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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I meant it quite literally. Another multi-billion dollar company needs to be willing and able to spend the same level of resources and time. Wal-Mart or Costco itself would have to be willing to produce their own hardware.

    Yeah, I fully realize it’s never going to happen. It’s a hypothetical to illustrate just how high of a hurdle it is. It won’t happen organically, there needs to be a strong driving force with the financial backing that rivals that of the competition.


  • “Nobody cares” is how Linux will eventually win on the desktop. It becomes viable for most people when they no longer “need” whatever they were using before. As Linux is free, it will win when it becomes “good enough”.

    The largest barrier is the fact that the end user is expected to install the OS themselves. Having an OS work 100% of the time right out of the box with a default install is impossible. Windows and OSX have a huge advantage by being installed on the factory floor. The manufacturer guarantees that the drivers work for the hardware they decide to install and that the default applications on the OS work as they should.

    Linux needs an equivalent to Microsoft or Apple that can put Linux on shelves at WalMart for average people that buy $600 desktops.







  • The reality is that to the average user all browsers are the same. A lot of technologies have sort of peaked for regular people and browsers are one of those. There was a time when you needed plugins to do basic things like view PDFs or videos, to play games (flash, java) and there would be a new major change to HTML or CSS every few months etc.

    That’s no longer a problem. All browsers are near equal in their ability to render pages. So people are naturally going to go with what feels familiar. We lost the battle for market share the minute Google decided to advertise Chrome on their search page.




  • The OP isn’t wrong. Turn-based combat is falling out of favour with the majority of the new generation. Final Fantasy has dropped turn-based combat for the same reasons.

    For several console generations now, all character expressions can be done in real-time. Actions such as ‘press the trigger and your character will shoot a gun’ and ‘press the button and your character will swing their sword’ can now be easily expressed without going through a command system.

    It’s now common for gamers younger than me to love such games. As a result, it seems that it does not make sense to go through a command prompt, such as ‘Battle’, to make a decision during a battle.

    It was always a design choice born from limitations. It’s not going to disappear, but it was destined to decline in use once those limitations disappeared.


  • Is this even a legitimate problem? Lots of people, myself included, have a “local” configuration. All of the services and credentials mentioned in the config are running on my personal machine for testing only during active development. None of those credentials refer to any sort of “real” service that’s on 24/7 and accessible via the internet. It’s effectively dummy data to the rest of the world and I imagine there are a ton of false positives like what I just described.


  • Windows auto-recovers from almost any issue the average user might encounter. It cannot be understated just how hard it is for an application or driver to break modern Windows. It goes much farther than just fixing a kernel panic. It will reset to a serviceable state for almost anything you can think of ( e.g. bad display settings, borked application install) and even in the worst situation will still give you some sort of GUI and try to walk you through the problem.

    Linux sort of just gives up and lets you shoot yourself in the foot if you really ask it to. It’s up to you to then figure out how to fix things and that usually involves diving into the terminal. But even ignoring that, a lot of Linux applications have a serious UI/UX problem. I cannot count how many applications just do things like throw a config file at you even for common tasks and expect you to read a doc page in order to figure it out. I have better things to do than read yet another wall of text just to do something simple like remapping key bindings (e.g. mpv). That would be an unthinkable thing to do to a Windows user.

    Linux developers seem to want to develop software for other developers. Windows developers develop software for average people. The fragmentation of 1000s of Linux distros, each with their own quirks only make matters worse by further complicating where and how to get help.



  • I’ve been using Linux for so long that it’s hard for me to give an approximation of what a new user might find challenging

    The average person would fail on step 0 of Installing the OS. In fact 90% of the problem could be attributed to Linux distros not coming preinstalled on PCs sitting in big box stores.

    All of Linux’s success stories for the average user (Android, Steam Deck, Chrome book) have one thing in common. They are low cost, simple, purpose built for very specific tasks with a bunch of exclusive games/software that people want to use. We need to start looking at PCs almost like they are highly moddable game consoles. It should come with the expectation that most users don’t want to leave the comfort of the walled garden.