active/useful, then hitting play and trying to remember what JOY_5 mapped to as used to be needed with directinput.
Using the deck prices seems like a good place to start unless they're using the opportunity to change strategy. It's an updated SoC, but minus a screen, battery, separate dock, built-in controller, and less pressure to pack it in a handheld chassis. They mention a built in wireless adapter for the controller, so I assume there will be bundles with and without a controller.
An ongoing 'background noise' concern I've had for a while is how PC gaming seems to be centralizing around steam. There's reasons why that happened, but it'd be real nice if 'infrastructure' was able to decouple from their store. It feels like practically requiring steam for PC gaming on windows and certainly on linux isn't a mile away from requiring MS windows, is it much freedom to pick which Seattle based company you run software from?
One of the things I've noted for a while is that PC gaming as a platform seems to be polarizing between high and low spec, especially if you look outside of North America/Western Europe to places like South America or SE Asia. The steam deck and now this seem to be a reference/target platform for the low spec group. It might not be able to play the prestigious high spec titles well if at all, but so long as "your mileage may vary" is messaged well I can't see it being a problem, it hasn't so far.
The thing that stands out to me looking back over a few decades is how much of consumer/public computing is exploring the latest novel thing and companies trying to cash in on it. Multimedia was the buzzword aeons ago, but was a gradual thing with increasing color depth and resolution, video, 3D rendering, storage capabilities for local playback, sound going from basic built in speaker beeps to surround and spatial processing. Similar with the internet from modems to broadband to being almost ubiquitously available on mobile. Or stereoscopic 3D, or VR, or touchscreens, or various input devices.
Adolescence is a very good word to encompass it, lots of awkward experiments trying to make the latest thing stick along with some of them getting discarded along the way when we grow out of them, they turn out not to be (broadly) useful or fashion moves on. What I wonder about is if the personal computer has hit maturity now and we're past that experimental phase, for most people it's an appliance. Obviously you can still get PCs and treat them as a workstation to dive into whatever you're enthusiastic about but you need to specifically go out and pursue that, where the ecosystem might be lacking is a bridge between the device most have as their personal computer (phone/tablet) and something that'll introduce them to other areas.