Sometimes you get care and you learn a year later that you can’t afford it and your life is over.

All I see is that this cycle is more efficient.

No fair! I want my cookie.

I think you have to have a certain status with them. I visited, and my boss got a cookie, but I got nothing.

Lutris is definitely the strongest contender, and is mostly based on the same compatibility technology.

I’ve run Proton without Steam for a few games. You’ve pretty much got the same code that Steam uses and most of their changes make it upstream eventually, so they’re not holding you hostage with being able to run your games. It just might get less convenient. There are other Linux game launchers that have good compatibility.

Steam and the company behind it have done wonders for Linux. They’ve given publishers a reason to care, they are providing strength and resources to fix bugs and libraries they care about, and generally have done very well in sharing their contributions with the community.

I do think this is a valid concern that we need to keep in mind, but I don’t think that we are at risk just yet. Valve is a business but as businesses go, they’re pretty cool.

This here meme’s an antique!

No it’s “noone” very different concept.

This is the hardest line in that entire trilogy. Amazing!

How is that possible? We banned it. We had a whole vote on it any everything.

My wife smuggled me a 6 inch sub in her purse into the local movie theater about five years ago.

This is a surprisingly narrow field view.

I had an internship 15 years ago where I was forced to write C++ with no internet access. I had to use a programming manual and man pages.

Employer: Skills shortage! (At the low wages I’m willing to pay.)

This makes sense. I have a friend from way back in HS who interned there while he was working on his degree who said that cloud services was the priority at the time, and Windows was more just a vehicle that they continued to maintain. That continues to be the approximate temperature of the product and is in line with my expectations.

They don’t care. They just want as much money as they can collect during their brief lives.

I really do care, but I don’t have anything more I can do. I can take individual measures, and I can vote, but by and large fellow citizens clearly expressed that they don’t value this.

I could imagine a future where Windows is just a proprietary DE over a Linux system. I don’t think it’s coming anytime soon because of the development cost it would impose, but I don’t see why they would go to such efforts maintaining a system they could get for free if the desktop user base keeps shrinking. They’re just too greedy not to do that. Even the backwards compatibility with Windows software is becoming a solved problem.

Aside from my above rant, the PC is definitely fast becoming an enthusiast/business platform. I opened a retirement account the other day through my smart phone!

Precisely. Windows is a side project for Microsoft now.

An iPhone 12, which I think is 5 years old at this point.

Can’t remember the last time it took my phone more than a minute to start. I would say typical for me is closer to about 20 seconds.