I love SteamOS for gaming and I think going forward that may get more and more adoption, but a lot of day to day apps or dev tools I use either don’t have Linux releases (and can’t be run via wine/Proton). I would love to jump over on host rather than dabbling with it via vms/steamdeck but it’s just not productive enough.

One especially painful thing is when certain libs I’m developing with need different versions of glibc or gtk to the ones installed by default on OS, and then I die inside.

I just wish we could have less ways to do things in Linux.

I get that’s one of the main benefits of the eco system, but it adds too much of a burden on developers and users. A developer can release something for Windows easily, same for Mac, but for Linux is it a flatpak, a deb, snap etc?

Also given how many shells and pluggable infrastructure there is it’s not like troubleshooting on windows or mac, where you can Google something and others will have exact same problem. On Linux some may have same problem but most of the time it’s a slight variation and there are less users in the pool to begin with.

So a lot of stuff is stacked against you, I would love for it to become more mainstream but to do so I feel it needs to be a bit more like android where we just have a singular way to build/install packages, try and get more people onto a common shell/infrastructure so there are more people in same setup to help each other. Even if it’s not technically the best possible setup, if its consistent and easy to build for its going to speed up adoption.

I don’t think it’s realistically possible but it would greatly help adoption from consumers and developers imo.

Most companies can’t even give decent requirements for humans to understand and implement. An AI will just write any old stuff it thinks they want and they won’t have any way to really know if it’s right etc.

They would have more luck trying to create an AI that takes whimsical ideas and turns them into quantified requirements with acceptance criteria. Once they can do that they may stand a chance of replacing developers, but it’s gonna take far more than the simpleton code generators they have at the moment which at best are like bad SO answers you copy and paste then refactor.

This isn’t even factoring in automation testers who are programmers, build engineers, devops etc. Can’t wait for companies to cry even more about cloud costs when some AI is just lobbing everything into lambdas 😂

AI has some useful applications, just most of them are a bit niche and/or have ethical issues so while it’s worth having the tools and functionality to do things, no one can do much with them.

Like for example we pretty much have AIs that could generate really good audio books using your favourite actors voi e likeness, but it’s a legal nightmare, and audio books are a niche already.

In game development being able to use AI for texture generation, rigging, animations are pretty good and can save lots of time, but it comes at the cost of jobs.

Some useful applications for end users are things like noise removal and dynamic audio enhancement AIs which can make your mic not sound like you are talking from a tunnel under a motorway when in meetings, or being able to do basic voice activation of certain tools, even spam filtering.

The whole using AI to sidestep being creative or trying to pretend to collate knowledge in any meaningful way is a bit out of grasp at the moment. Don’t get me wrong it has a good go at it, but it’s not actually intelligent it’s just throwing out lots of nonsense hoping for the best.

Considering it’s technical limitations the game boy had some amazing games. Gargoyles Quest games were amazing

R Type was such a good game

I think it was some asteroid style game in arcade, but first really memorable game was Dizzy 1 on C64. Was a wild time when a couple of quid could get you a magazine, some sweets and a cassette full of indie games and demos.

This is a pretty complex topic, as a quick knee jerk I agree AI art isn’t art in the common sense, but one thing I disagree with is that all art has intent or even needs it.

I don’t think AI art is going to or even tries to replace art as a creative pursuit. If anything it’s more likely to replace certain photography related jobs.

Currently the main use cases are

• Generating stock photos
• Generating texture maps
• Generating concept art

None of these things really care about intent, you could argue concept art does, but a lot of the time it’s just there to set a vibe/direction/theme. All of the above will still replace jobs but not the typical everyday artists jobs, maybe stock or texture photographers though.

I’m not against early access as a whole, if devs want to get player feedback earlier on in the life cycle and players are happy to be pseudo testers then it’s fine.

I get some people would rather wait and buy when it’s finished, and some studiosd/devs would rather bypass EA and just release the game outright, but I feel both paradigms can exist as long as both parties (devs/consumers) continue to benefit.

I think part of the problem is down to how a lot of games come out as “Early Access” which implies it’s more bare bones and will get fleshed out over time.

If a game releases as EA then the expectation is you will get more content until release, if a game just comes out without EA then it’s assumed it has all content and anything new is dlc/mtx/expansions.

I’m not gonna bother addressing Live Service games, wish they would go in the bin with most other MTX.

This tool is great for people who play fullscreen games, but if you play windowed it currently won’t work properly for you (even in windowed mode).

I got it to try and bump my 1440p@60fps to 1440p@120fps without making the GPU want to take off via the frame generation, and unfortunately while it does have a windowed mode that either draws over your window (it’s wonky and slow) or a mode where it just does fullscreen but with black space to pad to your window size, which looks silly.

I like what it does but I have other stuff I want to see on my screen while playing so want to keep my games windowed.

I would also say if you are playing a game that supports dlss/FSR with frame generation, just use that instead as it will use frame buffer data to drive the upscaling/frame generation, which is pretty efficient and the data is already on the gpu. Lossless scaling is basically taking REALLY FAST screenshots of your game and upscaling/frame gen then drawing it over your screen quickly.

