On my todo list to play that one eventually.

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So many companies out there now directly supporting Blender with substantial money and offerings of code to help Blender take advantage of CPUs and GPUs.. Intel, Apple, Unity, NVIDIA, AMD, Epic, Facebook, AWS, Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Valve, Activision.. I had a ZBrush user complaining to me the other day about how Blender gets 'the first class treatment' in Unreal Engine with tight integration and support, and ZBrush seems like a second class citizen by comparison.

There can be no doubt now, that the industry considers Blender an 'industry standard tool'.

Once Intel get their OneAPI support into Blender, will pretty much be able to use Blender on every device and every platform with the best API support available on that platform. HIP for AMD GPUs, Metal for Apple computers, OneAPI for Intel GPUs, CUDA/OptiX for NVIDIA. x86 and ARM support.

3.0 massively boosted the speed of Cycles, in 3.1 there will be additional Cycles features added. Light linking is coming, a long awaited feature, there's already an improvement for Cycles for fast refractive caustics in the works that will be likely merged for 3.1.

Eevee improvements on the way too, possibly in 3.2. Total rework of the engine to use Vulkan, allowing for thousands of light sources, screen space global illumination, etc..

Real time compositing support is still coming too.

That's barely scratching the surface of the stuff the Blender team have planned for 3.x, if you want to read about everything they have planned, check out the blog post. [External Link]

It's very quickly becoming harder and harder for a company like Autodesk or Disney or Maxon to justify their licensing costs for their software/render engines. Not when there's a very well supported, powerful, open source, free, easy to use alternative spreading throughout the whole industry, and most likely what all your new junior CG artists already know how to use and started with.

Going to be very interesting to see how those companies respond in a time when there's more pressure on their business model than ever. Will they step up or just step out?

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I wonder if this means we might also be close to a "Proton 7.0".

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Quoting: elmapulthis ad looks a bit too corporated if you ask me...
i dont know if that is a good thing or bad thing.

It's a great thing, it's a sign of how professional and high quality the Blender project has become. =D
It's exactly the kind of thing which would give studios faith to make the leap to transition to Blender away from other software.

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That feeling when the software you use is getting better at it's job faster than you are at yours.. Oi...
Seriously though, just look at that features showrool? Damn that was slick, it feels like something from a big corp for a very expensive product. The level of polish the Blender Foundation put into everything these days, their devs, designers, writers, etc, is just outstanding.

A true showcase for not only how good open source software can be but also how to successful manage every part of it.

Someone get that nail an xray, because Liam just smacked it pretty hard on the head.

Blender 3.1 is planned to have quite a lot of excellent new features as well. And work has begun on a major rewrite for Eevee, that should add an impressive new feature set and great performance optimisations. For 2D, 3D, Real time and Offline rendering, Blender is going to be on top of the whole industry by the end of this year. Simply unstoppable.

Blender is OP!

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Encouraging to hear they feel motivated to improve things for gaming.

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Quoting: NociferJust a lucky guess here, but you sound like a web designer or at least an experienced UX guy. Kudos to you, we desperately need more UX guys in the open source part of the world.

Correct, graphic designer / web developer mainly in my work. =)

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These are exactly the kinds of positive UX changes we need more of in the world of Linux and which I am glad to see the Linus Linux Challenge has resulted in.

As a rule, any time a user asks a piece of software to do anything, whether it be simply starting or closing the application, or asking it to perform any kind of task, there should be clear communication of the outcome.

For example, an action that refreshes a view in a user interface:
- If the action was successful (refreshing a view), hint at that visually by flashing the display area.
- If the action was unsuccessful, present a message box with a description of exactly what went wrong.
- If the action takes longer than 400ms [External Link], present a loading indicator on the view.

The number one thing that causes UX problems, is 'lack of communication'. If you don't know what's happening, or what went wrong, trying to fix the problem is that much harder.

A simple thing like an error message saying "Error: This action cannot be completed as it would remove the following software which is critical to the system's operation:", does not take that much effort for a developer to implement, but makes a massive positive difference for users.

New users aren't 'idiots' (necessarily, I mean in some cases..), they are just new. It's not their fault if they are left confused because the software didn't fully explain itself.

This should be a minimum UX standard that should be implemented across all DEs for all 'failable' actions.

Kudos to the distros for taking onboard the feedback of the Linux Challenge and making great changes as a result. Hopefully we see more of this.

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OP Games supports OP software.

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It's easy to be disappointed by the first episode of this series and view it as a disaster.

But I don't feel that way about it.

In software, when a bug is encountered, what do the developers ask for when you report the bug?

"Send us a log file."

What Linus created, was a log file of a bug. Not a regular software bug, but a "UX bug".

And look, a positive change has already resulted which will benefit future new users of Pop!_OS. Other distros would be smart to also notice this issue and address it as well, so they don't fall victim to the same issue.

One thing System76 has now done to prevent such almighty breakage in future, is to patch APT (the package manager), in Pop to prevent users being able to see the "Yes, do as I say!" prompt by default. Unless, they add a special file to actually enable it. On top of that, another System76 developer Jacob Kauffmann mentioned on GitHub their plans to "make further improvements" to the Pop!_Shop GUI so that "users don't have to fall back to the terminal in the first place". Sounds like lessons learned, and hopefully smooth sailing for users in future.

As for 'blame'. In general, when it comes to UX, my rule is:

"If the user doesn't believe they did anything wrong, then the UX is to blame."

In general, it should simply not be that easy for a new user to brick an install like that. The fact Linus was able to stumble in just 15 minutes into a sequence of events that ended with basically uninstalling his DE, is in my opinion, a UX design failing.

It's easy to say, "But the warning was right there on screen".. Yeah sure, it was, hidden amongst a bunch of other technical jargon. Who in their right mind would assume installing Steam has the potential to uninstall a DE?

This was a UX issue, and it's being addressed. That's a positive change, I'm glad Linus brought this to the Pop!_OS team's attention so they can address it. Hopefully more positive changes will result from the rest of the series.

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