keyringlight

I think there's a lot of weirdness if you try to answer "what is the PC gaming platform?" and how Valve or anyone else fits into it, and because it's PC a lot of answers can be true simultaneously, and many different users want/expect different things.

Is it processor architecture? Is it the OS? Is it the store and whatever facilities they provide? Is it the mode of physical interaction with the device (desk, couch+TV, etc)? Is it being able to assemble any random collection of hardware and expecting it to work? Does that discount set builds? Is it mandatory that the user is free to screw around with the software any way they please or can you lock stuff down?

At least on the commerce side, it's been the case since steam was opened up to third parties that they were the gatekeeper for success unless you were already huge (and now very few companies want to go it alone). Going back to Introversion's Darwinia they were just scraping by until they got on steam, developers have long been complaining that the varied methods Valve has used to get on the store (manual review, greenlight, etc) showed the vast majority of gamers only purchase through it or that you'll get a large wave of new business when you release on it. Now it seems like a 'tragedy of the commons' situation unless you've got your own marketing or it's a hobby project.

It seems like you've now got to do mental gymnastics to say Valve doesn't own the PC gaming platform

At this point I think Valve is more likely to be disrupted from an outside influence rather than within, I think a lot of their actions are about keeping the ship steady. If someone does come along as an upstart in a new market as valve did with digital distribution versus retail/physical, the old is unlikely to be instantly irrelevant and obsoleted, and even then you get new markets like mobile appearing over their lifespan where both are healthy side-by-side.

I think a cap on what consumption you're allowed until you can prove utility to society would be beneficial. That said, with crypto it was distributed so it'd be extremely hard to enforce, and using the example of how AI has played out there's companies willing and able to dump money speculating on it just so they don't lose out if it does bear fruit. I expect for anything in future that shows potential they can organize themselves around regulations faster than new rules and enforcement could adapt.

Another factor for China was their cities choking on smog. One of the anecdotes I remember from Covid was that mask wearing in Asian cities was just another thing you did depending on that aspect of the weather, except in 2020 it had another reason behind it.

What stands out to me is that winget has the appearance and is often perceived as a package manager, yet it's more of a CLI front end to an index, and that index seems to either point to the windows store or a URL to download a regular setup file which it'll run silently (adobe acrobat is the example that springs to mind).

This approach is something I wonder about versus the freedom to fragment with a thousand full distros, each with their own maintenance staff (and burden of supporting what they release if they want to be taken seriously) and experimenting with something. I think there's value in experimenting and exploring new directions, but it would be overall beneficial if there were efforts to consolidate or make it an easy to enable option if those branches prove valuable and compatible with the parent distro

The issue that was noted at larger LANs I used to go to was that matches of DotA could lock in around 12 people for around 45m per game which would make getting participants for other games more difficult. There would be constantly running CS/UT servers where people would drop into to kill time, but trying to get a large game running or something like battlefield required advance planning

The way I see it related to this are the questions who was/is paying MS for windows or who are their customers (at various points in time). At the time counterfeiting was meant to be the main concern, someone was paying for it and the money didn't flow through to MS. Between the cost of windows being hidden away for someone buying a OEM machine or wrapped up in a contract for businesses there probably wasn't many that deliberately chose or were aware of that particular software component in what they were buying. The rise of mobiles and ad networks meant no one thought about paying for the OS software, consumers would never pay for firmware on any other electronics and that assumption followed on so the costs were absorbed by whoever designed the platform, manufacturer or carrier. It pays to be the middleman though, through various app stores.

There's also the move from making an application for an OS (for many GUI tools mostly explored what they need to provide, are 'done' and stable by now) towards clients for an online service, cross platform frameworks or websites where you could argue the browser is the OS shell. I'd guess if there's any strategic failing for MS with windows, it's that they haven't given developers much reason to make apps _for windows_ with things that can't be done elsewhere, even for gaming the constraint is loosening, and a lot of that is driven by AMD/nvidia/intel or following what is getting made for consoles.

The larger alternative that comes to mind is the ClockworkPI [0] uConsole and DevTerm devices, although they seem to have poor availability or long and variable lead times. Beyond that you're into touching distance of x86 laptops with the GPD Win type micro PCs.

