Going back a few years to covid lockdowns, work from home exploding and a shortage of computers, I thought the mirror image of that was something MS should have tried. Enable a variant of windows on the xbox (probably locked down) so people can plug in keyboard/mouse and do some desktop tasks on the recently released consoles, and it'd also serve to seed a userbase for the gaming side.
The aspect that's depressing to me is that we've shown many times that we can throw huge amounts of resources at various projects, numbers quantifying them so large most people don't have the context for the scale, but not for projects that preserve our environment. If anything it seems like doing so would give us a greater time span to do things like colonize the nearest chunk of rock in space (which is a figurative paddle off the coast compared to reaching other habitats) and terraforming our own world first might teach us things we need to know for greater projects.
Another aspect I'd wonder about for relatively simple tasks is just freeing it from memory and being prepared to pay the cost of loading it again, it's probably already on disk. Latency matters, but it seems there will be limits especially considering the transfer speed and latency improvements we've seen to storage commonly installed in most systems over the past 15 years or so.
Then comes the challenge of deciding what processes/data to free or page, whether that's flagged by the system as it's running or at coding/compile time. And that seems similar to the issue of picking a swap strategy for a distro/OS, which will depend on the user's demands or system, setting a good default and exposing how to change the configuration to a better match if needed.
From what I remember it was a project for Coffee Stain (the studio) to train up/onboard new hires, having started as a modding team with Sanctum for UT3 and later a full standalone release. Then they ran with it for a while after it struck a chord with people willing to give them money.
That lack of care is the part that's annoying to me, combined with them being one of the largest corporations that has the resources to throw at those issues if they chose to do so. Quality issues aside, there's lots of similar aspects like the long drawn out migration of the control panel (i.e. their own control panel applets, putting aside third party) since win8 in 2012, if they wanted they could have completed that in the last 14 years and however many major releases you count since then.
It may not be the bean counting optimal, but it is a long term image they project of the company.
I think any movement is gradual and for it to be significant it would need to be sustained, people love dramatic sudden changes but it's going up against decades of momentum. As you mentioned mobiles, that took a long time to transition and that was with a starting point where a large proportion already had a non-smart phone along with the decisions they made about replacing aging devices.
The point about "fighting the last war" is interesting as there's a lot of uncertainty right now about how personal computing with a PC is going to look in the next few years. The angle I've been wondering about with the pressures on consumer hardware pricing/availability is if manufacturers can use it as an opportunity to establish new standards if/when it's easier to buy new again (eg, a major ATX revision/rethink) or if they keep following the same template. Over on the software side, what could a non-stagnant OS offer that would be attractive to consumers, what can consumer/desktop linux do that isn't following windows/macos, what would create a need for a mirror image of WINE as linux is leading with new features first?
A tangent to this which annoys me is not specifically windows, but the way the ecosystem has evolved over the years, by guidance/enforcement or lack thereof from MS. Unless you're very careful about what applications you install and how you manage/monitor them, you can end up with a lot of background applications loaded each boot, each doing some combination of non-centralized updating itself or applications it manages, preloading, quick launch, etc.
I'm pretty sure some versions of DOS had a defrag tool, or at least windows 9x had a DOS mode equivalent where you could see the block map getting moved around.
And there's an example of one of the contradictions of modern PC gaming, for as much as it'll get hyped as a mostly open platform with a lot of freedom (in comparison to consoles), there's an awful lot that has coalesced on a small number of services over the years where an awful lot of value can vanish instantly if someone makes a decision you don't agree with or a service gets disrupted/closed.
Depends what they're used for, if it's for lightweight-demands mobile communications and simple tasks then I'd definitely agree. However the phone has become the personal computer for many and covers a broad range of tasks, let alone before you consider demanding users.
If you've got one device for all your computing then you want something more capable, I think there's more scope for variation is when it's in conjunction with another device, mobile plus your choice of watch/tablet/laptop/desktop/etc. that doesn't necessarily have to be on your person or quickly accessible, task dependent.
I'd add the gold rush for hardware to mine crypto coins, depending what component you're looking at.
What stands out to me is that you can't rely on pricing acting predictably any more, it used to be that when a new product/generation released there would be a few weeks of high demand/short supply, but when that was satisfied it would be a nice graceful decline over its lifespan until the next generation was nearly ready to come out and take its place in the market. You can look at old PCPartPicker trends graphs via archive.org to see this over and over. Now it feels like trying to catch a falling knife and it really raises the threshold for whether I actually need an upgrade versus other areas of my life where I could spend.
On the bottom [0], youtuber/cooling specialist/tuner der8auer did an interview with an intel engineer a few years ago. One of the points they bring up is that it's not a pure gain to have less silicon between the logic and the next interface to another material conducting heat away as the silicon itself acts as a conductor/spreader, i.e. sideways as well as upwards, so there's a balance.
The Bethesda Morrowind-onward RPGs had their engine roots in Gamebyro, which was fairly widely used by other developers as well. That said I think there's a question about where the value comes from, as their customization to it 25+ years ago and what it enables their game/toolkit to do has clearly given them a 'special sauce' that hasn't been replicated.
