Yep, I guess the way you said it was more diplomatic than mine because with (I believe at least) the same message I’m getting downvoted for asking for more open source but you don’t. I’m clearly missing something.

Edit: my bet is that you mentioned Playnite thus demonstrating legit alternatives do exist, whereas I didn’t so maybe people imagined I just complained asking for something impossible because they didn’t not it already existed. I should have mentioned Lutris.

I didn’t say it was the only motivation, but even if I did, can you please give examples and address the question I did ask?

Steam isn’t open source either

…and? I wish Steam also was open source but I don’t see how that’s relevant here.

We’re discussing about a position for someone who probably likes, or at least understand, open source because that’s the motivation for most people when they consider Linux. It’s important to highlight what it is and what it is not, unfortunately.

There are open source games too, just to give a random examples GCompris is quite amazing and it keeps on growing. Countless examples on https://itch.io/games/tag-open-source

What is the point of this very community? Is it “just” to play (and if so, one can “just” launch Steam on desktop or their SteamDeck, BTW AFAIK Steam does not suggest DRMs, it’s up to the game dev) or rather is it to play better, whatever that might mean? I personally do not believe promoting proprietary software (especially when working ones already exist) helps go further but you might disagree. Can you please explain then WHY more proprietary launchers and games is good?

No mention of open source though.

you would be surprised how much work a CPU under 100mhz can do when there isn’t an operating system/browser in the way

Latest cool thing I saw : Doom on my earbuds https://doombuds.com/ which IMHO demonstrate greatly how much more powerful so many tiny things around us really are.

Worst part is … he’s still right according to the stock. That’s just madness.

Yes, that should be done in order to pass national certification and thus before allowing importation. Having cameras is fine when used in a closed loop, streaming data away from the car though, that’s different.

You mean compared to 996? Actually yes probably. Compared to forced labor though, I wouldn’t go that far.

All tech is used as such. You think Apple and Microsoft and Android aren’t …

At least “All popular consumer tech …” then, because there are alternatives already.

Sorry buddy but you are not “smart enough” to use that super powerful tool that supposedly can do everything extremely convenient for you! /s

Right, except that unlike Explorer or IE after that, it siphons everything it can to send it back to Redmond so even if one does not use it, it is STILL a problem.

“bend the productivity curve” is such a beautiful way to say that they are running out of ideas on how to sell that damn thing.

It basically went from :

• it’s going to change EVERYTHING! Humanity as we know it is a thing of the past!

… to “bend the productivity curve”. It’s not how it “radically increase productivity” no it’s a lot more subtle than that, to the point that it can actually bend that curve down. What a shit show.

Right, sorry maybe I got a bit excited by my point. It wasn’t about this HDD example in particular, it was about the broader consumer hardware trend.

Another interesting metric is piracy trends, checking a popular show, e.g Fallout and its latest episode namely S02E05 :

• 1080p ~15k seeds
• 720p ~3k seeds
• 480p ~0.2 seeds

… and 2160p gets 50 seeds!

Of course that’s just 1 datapoint and it’d have to be replicated (maybe it was released after the other versions, maybe it’s a show people do NOT want in high res, etc) but it’s quite a big gap.

I’m not arguing about prices. I wish prices would keep on going down but that’s just my preference as a consumer. It has nothing to do with my argument though.

I’d be curious to know if game size is increasing over time. My intuition is that we also peaked at 200GB installs. There are bigger games but on average I’m not sure we installation size keeps on growing.

Interesting, I’m not sure if there is a metric for it, maybe Steam most popular configuration could be used then see if it’s average time does it indeed last longer? My intuition is it might indeed but I didn’t check the actual data.

Honestly I don’t think it matters so much…

I think we reached peaked IT few years ago.

Nobody needs (that’s the crux term here, need, not “want” or “desire” or “wish”) a bigger hard drive. It’s the same way nobody needs an 8K TV and they they aren’t sold. Why?

I’m glad you ask, it’s all connected! If you stick to “just” a 4K TV, because you have normal human eyes, then the content you need is “just” 4K so a movie is just 2GB or so… and thus you don’t need a larger hard drive, thus not CPU, GPU, memory, etc. The current setup is simply “good enough”.

I can already hear the steps of that ONE person who edits 360 8K videos for National Geographic preparing to argue “actually…!” and yes, they ARE right. Some people, professionals, DO need super high res, super high framerate, super high everything … but that’s NOT your average consumer. You average consumer STOPPED upgrading because they need to. Most consumer who still upgrade mostly do it because of habit, because they get coerced into it (e.g. MicroSlop Windows 11) but not because they genuinely need to.

So… yes I “wish” I had better everything, including hard drive, but the truth is we “peaked” in terms of actually required spec a couple of years ago, same for phones that are now the same equivalent small slabs.

My point is I’m wondering if this AI bet will have deeper consequence for the industry overall with the realization for most people (again, please before you reply : your average consumer, the person who browse the Web, watch a video of a TV series, play some games for fun, NOT a professional!) that the hardware they have TODAY is good enough.

FWIW I do have 2 Linux phones and… they work. The problem IMHO is that non-software companies believe THEY can lock or profit their customers via an “app”. If they only provided a Web page instead rather than a mandatory mobile application then it wouldn’t matter so much.

So, despite have working Linux phones (albeit far from perfect) I’m still relying on a deGoogled Android phone so that I can run mobile “apps” for only a couple of, quite important to me, services.

To summarize, I don’t think it’s the OS themselves that fuel lock-in but rather apps that require those locked down OSes.

So… I’m definitely cheering up for the lady in red.

Why? Am I an elitist asshole doing his best to sound smart?

Well yes, definitely BUT I also appreciate the power of the command line. The CLI isn’t “cool” because of the cryptic command, no the CLI is cool because :

• ls (list files)
• ls *.txt (list all files ending with the .txt extension)
• ls *.txt | wc -l (count how of them are)
• etc

and the “etc” is the FUNDAMENTAL part! Namely that no matter how smart the GUI developer is, they can’t predict how it is going to be used when done with OTHER tools. That’s the true power of the CLI. So yes if you stick to a single command, the CLI is unnecessarily cryptic but as soon as you start to combine commands, nothing comes close to it.