Another aspect I'd wonder about is the cost for whatever organization is responsible for maintaining lamps in a district, presumably a slower charger is a lower specification and would be cheaper and more likely to be widely fitted or for the project to be approved in the first place, and limits the demands on the local electrical infrastructure. Once the initial install is done in a lamp it would seem that upgrading in future would be a smaller hurdle.
Yes, I do this because when I'm using my bike to get into work as it often involves more than one set of clothes and swapping everything between different pockets is annoying so I have a big 'unipocket' fanny pack, my 6.7" phone is still cumbersome in there making digging out other items annoying. And when I'm wearing some pairs of pants and the phone isn't angled just right it will dig into my hip while walking up stairs until it's adjusted.
(and that's with a relatively budget android phone, smaller devices are a tiny niche of old less powerful devices that barely have support)
> The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price.
The way I see it, it depends how you see who is who's customer. Is the gamer the customer of the store, or are they the customer of the developer/publisher who put out the game, and in turn is the developer/publisher the customer of the store. The store cut is the price to buy their services, and they can shop around to find different offerings at different prices, just as gamers might be able to shop around and decide what (platform features) matters to them with the options available.
Going back further, the thing that enabled them to release their first game "when it's done" and set the ball rolling was being founded by two ex-Microsoft with piles of money, most studios don't have that luxury.
I think while PC is a good example of epic struggling to compete with someone who took full advantage of being first mover, the apple appstore/google play mobile stores are also where they've put in significant financial/legal effort trying to create a more lucrative openings in that market as well.
Adapt based on window size? Either hide/truncate less essential information when the width goes below a threshold, or make each entry multi-line if you require showing all of it. This is not exactly a new approach, I can resize my Foobar2000 window and the playlist columns will stay proportional to the window, and that seems to be using fairly standard windows components to the extent it wouldn't look out of place 30 years ago.
I think that comes with risks, they will need to do a lot of work to manage expectations which is likely to be an unending uphill battle getting users to read and absorb any notice you put in front of them. If there's ever an official version of SteamOS that installs as broadly as most other linux distros along with a general/minimally trained audience, they can't do Deck certified on how well each game works on your system, and I can see challenges for "why does this game I bought on the steam store not work on my steam system?" especially if it's the hot new multiplayer game that targets windows with windows-only anticheat.
PC does have a fair amount of users that want it to operate in a console-like way when it comes to usability, the moment you tell them to fiddle with a runtime or experiment with the command line variables you lose them. That's to say nothing about handling stuff that lives outside steam, because PC gaming shouldn't equal Valve. The Deck is a nice manageable subset to deal with and fairly small enthusiast audience
It's one of those scenarios where I've felt for years that the steam survey doesn't break things down enough to be useful for anything besides the broadest generalizations. The PC gaming market is huge, but there's going to be a lot of variety and sub-groups within it and I expect few developers are trying to target 'everyone' (the opposite of targeting).
It had internet, back then one of the big bits of news tangential to the iphone releasing was how Jobs decided on no Flash player on their mobile devices, which was the mortal wound to official support of that format. More generally though, I think the iphone (or smartphones in general) work as a good example of bundling capabilities and doing it well. Phones before then could do many of the things smartphones could, some could play games, could play music, some had cameras, and there were separate devices that specialized in those and did them better, but smartphones collected them all up and started an arms race in doing them great.
Keller himself credits the many people responsible for the contributing parts [0]. I think the general 'enthusiast' tech press and reporting likes hero figures and the simplicity it brings, even better when you can cast a good guy against a bad guy, and the background in this case would be AMD vs intel.
Going back to the winxp days there was a fairly vibrant group of people making unofficial themes for it, although I think that was helped by the existence of tools (from Stardock?) specialized on that task and making it approachable if your skill set didn't align perfectly.
I think the challenge with 10 IoT LTSC isn't going to be the OS itself, but the software running on it. Lots of software uses chromium embedded, and in the case of win7 the day that extended support (+3 years) ended CEF also dropped support and required features only found on more recent windows releases, then as other software updated their CEF dependency they also dropped win7 support. It might not be a major thing, but there is a slow erosion that goes beyond whether the OS gets patches. If nothing else, if it's a machine that uses software that goes online it's a notice that you should investigate moving to something else eventually.
I think just saying "installing the OS" is a bit of a trap, that's step one, and important step but then you get to all the different subsets of features and software that they use, including not included in the OS or its repos.
