Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: Purple Library GuyKind of feels like Mono is a corpse they are graciously allowing the Wine people to bury for them.

That's the strange thing.
Mono is no corpse.
Unity uses it for their game engine.
Android uses it for compatibility.
Basically anyone who isn't Microsoft uses it if they want to participate in the Microsoft dominated dotnet space.

Mm, I was suspicious of that press release, but perhaps not nearly suspicious enough. So if their claim that everyone is/will be using their fork of Mono rather than the main version they're asking WINE to maintain is false, then . . . I dunno. It's not like they can force the WINE people to maintain it, or would have been able to stop them from maintaining a fork if they wanted to. It all seems kind of amicable (assuming the WINE people are even aware this is happening), but at the same time like nothing much is actually going on.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: wytrabbit

Quoting: Purple Library GuyKind of feels like Mono is a corpse they are graciously allowing the Wine people to bury for them.

But... WINE has put a lot of effort over the years into supporting programs for old defunct Windows releases. Microsoft no longer needs it, and they're recommending all new code to use their modern fork, but these are like receiving the exam answers ahead of time. Now WINE no longer needs to guess and reverse engineer Mono related code, saving them time and money.

But Mono was already open source. It started as an open source thing to try to deal with the problem that was MS' .Net, which originated basically as a platform to exclude Linux. So I don't see why WINE would have needed to do any of that. MS are just saying "We have no more use for it, how about you guys maintain it?"

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Kind of feels like Mono is a corpse they are graciously allowing the Wine people to bury for them.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: Purple Library GuyFor me, I feel like there's some kind of discrepancy between how many of these things seem to be selling, and the degree to which they've bumped the Linux percentage on the survey. Like, if they're doing as well as they seem to be, shouldn't the percentage be growing faster than it is?

Nope. It's how percentages work. Remember, this is up against Windows which remains top-dog when it comes to gaming. Steam is growing all the time too, which also means more Windows users on Steam.

Sure, but . . . OK, so as near as I can figure out there are somewhere around 150 million monthly active users on Steam (and growing, maybe more by now).

The Steam Deck shows up in the user survey as about 1%, lifting Linux overall from about 1% to about 2%. So, that would be 1.5 million Steam Decks if all Steam Deck users were "monthly users". OK, not all will be, but you'd think most would because most people who get them seem to like them quite a bit and you're not going to spend hundreds of bucks on the thing only to not game at all. So, the implication of the Survey would be around 2 million sales, or something.

But the impression from all the time high up on the sales charts and other snippets definitely makes me feel like they should have sold several million, like 5 million or something, representing like 2-3% rather than just 1%. So, discrepancy.

This is all very vague because our information on all the sides of the data is pretty bad. So really just an impression. But not an obviously false one.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

For me, I feel like there's some kind of discrepancy between how many of these things seem to be selling, and the degree to which they've bumped the Linux percentage on the survey. Like, if they're doing as well as they seem to be, shouldn't the percentage be growing faster than it is?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: AdutchmanI agree with the last tweet. If you look at Steam from a UX/UI standpoint, it's pretty bad because the core UI has not evolved significantly in years.

Is there something inherently good about changing the core UI?
There are some things I'd like to see . . . for instance, it's basically a lot like a browser but it doesn't have tabs.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

There's something I like about the contrast between the unrelentingly grim tone of the game itself, and a title like "Whiskers of Winter" which cracks me up.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: bonkmaykr

Quoting: soulsource

Quoting: Claude_LibI have Windows on a separate drive for rare occasions when I need it. The only clue two systems have about each other's existence is that Windows messes up the clock because I keep forgetting to set the RealTimeIsUniversal registry key.

This update might break exactly such setups. The list of revoked keys is stored in an EFI variable (-> mainboard memory), and if Windows is unaware that there is a Linux installation, it will happily update that list - making Secure Boot prevent the execution of GRUB versions signed with the now-revoked keys.

I actually remember there being something about this previously around the time Windows 11 first leaked, where there was some concern that Microsoft was going to force OEMs to keep secure boot enabled with no opt-out, and then since the secure boot keys are only their keys by default you don't really have a way to move off of Windows any longer. It didn't end up going that route, or if it ever does, at least not as soon as some of us expected.

Yeah, I remember that worry. I suspect if Linux was only desktop Linux, it might have happened. But Linux on server is too big and essential, a lot of big companies would not have sat still for MS trying to cut them off on that side.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Caldathras

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe movie is not so much a portrayal of the book as a satire of it, poking fun at all the fascism.

Now that you mention it, that's how it feels to me too.

My understanding is that that was what the director was specifically going for.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Caldathras

I have a real sweet spot for Starship Troopers, as one of my favourite sci-fi movies.

Heinlein's original novel is even better.

Far as I can tell, though, the two are in kind of an interesting conversation. 'Cause, like, Starship Troopers is kind of a political thought experiment, taking seriously and conveying quite positively the idea of a very militarist society where only people who step up to do some killing get to vote, and taking for granted the idea that space war is basically perpetual. (In the book it's clear that Earth is not just fighting bugs, but also whoever else is on offer--there's at least one mission where they're running around tac-nuking pink humanoids)

The movie is not so much a portrayal of the book as a satire of it, poking fun at all the fascism.

View this comment - View article - View full comments