As someone who bought Half Life 2 when it was released …

I only remember people being excited about Steam, Web stores weren’t a thing back then and they were the future! (It was the following years of audio and ebook stores locking stuff down and evapourating that taught us to hate it).

Game/Audio CD DRM hacking the kernel and breaking/massively slowing down your PC was pretty common back then and Steam’ s DRM didn’t do that.

The HL2 disc installer didn’t require you to install Steam, once installed it asked you to setup Steam and there was a sticker under the DVD with the Steam code for you to enter.

You were then rewarded with a copy of HL2 Deathmatch and Counterstrike Source.

Steam wasn’t always on DRM, back then ADSL/DSL was relatively new and alot of people were still stuck on Dial Up modems.

Steam let you sign in and authorize your games for 30 days at which point you would need to log into Steam again. This was incredibly helpful feature for young me.

Basically Epic like every other publisher has created their own launcher/store.

They aren’t trying to compete on features and instead using profits from their franchise to buy market share (e.g. buying store exclusives).

The tone and strategy often comes off as aggressive and hostile.

For example Valve was concerned Microsoft were going to leverage their store to kill Steam. Valve has invested alot in adding windows operability to Linux and ensuring Linux is a good gaming platform. To them this is the hedge against agressive Microsoft business practices.

The Epic CEO thinks Windows is the only operating system and actively prevents Linux support and revoked Linux support from properties they bought.

As a linux user, Valve will keep getting my money and I literally can’t give it to Epic because they don’t want it.

Basic rule if someone claims X magically solves a problem they don’t follow X and are a huge generator of the problem.

For example people who claim they don’t need to write comments because they write self documenting code are the people that use variable names x1,x2,y, etc…

Similarly anyone you meet claiming Test Driven Development means they have better tests will write code with appalling code coverage and epically bad tests.

Nvidia drivers don’t tend to be as performant under linux.

With AMD instead of using the AMD VLK driver, you would use the RADV (developed largely by valve). Which petforms better.

Every AMD card under linux supports OpenCL (the driver is more based on graphics card architecture) and you install it very easily. Googling it with windows found pages of errors and missing support.

Blender supports OpenCL. I bet the 2x improvement is Blender being able to ofload rendering to the AMD graphics card.

Also this represents the biggest headache in Linux, lots of gamers insist they can only use Nvidia cards. Nvidia treats linux as an afterthought as best or deliberately sabotages things at worse.

AMD embraced open source and so Linux land is much nicer on AMD (and to a less extent Intel).

The results here will probably be a DxVK quirk, lots of “Nvidia optimised” games have game engines doing weird things and the Nvidia driver compensates. DxVK has been identifying that to produce “good” vulkan calls.

Mint was a reaction to Gnome 3, the unique workflow upset a lot of people and the people behind Mint decided to build Cinnamon desktop (its Gnome 3 made to look/work like Gnome 2). They needed a distribution to build/test their work and so based a distribution off of Ubuntu and called it Mint.

As a bit of explanation, there are only a few projects which attempt to build an entire linux distribution from scratch. This involves finding code from thousands of sources, work out packaging, etc… We call these ‘base’ distributions, Debian is the base distribution for Ubuntu, Ubuntu is the base distribution for Mint.

Ubuntu tends to be slightly ahead of Debian in the software versions it uses and automatically enables the ‘non-free’ repositories. Ubuntu tends to push some Canonical specific things like Snaps (which everyone hates)

I believe Mint rolls the Canonical specific things out of Ubuntu and you get the latest version of Cinnamon.

Its all a bit…

If its for work I would suggest picking a “stable” distribution like Debian, Kubuntu or OpenSuse.

A lot of people recommend Arch or Fedora but the focus of those is getting the very latest releases, which increases your chance of stuff breaking.

A lot of people will suggest niche distributions, those can be great for specific needs but generally you will always find Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL support for commercial apps.

I would also suggest looking at the KDE Desktop, many distributions default to Gnome but it is unique in how it works, KDE (or XFCE) will provide a desktop similar to Windows 11.

Lastly I would suggest looking at Crossover Linux by Codeweavers.

Linux has something called WINE, its an attempt to implement the Windows 95 - 11 API’s so windows applications can run on linux.

WINE is how the Steam Deck/Linux is able to play Windows games. Valve embedded it into Steam and called it “Proton”.

WINE is primarily developed by Codeweavers and they provide the Crossover application that makes setting up and running a Windows application really easy.

People will mention Lutris but that has a far higher learning curve.

There is an application database so you can see in advance if your applications would work: https://appdb.winehq.org/

This advice isn’t grounded in reality.

Management normally defines ways to track and judge itself, these are typically called Key Performance Indicators.

KPI’s are normally things like contract value growth, new contracts signed, profit margin, etc…

So if the project manager is meeting or exceeding their KPI’s and you walk up to their boss telling them the PM is failing as basic job functions, the boss won’t care.

This is because the boss might have set the KPI’s or the boss might also be judged on them. In either situation its to the bosses advantage to ignore you.

The boss will only care if there is a KPI you can demonstrate the PM failing to meet.

Every person/group will have various incentives and motivations. To affect change you have to understand what they are.

A project manager has responsibility for delivery of a project but they typically lack domain specific knowledge. As a result they can’t directly deliver something, merely ask subject matter experts for advice and facilitate a team to deliver.

Most PM’s cope with the stress of this position poorly.