When you're looking at consumer usage of a PC for anything that remotely makes sense to do on that platform I think windows has the advantage of decades of a different software ecosystem. Cumulatively there's a huge broad library of software that linux can't touch, or gets partway there but falls short. For example I can tag music files on linux, but it's painful compared to something like Mp3tag (which has been going for about 17 years). Or if I want fan control on my 9 year old intel platform I need to learn about and add a kernel parameter and manually detect sensors before I get started whereas it's straightforward on software available on windows.
For the "huge number of games work on linux" I wonder how valuable that really is to drawing people to linux as PC gaming has a challenge with huge numbers of releases that aren't noteworthy and don't have many players, I'd guess most of them are not doing anything technically novel or quirky (i.e. using a popular engine with minimal changes) so can easily be compatible.
Is there much value there for users or the linux platform? Some definitely, but it's not going to move the dial much compared to if say valve, codeweavers, or someone else could work with EA to get an agreeable solution that lets Battlefield6 work on linux, as an example with a large audience that's locked into windows to play what they want.
The interesting thing about Kaby-lake/7th is that other CPUs in that generation are allowed by MS. While there is the extensions support aspect, after spectre/meltdown I think part of it was getting AMD/intel to sign up to providing firmware updates for product ranges over the win11 lifespan, then cycle will repeat again for win12.
Just speaking personally, but one thing I wonder about with the issues is putting aside the 'internet knowledge base' how much I've accumulated knowledge of how to gloss over all the little issues in windows that doesn't translate over, and whether that applies to other people in general. There's the common "I migrated grandma and pointed her at firefox and she's loves it" anecdote for users with little assumptions, so for different types of user it'd be an interesting project to catalogue what pain points they come across, major ones are likely well known but I expect it'd be really interesting to gather minor ones. How much is adaptation to the windows/linux "DNA" or ways of doing things that would cause breakage if they were changed and how much could be looked at by various projects.
The only thing I'd add is that if you can opt to say "yes" later, it should be obvious where to find it (eg. make a logical settings menu) or they point you to where you can find it. If they really want to make you feel comfortable using their app/site/service there shouldn't be any loss aversion instinct stirred up by hitting "no" as though it's your only chance to accept what they're offering.
There's been a little bit of a trend with windows that things they start experimenting with towards the end of the life of version N become a focus for version N+1. In the case of windows 11, they had been trying to get onto the dual-display portables wave with a "Windows 10X", but cancelled it and brought much of the UI over to 11 to a mild reception. I'd be really surprised if they don't try and leverage AI as much as they can with the next full version (and whatever fun name they give it).
More to the point, I'd agree I'd love it if they had a widely available basic version and a separate version where they can chase the latest shiny object, but I can't see them being motivated to do that in the foreseeable future.
This has already happened, PC Gaming Wiki has entries for lots of games where support for various old methods of doing things no longer work, on real hardware on windows, and you need to use a variety of workarounds like dgvoodoo or a fix by a random third party modder to get the game to operate correctly. And that's before you consider defunct copy protection or trying to add improvements.
I think Valve have been very careful with where they put their efforts (hardware and software), their scope isn't that broad so much as it needs to have a direct link to steam. It's similar to why I don't think we'll have SteamOS released by Valve for generic hardware in the foreseeable future, because they're concentrating on their specific usage on the Deck.
Going broad means they need to support a whole lot more, and they probably can't tell users "go google it" in a similar fashion to how MS can't shrug off windows problems entirely when they happen for their users. The geeks are perfectly content with using a range of existing distros and there's little gain in adding one more, besides those that want the Valve/Steam brand umbrella to cover even more of PC gaming like they own the platform.
I'd love to know how many people are verifying checksums, and sourcing the checksums themselves from reputable sources. An event like this seems like a prime opportunity for someone to insert something extra into one of the components needed and a proportion of users will pick it up, whether the security cure is worse than the disease of an unsupported OS.
Just as an example of this everyone points out Massgrave for activation on a version of windows I doubt many are properly licensed for, and one of the methods used relies on periodically talking to KMS servers they provide including some on a Chinese TLD [0]. Personally I'd be charitable and say it's probably well intentioned using the cheap resources they can get (there's no mention of donations on the site), but I wonder how many are aware of what is involved and this is just something they rush through to get rid of the big scary warning that windows puts up and tech news hysteria.