[0] https://www.clockworkpi.com/

I think at some point there will gradually be a line that divides consumer type devices and Workstation with a capital W type devices. If nothing else it'll encourage the PC market to really decide for each use-case how much they value having a huge range of laptop or pre-built configurations or being able to assemble from parts. There's a lot of momentum in the PC mindset, but I also think a lot of people would be satisfied with less 'personal' so long as they were able to identify what they need and match it to capabilities of a model. 20 years ago the idea of a phone/table as the personal computer for most people and not a PC/laptop would be silly, yet here we are

Plus whether there's further benefits available for the FSR/DLSS/XeSS type upscalers in knowing more about the scene. I'm reminded a bit of variable rate shading where if renderer analyses the scene for where detail levels will reward spending performance, could assign blocks (eg, 1x2, 4x2 pixels etc) to be shaded once instead of per-pixel to concentrate there. It's not exactly the same thing as the upscalers, but it seems a better foundation for a better output image compared to a blunt dropping the whole rendered resolution by a percentage. However, that's assuming traditional rendering before any ML gets involved which I think has proven its case in the past 7 years.

I think the other side to this is the difference between further integration of the engine and scaler/frame generation which would seem to involve a lot of low level tuning (probably per-title), and having a generic solution that uplifts as many titles as possible even if there's "perfect is the enemy of good" left on the table.

I'd wonder about someone targeting Musk seeing as Starlink is one of his ventures that seems to be running well up to now while his other companies have issues. Having typed that out it seems like a spy movie plot, but that seems to be the world we're living in recently.

That matches my experience with Cachyos, it's a rolling and cutting/bleeding edge distro which means it maybe cuts you occasionally. They still seem to be finding their way with some aspects like changing what bootloader they want to use (I'm not sure how much difference it makes to the maintainers, but it seems a little like bike-shedding for a distro which is out in public), and there's some changes which are forced on them like the nvidia drivers splitting between open/closed.

That's in contrast with what I perceive with a lot of gamers (seeing as Valve is being mentioned a lot) where they see a PC as a deluxe console with steam as the UI, and seem to be desiring a high level of polish. That's in combination with signalling that they're using the latest and greatest, tweaking to get the most out of their rigs, showing off their pretty color coordinated builds, and somehow are expected to dive into linux (and the freedom it brings) when there's hostility to running more than one client/store/downloader/gaming package manager. Some aspects of PC gaming seem weird to me.

I think a lot of this comes down to assumptions about the audience and something along the lines of "it's not a problem until it is". It's one aspect I wonder about with migrants from windows, and all the assumptions or habits they bring with them. Microsoft has been trying to put various safety rails around users for the past 20 years since they started taking security more seriously with xp, and that gets pushback every time they try and restrict or warn.

The biggest one I've noticed which I think is linked to that preference is sites using Cloudflare sending you into an endless loop of a bot check.

With windows I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to helpfully 'repair' it after any given update, similar with a lot of the privacy tweakers you can find. Then it becomes a monthly task after patch Tuesday to confirm your system is how you want it.

Another thing you can do is run multiple profiles at the same time with the -no-remote argument , so "firefox -P profilename -no-remote"

One of the things I've been wondering about with the 'digital detox' trends or one of the younger generations getting dumbphones instead of smart, is why haven't the papers found some way of turning back the clock to explore capitalizing on that when it's supposedly hard to sell news now. 24 hour news is decades old at this point and the constant firehose of events from every location on the globe is tiring especially if only a tiny fraction is directly relevant to you. I'd be interesting if they could make a more attractive 'news/analysis product' like a newspaper or the evening news broadcast which is distinct from what is readily available from all the other sources.

I'd have some sympathy for this if they weren't the biggest fish in the pond with huge "make it happen" resources at their disposal. They have the potential available to do almost anything they want if they decide to, and at this point it's a conscious decision not to.

I wonder if it's a consequence of Valve's core business is dealing with delivering data for games regularly in the 10's of GB range, they assume most of their customers are on connections good enough for game downloads so they must be using the store and chat via the same. I guess if it's not unpleasant enough for a large group of people to prevent commerce from happening, then it's not worth putting engineering effort into (or however they allocate effort at Valve now).

And the Olympics in 2028

I've experimented with linux auto updates and the only one I found which easily and clearly worked while staying in the background was Mint. Mint seems like a modern lightweight equivalent to what Ubuntu was 20 years ago.