• Suikoden 2
• Final Fantasy 7 (original)
• Dark Souls
• Resident Evil 1
• Castlevania SOTN
• D&D Warriors of the Eternal Sun
• Resident Evil 1 Remake (GC)
• Gran Turismo 4
• Road Rash 2
• Oblivion

Big shout out to SFA2, FFT:A/2, BOF series, Roadwarden.

10 feels too little to condense 40 years of games.

It saddens me as Windows 8 was absolutely awful and the first step towards the mess we have now. Windows 10 was better but still inconsistent in loads of areas and still felt faffy to use.

If you ignore the ads and bloat ware in Windows 11 it’s not that much better than 10, the UI feels more consistent but still more painful to use than Windows 7.

We have no “good” versions of Windows to use, they are all bad and getting worse, I would love to jump to Linux but that has its own raft of inconsistencies and issues, just different ones.

I have a steamdeck and it’s a brilliant bit of kit and if the whole Linux eco system had this same sort of cohesion and “out the box” working experience then it would probably be far more adopted.

Your point on stability is great, but for most people I would say they rarely see BSODs, windows is pretty stable too, I think a lot of the reasons that corporate servers use Linux over windows is more to do with licensing and permissions, I have seen plenty of windows server setups which works fine 24/7 so I don’t think windows is any less stable, it’s just more faff to setup things which are based on Linux conventions/features (i.e docker).

If Windows went back to how it was in window ls 7 where it didn’t ram garbage down your throat every update I wouldn’t have any problems with it.

Stuff just works on windows, I have a proxmox box with some Linux vms to run containers and I’ve tried several times over the last 20 years to move to Linux on my main pc but there are just too many faffy bits.

I really dislike what windows has become, it’s bloat ware that’s getting worse and worse, but I begrudgingly use it as I can be productive, the moment I can be as productive in Linux I’m off of windows, but even simple things like drivers are often not as good, lots of commercial software has barebones or no Linux support, there are many different package managers (on one hand great) but some have permission problems due to sandboxing when you need something like your IDE to have access to the dotnet package, also as a developer building apps/libs for Linux is a nightmare.

For example if I make an app for Windows I build a single binary, same for mac os, for Linux it’s the Wild west, varying versions of glibc various versions of gtk and that’s the simpler stuff.

Anyway I REALLY WANT to like Linux and move away from windows to it, but every time I try its hours/days of hoop jumping before I just end up going back to windows and waiting for windows to annoy me so much I try again.

(just to be clear the annoyances I have with windows are it’s constant ad/bloat ware, it’s segregation of settings and duplication of things, it constantly updating and forcing you to turn off all their nonsense AGAIN)

I don’t really see phones as a problem, it’s the rampant social media and ads that are the problem and unfortunately it’s too intertwined with society/technology to undo it at this point.

I think a lot of us are just sick of Windows being eroded into garbage spyware, unless we want to run mac hardware there is no other alternative really.

Linux is really the only alternative, and I would love it to do everything better than the other OS’ rather than being content with it just being good for specific use cases.

Every 5 years or so Windows annoys me so much with its nonsense that I salt the earth and install a Linux distro.

The last time I did this was Ubuntu (tried manjaro or whatever its called before too) and every time I find a problem that requires hours of trawling the Internet just to find I need to basically rebuild/test/maintain my own version of the library/component.

It gets to the point where I can’t really be productive and I begrudgingly go back to windows as it’s less faff and more productive for me. Then the timer starts again for I get too annoyed with windows.

I want to love Linux, but its not as simple as “just using it.” (unless you are using a steam deck, that is brilliant for its use case).

Part of the problem for me I feel is that the Linux eco system is so wide and vast that we don’t have a singular collective agreement on where to share effort to get something as stable and easy to use as Windows etc. From this thread alone people seem to hate Ubuntu, and sur maybe it’s bad, but most non Linux people only know of that Linux distro.

The sheer vastness of the eco system is it’s downfall, if there was 1 main shell everyone got behind and was used by companies and end users then we would have a huge knowledge base of problems and fixes as well as a concerted effort in a shared direction. As it stands at the moment most companies using Linux don’t have a shell layer, then end users are probably all using various different shells and related components etc, so effort and support is not consolidated as everyone is pulling in their own directions.

I get this is one of the things that draws in the current Linux userbase, but for those of us who just want to do same stuff we do on windows/mac we don’t really care about being able to mix and match stuff, we just want to get behind something that gets out of our way and let’s us use the computer, not faff in the infrastructure of the OS.

Same as above, as a kid (80s) games were new and interesting, even shovelware games you would get for free on C64 mags were interesting.

Over the years games have just become more and more streamlined, and action focused, it’s basically like Hollywood now where they just churn out nice looking mediocre films to make money.

The 2nd point though js why I responded as I really agree with the point on something new being what makes games interesting now. They don’t even have to be amazing, just offer a new experience.

For example when Dayz came out, that was a nice breath of fresh air, every time I loaded up the game with friends I never knew what was going to happen. Same sort of thing with Phasmophobia, was genuinely amazing for the first week we played it, just nothing else like it. Now you can’t move for DayZ style games or Phasmo ripoffs.

I am bored of playing the same sort of stuff, like I’m bored watching super hero movies, I want new experiences (VR has some good experiences).