We can say "It's time, Valve". But, is it Valve Time?

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Noticed a little late, but happy birthday anyway. If you see some rather solemn-looking birds on your doorstep, it's because I'm sending my Sincere Egrets.

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So in a while we'll be able to say goodbye to all of this, and hello to Oblivion.

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Down with Gacha games.

Meanwhile, there's one thing I have been failing to understand for a couple decades now. So, once upon a time, dates were usually written with the month as a word, or an abbreviation. Like, "Oct. 12, 1972" kind of thing. But back when things first started getting computery, there was a shift to doing dates in all numbers so computers would be able to understand them, because computers were stupid like that, and primitive, and stuff. And this influenced even non-computer stuff--even in an analog form you're writing on, there's typically an assumption that you'll do it that way. But this has serious drawbacks--people aren't consistent in how they order year/month/day, different countries have tried to standardize on different orders, and dates done with just the numbers are ambiguous, leading to errors and misunderstanding. At the time, the sacrifice was probably necessary.

But for a long time now it has been perfectly possible for computers to handle things like a date format with a word in it. Like, really no problem. And the result would be more human-readable and less ambiguous. So why do we stick to doing it the stupid way?!

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Maybe I was a bit unspecific here: The 32bit runtimes are there.

The 32bit runtimes are where, exactly? A major part I don't understand is how this is apparently a major burden for Fedora or Ubuntu devs to maintain in existence, but somehow automagical for Flatpaks. Like, do distros use much more primitive compiling techniques for some reason? To put it a different way, no doubt they exist today, but if Fedora and Ubuntu were to stop having them, at what point would Flathub or whoever be saying "man, these things are a pain to maintain, we should drop them"? Why is the effort different, and who in the Flatpak world has the workforce and motivation to put it in if it's being claimed to be too hard for major Linux distributions?

I don't understand how this argument supports your point of view at all. There is nobody to package these applications for any Linux distribution as well if they are closed source. What is the point here?

You don't really need to "package" them if the OS already supports them. But if they're closed, and you do need to package the application (which is what everyone has been talking about up to this point), you legally can't, or at least you can't then distribute it, so that's a problem.

What you seem to be suggesting is that you don't actually need to put the games in Flatpaks, but instead you have various game-running platformish applications which can package the needed stuff and run all the games. That's not as bad, but note that it's not what anyone had suggested. Over and over I was seeing people say put the things in Flatpaks--not, have Heroic or whatever bundle the needed libs. So what I'm seeing here is I've been saying solution X is bad, and you're coming back at me with "You fool! Solution Y is great, what are you talking about?"

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Well then that's really not a solution. So first of all, it involves massive duplication of effort. If every individual app is individually re-doing the work, then the maintenance the Fedora people don't want to do once would have to be done hundreds or thousands of times. That's insanely stupid.

But wait, it gets worse! Much of the point here is precisely about apps, such as old games, that people want to use but which are not maintained and furthermore are not open source. There is nobody to package them, let alone each do all this individual compiling of libraries. And it would probably be illegal for anybody to try. I suppose someone could make a Flatpak for a game without the actual game files, with instructions for people who own the game on how to stick the actual game files into the Flatpak. Sounds like just a marvelous approach! Not.

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I do worry that in much of the world Linux is gaining traction but not in the country of our future overlords.

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True. But this is the actual OS we're talking about here--it hasn't been a mostly-hobbyists project for a long time. People get paid to work on Linux.

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I'm quite suspicious of the new Nexus ownership. But this doesn't appear to be their fault. I'm sure something that is their fault will appear at some point.

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The issue here is not how the 32-bit software is distributed. Sandboxing it or not is irrelevant. The question is, who's going to maintain it? I don't see where Flatpak or any other such approach gives an answer to that question. Flatpaks have to get the libraries somewhere, why are so many people ignoring this?

The bottom line is, there are a lot of people using 32-bit software. Either the 32-bit versions of what that software needs in order to run have to be maintained, or some emulation thing needs to exist that creates the same result with less maintenance overhead. Putting stuff in a Flatpak neither maintains any libraries nor represents emulation. It is not relevant.

The alternative is to just not do it and pretend this is a defensible position. I don't think "but having my OS actually run software is hard and users who insist on it are being unrealistic" is a defensible technical position.

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