With battery storage is it feasible to isolate/disconnect, move and then reconnect at another location, or once certified and turned on is it considered part of a system that can't be divided. It would be adding a significant cost to enable 'movement' of energy if you didn't need storage before and would need to be charged ahead of time, but it seems similar to fuel where I could give gas to a neighbor. I wouldn't expect that kind of scenario to work for the vast majority of people, but on a remote island it could be the kind of solution that gets engineered to keep homes working when an official solution takes a long time to arrive.
On a tangent, one thing I wonder about for the future is all the people doing bypasses on the CPU requirements will at some point in the future be left high and dry. There's already been one win11 update where they started to need the popcnt extension that started showing up in CPUs after roughly 2008, raising the hard requirement from anything that's x64 although still below the official reqs. The scenario I wonder about is how many well meaning upgrades have been done to keep people on a supported version of windows, but MS can either update so the hard requirement matches official and leaves a lot unbootable, or detect it's actually unsupported and at that point refuse to update (I guess at that point you need another campaign such as "end of win11 25h2" to raise awareness of service pack levels subdividing the major OS version) while MS can point to "well, we never supported them anyway" as though that fixes the problem.
I'm struggling to think of a way out that doesn't involve forcefully educating users or MS needing to maintain a low requirements/long term support branch of windows forever
I think it's the curse of windows being attached to a tech company, and a tech company seems to want to keep pursuing cool things™ instead of boring maintenance on a utility. Over the years lots of little extra non-essential functionality has crept into windows to where you could almost compare it with a lightweight linux distro, or that it's hard to draw the line where the OS ends, and then you're getting into territory where everyone relies upon a different subset of what's available which MS has been increasingly able to use to justify adding more 'essential' features for modern computing.
I think the change has been the general user doing many aspects of their real-life interactions (money, government, housing, travel, work, etc) easily and at speed via computing device compared to slower offline or face-to-face, and there's huge consequences if that gets screwed up if it can't be isolated from interference.
What I find interesting is that there's been little interesting making something like QubesOS for as many consumer devices (portables as well as desktop) as possible with an interface as painless as possible so people actually use it, and then the blast radius from any problem is smaller. There's also the hosted services side of computing where isolation on the same host is an expected feature and vulnerabilities like meltdown/spectre are such a big deal over the past 8 years, but it only gets seen as a curiosity on consumer devices.
Even without RT I think it'd be beneficial to tune graphics settings depending on context, if it's an action/combat scene there's likely aspects the player isn't paying attention to. I think the challenge is it's more developer work whether it's done by implementing some automatic detection or manually being set scene by scene during development (which studios probably do already where they can set up specific arenas). I'd guess an additional task is making sure there's no glaring difference between tuning levels, and setting a baseline you can't go beneath.
If anything I think PC has been a prototyping or proving grounds for technologies on the roadmap for consoles to adopt. It allows software and hardware iterations before it's relied upon in a platform that is required to be stable and mostly unchanging for around a decade from designing the platform through developers using it and recently major refreshes. For example from around 2009 there were a few cross platform games with the baseline being 32bit/DX9 capabilities, but optional 64bit/DX11 capabilities, and given the costs and teams involved in making the kind of games which stretch those capabilities I find it hard to believe it'd be one or a small group of engineers putting significant time into an optional modes that aren't critical to the game functioning and supporting them publicly. Then a few years later that's the basis of the next generation of consoles.
I think one of the challenges is that game designers have trained up so well at working within the non-RT constraints (and pushing back those constraints) that it's a tall order to make paying the performance cost (and new quirks of rendering) be paid back by RT improvements. There's also how a huge majority of companies wouldn't want to cut off potential customers in terms of whether their hardware can do RT at all or performance while doing so. The other big one is whether they're trying to recreate a similar environment with RT, or if they're taking advantage of what is only possible on the new technique, such as dynamic lighting and whether that's important to the game they want to make.
-How difficult it must be for the art/technical teams at game studios to figure out for all the detail they are capable of putting on screen how much of it will be appreciated by gamers. Essentially making sure that anything they're going to be budgeting significant amount of worker time to creating, gamers aren't going to run right past it and ignore or doesn't contribute meaningfully to 'more than the sum of its parts'.
-As much as technology is an enabler for art, alongside the install base issue how well does pursuing new methods fit how their studio is used to working, and is the payoff there if they spend time adapting. A lot of gaming business is about shipping product, and the studios concern is primarily about getting content to gamers than chasing tech as that is what lets their business continue, selling GPUs/consoles is another company's business.