This cartoon is an example of micro management (a common coping mechanisim), the manager has involved themselves in the low level decisions because that gives a sense of control. If a technical team then tell them its a bad decison the team are effectively attacking their coping mechanisim.

The solution isn’t to tell them their technical idea is terrible, when you’ve fallen down this rabbit hole you have to treat the PM as a stakeholder. They are someone you have to manage, so a common solution is to give them confidence there is a path to delivery, a way to track and understand it.

During the pandemic I had some unoccupied python graduates I wanted to teach data engineering to.

Initially I had them implement REST wrappers around Apache OpenNLP and SpaCy and then compare the results of random data sets (project Gutenberg, sharepoint, etc…).

I ended up stealing a grad data scientist because we couldn’t find a difference (while there was a difference in confidence, the actual matches were identical).

SpaCy required 1vCPU and 12GiB of RAM to produce the same result as OpenNLP that was running on 0.5 vCPU and 4.5 GiB of RAM.

2 grads were assigned a Spring Boot/Camel/OpenNLP stack and 2 a Spacy/Flask application. It took both groups 4 weeks to get a working result.

The team slowly acquired lockdown staff so I introduced Minio/RabbitMQ/Nifi/Hadoop/Express/React and then different file types (not raw UTF-8, but what about doc, pdf, etc…) for NLP pipelines. They built a fairly complex NLP processing system with a data exploration UI.

I figured I had a group to help me figure out Python best approach in the space, but Python limitations just lead to stuff like needing a Kubernetes volume to host data.

Conversely none of the data scientists we acquired were willing to code in anything but Python.

I tried arguing in my company of the time there was a huge unsolved bit of market there (e.g. MLOP’s)

Alas unless you can show profit on the first customer no business would invest. Which is why I am trying to start a business.

This is why Java rocks with ETL, the language is built to access files via input/output streams.

It means you don’t need to download a local copy of a file, you can drop it into a data lake (S3, HDFS, etc…) and pass around a URI reference.

Considering the size of Large Language Models I really am surprised at how poor streaming is handled within Python.

Doesn’t the fact you have to use a separate mouse tell you the design is poor?

The better approach would be to detect clicks on the left and right of the trackpad as left/right buttons and support two finger right clicking.

I have had a vareity of HP, Dell, etc… laptops. The trackpads will do gesture stuff but you can clearly feel a left and right button if you push down on the trackpad (e.g. push on left side for left button).

I have a Mac book Pro for work.There is just a lot of random weirdness.

There is no right click, your supposed to do a light two finger touch for right click.If you click too hard it opens the dictionary.

If you plug in a mouse you can get right click, but it isn’t consistent in working.

By default scroll is inverted (up is down, down is up), also windows can have scroll bars but they aren’t clickable, you have to do a scroll gesture.

Almost every Left control + Button action is now Meta key + button. But not everything, its annoyingly inconsistent also new random shortcuts.

For example lock screen isn’t Meta key + l like on Linux or Windows. Its Meta + Shift + Q, shut down is Meta +Left Control + Q.

The keyboard doesn’t match the your countries layout, so keys move around and is missing traditional keys like print screen. To do that you press Meta + Shift + 4 to switch the mouse to a screen cut tool and select the area you cut.

I could go on and on, none of it is obvious and I wouldn’t say any of it is an improvement at best its just different.

I am currently teaching python and JavaScript devs Typescript. Everytime they hit a problem they switch to any

Sigh

Engineering is tradeoffs.

A command shell is focused on file operations and starting/stopping applications. So it makes it easy to do those things.

You can use scripting languages (e.g. Node.js/Python) to do everything bash does but they are for general purpose computing and so what and how you perform a task becomes more complicated.

This is why its important to know multiple languages, since each one will make specific tasks easier and a community forms around them as a result.

If I want to mess with the file system/configuration I will use Bash, if I want to build a website I will use Typescript, if I want to train a machine learning model I will use Python, if I am data engineering I will use Java, etc .

You’ve just moved the packaging problem from distributions to app developers.

The reason you have issues is historically app developers weren’t interested in packaging their application so distributions would figure it out.

If app developers want to package deb, rpm, etc… packages it would also solve the problem.

Nice out of date dependencies with those lovely security vulnerabilities!

For anyone too lazy to read the blog, there are 10 shortcuts on the sidebar of nautilus. The author can’t remember the last time they used “Documents” and picture/music links are rarely used. In their experience they only need “Downloads”. So they suggest its worth pruning the list.

Ahh Gnome dev’s continuing trend of removing things they personally don’t find useful.

Just to add.

Look at any hobby in your life and break out the money spent vs the enjoyment you got out of it.

For example the Cinema costs me £10 and a film is 2 hours long, meaning my fun time costs £5 per hour.

A £100 console would have to provide me 20 hours entertainment for it to be comparable to going to the cinema.

These days any PS4 game will have 10-40 hours content, but buying them costs money. Popping on CEX website the most expensive PS4 games are £12. Assuning you only get 10 hours of fun from a game…

The question you should ask yourself is are there 3 games on the PS4 you are interested in playing?

Its a really immature and niave response from Kev. Information is power, he’s chosen to operate without knowledge for internet points.

Meta think there is potential to enlarge their market and make money, Kev’s response won’t impact their business making decisions.

Kev should have gone to the meeting to understand what Meta are planning. That would help him figure out how to deal with Meta entering the space.

I don’t expect he could shape their approach but knowing they want to do X, Y or Z might make certain features/fixes a priority so it doesn’t impact everyone else