Well, it's only natural Ubi will want to gauge interest in their own community instead of some other like Steam or, even more randomly, current Linux users. They want to know what their existing userbase thinks of this.

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GOG’s no-DRM policy is nice, but it has nothing to do with Linux or open source.

They started out as an old games store and no-DRM was them trying to stand out and was fitting for their catalogue where publishers wouldn’t be adamant about protecting their investments.

The lines are all blurred now with new games on GOG and old games on Steam and Steam is winning.

But I bet Steam isn’t winning because it has first-class Linux support. In fact, the only reason they do so much for Linux is because they can afford it and someone decided Windows’ monopoly needs to be broken and that is the real reason Valve deserves our (Linux users’) support. For now.

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Valve isn't publicly traded as far as I can tell, so they don't have to chase profits and forecasts at any cost like a lot of the "evil" companies do. That's not to say they won't become evil at some point, people in power and business practices change.

A monopoly is _never_ good, so it's always worth it to have some competition to turn to. Their dominance/monopoly in the Linux space is unfortunately insignificant, though I find it very hard these days to give money to GOG what with their Linux support being the afterthought that it is.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they dropped Linux support entirely now they're "restructuring".

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Nice, that’s my slightly broken entertainment sorted for today.

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Quoting: PhiladelphusHence why eletrical sockets the world over have mechanisms to ensure that you can only plug a device in the correct way, rather than backwards which might fry your device or start a fire*. It sounds like you can still "plug things in backwards" with APT if you really want to, it's just removed the label on the plug telling you that's possible, which should stop a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't think to do it.

*And yes I know North American sockets can technically allow plugs to be flipped either way (because for some devices it doesn't matter), but that's both an exception to the rest of the world, and if the device really should be plugged in only one way there are two different physical mechanisms to enforce that. (Making one prong slightly larger, and using the third grounding prong.)

This is actually wrong. The UK has those huge sockets that can only work one way for electrical reaons (as far as I can tell), but other countries really don't. The US situation you describe is the norm, not the exception. This is alternating current, it'll work both ways because the current changes direction multiple times per second.

In Poland we have these grounded sockets/plugs that actually can be plugged in one way because there's a ground rod in the socket, though that is a limitation of the physical, not electrical, design. In neighbouring European countries they use almost the same plug but without the third rod and with two contacts on opposing sides of the plug and these can be put in every which way.

As for the topic at hand: this change should not have been made. LTT only cares about clicks and advertising revenue and they will do/show anything that will bring those in.

Linux and apt have been fine before they came along and breaking one's system is part of the learning experience and now there will be people who will be denied that.

This is clearly bad PR for Linux, it's enough to read the comments under the video a bit, but ultimately PR is PR. It's not like you can't break Windows by deleting system files. Also, he didn't break his system, he just broke the GUI and his problem was easily fixable by reinstalling the packages.

That said, the wall of text of apt is clearly deficient and should be improved.

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Quoting: rustybroomhandleStill not complete though. They don't say which kernel to test against and which branch of Proton Experimental.

I don’t know you, but demanding much?

In any case, like any of that matters for devs who will be using linux for the first time in their lives.

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I agree with your post, scaine, but you’re reading too much into my words. The winning team is simply the one with the biggest market share, which basically also in this case means you can do “everything” on it, whatever that may mean.

People like being in the majority, it reinforces their life choices and makes them more sure of themselves. It also gives them easy arguments, like I can do that, you can’t do that ergo your thing is shit and mine is awesome. It’s also very easy to manipulate people into feeling bad about their choice with e.g. a meaningless higher number, regardless of the general picture.

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Quoting: MohandevirIt's just sad... Bad timing. The problem is solved, I read? Took what? Couple of hours to get a fix? How much time would have been required, on Windows, to get a fix for a similar issue? Next tuesday patch? Next month? I must admit that I never witnessed a Windows update bricking a PC or generate a BSOD, either... :huh:

But it's Linux, it doesn't have that margin. It must be nothing less than perfect, accross the board, on all distributions simultaneously, to convince mainstream users.

This is something that happens across various industries, not just OSs. I recently had a conversation about this regarding rowboats of all things. Once a company/product is “market leader” in the minds of the people they can do pretty much anything and people just shrug and learn to live with that. Any competitors, however, must constantly be perfect and any slip up is met with ridicule and serves only to reinforce peoples’ conviction it’s futile to struggle against the status quo and keep using the leader’s product. It’s a very curious psychological construct.

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: BielFPs

Quoting: dubigrasuBad timing indeed, sadly what a missed opportunity for Pop!_OS (God!...this name!) to show its value. (as a side note, I felt so vindicated when Linus agreed that it has a "spectacularly stupid name").

I am also one of the people that are bothered with those silly names, "Pop!_OS" and "MariaDB" for example make it looks like those are pet projects made by one person, rather than serious solutions.

How influential is this Linus guy in general (outside US/UK)? I never watched anything from him, but judging by how many people are talking about this video makes me thing that this could unfortunately scary new user out of trying a linux distro (or worse, advocating against it).

The video have 1.1M views and then it was first released on their own paid platform so unable to know how many views it had there.

At least there is one comment thread with over 1024 comments with "wow didn't know linux sucked this hard".

Yeah, there are a lot of comments like that there, as if they only saw that one part of the video. Some are possibly MS employees who work on their image, a lot are undoubtedly people who’d never try Linux anyway because they’re happy to remain on the winning team.

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The failing here I feel was in the Pop Shop (which I dislike, mainly for its handling of updates, but that is neither here nor there). When it failed to install the package, it should have come up with a better message that would indicate the problem (Steam package is broken) and propose to him to file a bug.

As the error was meaningless, he turned to the command line, which was not the thing he should have been encouraged to do.

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