Fedora might be second place with options between "do the updates ASAP but there might be weirdness if you're running something that gets updated" or "download and do a big install when you want to turn the PC off/restart". The bigger problem is that dnf-automatic and apt's automatic-updates seem pretty finicky to set up correctly and get feedback that it's happening, plus the documentation seems old and thin on the ground, it's just enough to cover the happy path and there doesn't seem to be any recent ongoing work. For Arch don't even bother because their attitude is that system admin must be handled by a human, automation for pacman isn't supported.

I think performance requirements depend on what it's used for, and what other devices you have access to in your life. If someone only has one phone as their personal computer for everything then I can see an argument that the minimum should be higher, but if the phone is intended to be comfortably pocketable tool for tasks you're likely to need while away from a larger/more powerful device. For example have the phone to handle calls, simple messaging, taking photos (minus editing), transport/store apps, and a full PC or larger phone/tablet for ticketmaster.

The only other option that I've toyed with is buying a small feature/"dumb" phone for going in the pocket and a smartphone in a bag, which seems less ideal.

FM radio uses the headphone cable as an antenna, so with the move to bluetooth I assume it got squashed for similar reasons. The other aspect is it assumes if you want live radio that you're happy needing an active data connection and allowance, any any local stations have a stream available. One of the things I love about streaming (via RadioDroid, etc) is that you can get a station from anywhere on the planet but sometimes you want something a bit more basic.

One thing I wonder about with people moving to linux is whether "it works like windows" can act as a safe and comfortable landing point, but then how many people explore and prefer the options that they then have access to.

One aspect MS has been criticized for over the past few versions of windows is that they are opinionated about how the base windows UI operates and looks for a very large number of users. One of the things I find interesting on the subreddits for some distros is a lot of posts is showing off how they've customized things, so you can nudge people towards the theming support or panel components you can swap out, or that you can have drastically different DEs with different operation models yet handle the same applications.

I'd wonder if there's enough willing to pay within individual consumers or professionals that would support a browser development team, and my impression is that file compression and browsers are pretty much a software commodity where they can be easily swapped with other options. I doubt there would be a lot of uptake on licensing within companies, and any bundling a licensed copy with an OEM build PC would probably involve mozilla paying them instead of the other way around.

It seems like the browser only exists with a very important secondary motivation, for microsoft and IE it was tying the web and windows together with activex, and for chrome it was to give their ads/services a good presentation. The other alternative I wonder about is the Document Foundation with LibreOffice, where their offering is distinct from MS Office, and there's still space for other players to exist healthily.

There was an article posted here not too long about with a similar sentiment about the NEC PC-98

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44076501

One thing I wonder about is whether PC gaming is splitting into two distinct tiers, high end for those with thousands to spend on their rig and studios who are pathfinders (id, Remedy, 4A, etc) in graphics, then the wider market for cheaper/older systems and studios going for broad appeal. I know the market isn't going to be neatly divided and more of a blurry ugly continuum.

The past few years (2018 with the introduction of RT and upscaling reconstruction seems as good a milestone as any) feel like a transition period we're not out of yet, similar to the tail end of the DX9/Playstation3/Xbox360 era when some studios were moving to 64bit and DX11 as optional modes, almost like PC was their prototyping platform for when they made completed the jump with PS4/Xbox one and more mature PC implementations. It wouldn't surprise me if it takes more years and titles built targeting the next generation consoles before it's all settled.

From earlier in the article they say this testing is with ultra settings, and for a modern game it would be expected that they're creating content that shows off well at 4k resolution and easily push past what 8GB VRAM can contain. The PCIe5 system is still affected, it's just affected less. There's probably tricks they can use to stream detail levels in/out of VRAM depending on how objects are displayed on screen (like the early direct storage+sampler feedback demos), but that's more work to do effectively and would still put pressure on PCIe and storage being fast enough to keep up.

I'd say it comes down to players picking appropriate settings for their system, and it being good if the developer can can provide the information on the consequences of different settings (showing VRAM usage), or a warning if you're below their required/recommended system.

What stands out to me is that it's not just the hardware side, software production to make use of it to realize the benefits offered doesn't seem to be running smoothly either, at least for gaming. I'm not sure nvidia really cares too much though as there's no market pressure on them where it's a weakness for them, if consumer GPUs disappeared tomorrow they'd be fine.

A few months ago Jensen Huang said he sees quantum computing as the next big thing he wants nvidia to be a part of over the next 10-15 years (which seems like a similar timeline as GPU compute), so I don't think consumer GPUs are a priority for anyone. Gaming used to be the main objective with byproducts for professional usage, for the past few years that's reversed where gaming piggybacks on common aspects to compute.