Also upthread Source was mentioned which has id's Quakeworld/Q2 engine as an ancestor, via HL1 GoldSrc.
I've only seen the ./ category moderation style in one other place and it's really a shame as I think it has great value if it can be linked up with filters besides raw thresholds, of course balanced against how it would be used in reality by a large group of people. Voting incentivizes populism, and that means a lot of topics degrade into "everyone's a comedian" or virtue signalling whatever is acceptable in that particular forum, mostly retreading old ground instead of moving the discussion forwards.
IIRC, Epic had (still has?) the source for UT4 available as they were trying to push community contributions, mostly on the playable content side but I'm fairly sure they had the core game there, based off what is now a very old branch of UE4. The telling thing to me is if there was a huge demand for it there was no significant effort to pick up the torch, or even do yet another 'spiritual successor'.
I'm fairly sure it's one of the reasons both MS and Sony went with AMD hardware from 2013 onwards, they can make use of the security/virtualization features their server platform has.
I think proximity is a good measure, what different types of news do you need to know and will impact your decision making on different time scales? There's probably a very small amount of things I really need to know (practically) instantly, regional/national/continental/global news might be interesting to be summarized daily/weekly/monthly, but even then it will be different subsets where it affects me or is little more than trivia and will be forgotten quickly as I have little connection to it.
The challenge lies with whether the things you go to reddit (or any other service/product) for are concentrated or exclusively there, such as discussion or information on a particular topic. There's a lot of communities where they've concentrated their resources on a free site and are at the mercy of the whims of the owner, discord is another. Very often there's no simple switch to an alternative without losing a lot, or hoping on the charity of others to spend effort migrating.
Something I can't fault nvidia for is long term vision. If you ignore all the non-gaming uses, I can't see significant gains to be had by keeping evolving rasterization based rendering, which presumably would hit diminishing returns, upgrades would be less exciting, and be easier for AMD and others to compete against them. The trouble is a variety of reasons has meant that long term is likely going to be over a decade from when it was introduced before it's really commonplace or part of the furniture for the majority of games.
I'd add the move from feature phones to smart phones and later tablets. Early adopters were getting them 2007/08, 5 years on from that the platform was well on its way to maturing and with a broader range of hardware and the software ecosystem was moving to target it too. Then there's the question of what form best suits the usage the tasks the netbook audience have, if you're doing the very basic browsing/comms tasks, why take a comparatively big slab when a 4-5" will do, and if you do need a portable PC why constrain yourself to a weak system, netbooks were in no-mans-land.
IIRC winget is another mechanism with a CLI front-end that resembles a package manager. What it does is either hook into the windows store (another channel) for packages, or points to an installer which likely runs silently in the background, for example 'winget show adobe.acrobat.reader.64-bit' or 'microsoft.vcredist.2015+.x64'
I got curious and I had a windows xp ISO lying around, apparently it does support migrating from win98 onwards which surprised me a bit, win95 has to do a fresh install. From looking at the various .inf files it seems to pull a lot more information from a NT based starting point than 9x. I'm not sure if I'm curious enough to try a 98 to NT5 upgrade in a VM though.
Whether or not many people would want to do that upgrade/migration is another question, but similar to you I doubt the number was high.
For the kinds of games where DRM free matters, where they don't have a prominent online/multiplayer side or the equivalent of playing the game 'from the disc', is the console subscription really an issue? I don't have a console myself, but from when I've looked into it there's a bunch of mainly free to play games where that subscription isn't needed as both the publisher and Sony/MS get their money from purchases.
I wonder if this signals anything about Sony's attitude to blu-ray movies. Aside from games one of the reasons their consoles have sold well is because they've been excellent physical media players. The PS2 for DVDs and the PS3 onwards for blu-ray.
If I remember well PS3 was during the period where blu-ray lasers were production constrained and more expensive with Sony prioritizing their own devices, so the console was price and availability competitive against dedicated disc players by third parties. And the PS3 had pretty long term update/support. I'm fairly sure that had an impact on the financial side as it was in the era when console hardware was subsidized on the expectation they'd get a slice of game sales, except those consoles bought for primarily for movies didn't reimburse them so well.
I wonder where all the artists who used to make the wide range of styles for XP went after MS made it harder to apply themes to windows, or what factors contributed to attracting artists to start making that kind of customization. I think partially it's down to the platform many use (many seek to theme mobile OSes), but the tools to do so has to be a large contribution. I'm not aware of anything like Stardock's Skin studio that exists outside windows, and from looking at their website it's now useless for anything past win10 1909. Having their art seen on widely used platforms (OS or applications) has to be a large draw to it as well.
Isn't that a consequence of it being a fairly open platform and no certification gatekeeper before a developer can release/update their game? The platform isn't specifically steam or where mouse/keyboard is unavailable or inconvenient, it's generally what they think most of their target market will be using which is likely a generic windows desktop. I don't think developers or valve themselves would want to set up certification and enforcement to say "you must have X in your game otherwise you can't release on steam", especially for the wide range of categories of criteria you could possibly think of, and someone out there will want a way to do text input on their steering wheel for a driving simulator. PC gaming casts such a wide net it's likely an impossible task.
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.