Although it might be more broadly applied to 'computers', Asimov's stories around AI and tangents like robots often have the underlying message that it's not so much the technology, so much as how humans use, react and interpret what it's doing.

I'd wonder how much Valve has agreed to buy other parts and tooling/manfacturing services. Then they could have scenarios where they have a pile of AMD chips and the rest of the parts, but limited or no VRAM/RAM/NAND to complete the systems so they can be sold, or they've spent a pile of money designing and working with a manufacturer to get to the stage where they can start making batches, but can't get the volume to bring in a real benefit.

Being pragmatic, I wonder if Valve benefit from the health of the PC market, whether they'll also put efforts into helping people get more life out of their existing machines, or individuals/businesses refurbishing to sell on the used market with more confidence. There's already an angle for reducing e-waste with the win10 end of life if it can be tied into installing linux.

I wish convenient ideas like that which become memes would die off as I really doubt there's any rhythm at Microsoft that causes it, for example I doubt they have alternating teams for every other version. More to the point, from an outside perspective I don't see any change in direction that would drastically change windows for the better within foreseeable future or the timespan a "windows 12" would release.

> I really doubt there's any rhythm at Microsoft that causes it

Last version was really bad, let's focus on fixing problems on the next ... last version was great, we need new revolutionary features to sell the next one.

That was visible on the older versions of Windows. Win 95 was kinda bad because nothing worked very well, then 98 fixed things, then ME tried to redo everything that still worked badly, what didn't work so they merged everything that worked into 2000. XP both worked badly at the beginning, and well at the end; Vista rebuilt a lot of stuff, and 7 fixed it so it worked.

And then the rhythm completely stopped.

Yeah, I've never really bought that meme. They probably just jumped to 10 because they wanted a bigger number than a competitor, maybe OS X. This is the company that released the first version of windows NT as 3.1 because Netware was at that version at the time and probably called the Xbox 2 the 360 so it had a larger number than Sony.

It's not anything at Microsoft that's doing it, it's just the way people are. Microsoft announces some big, new thing, and everybody hates it. When the next version of Windows comes out, people are used to that new thing, so they don't hate it. The new version has a ton of stuff they hate, but because the last version was sooo bad they ignore it all.

Could be, but I had lots of complaints about Vista, and 7 worked much better for me.

I stuck on 7 for a long time, not because I was waiting for 11, but because I was waiting for some annoyances with 10 to get addressed.

I still would rather have an updated W7 than W10 or W11.

Updated means - security updates, clipboard manager, dism (W7's dism was limited).

Running/renting hardware and connectivity and administrating a service and development are slightly different.

Has anyone produced a proof of concept for such a system, for gaming or otherwise?

Given that a certain amount of windows gamers have been having issues making sure their PCs complied with the config requirements for the latest COD/Battlefield, it would seem an even higher bar for a consumer targeted bit of software that needs to do more to be running securely (or add a different mode to your distro install and reboot to it), alongside the wider variety of distros/configs. Distros advertising themselves for gaming or getting people to migrate from windows are also trying to keep barriers to entry low or to appear simple.

Another aspect to "just work" is it'd be great if component vendors mentioned the state of linux support. For example with motherboards it's expected that there will be windows drivers and tools there for all the functionality, but while the source of software support is different under linux from looking at a random product page it's a big question mark on which one is wise to buy to get the best experience or if full/partial support is available now or soon. Even for Asus gear which I'm aware has efforts going on for linux (or just their laptops? just their ROG branded laptops?) there's precious little mention of it on product pages to confirm the status.

It doesn't help that GPUs have also generally gone up over the past decade because there's more market for them besides gaming, along with how they benefit from being hugely parallel and the larger you can make them the better, and fabrication costs are shooting up. I think there was a GamersNexus video at the launch of one of the previous GPU generations that noted that there was a move from "more for your money" each generation towards "more for more", i.e. keeping the value roughly static and increasing the amount they charged for a more capable product.

I recall reading that a major candidate for any early colony is in lava tubes, dust on the would be one factor, but radiation shielding is another. Either you have to ship materials from Earth and build them, consume whatever is available and useful locally, or make use of whatever Mars-nature provides. If you can get away with lighter materials to build below surface then it seems better compared to more durability/shielding requirements above.

It's good while the software you run on it still supports that OS, for example the big one would be anything build upon Chromium (or electron) framework which deprecated win7 support when Microsoft ended ESU support (EOL +3 years).

Yes, sure. Which is why companies shipping old DOS games make them run in dosbox… Makes total sense. Could it be that windows isn't that compatible?

After all no game from >10 years ago runs any longer.

The downvotes are obviously coming from people who did not try to do as i asked.

The most stable ABI on Linux is the Win32 one, running on WINE.

Spoken like a guy who doesn't use WINE.

and windows can run WSL

So software should be deployed with DOSbox and WINE on Linux on WSL on Windows 7. Got it!

For a while I've been wondering if the push to DX12 or vulkan as the "better" APIs has been a factor in the big engines becoming a near monoculture with games development. Games are very varied in what they require, some push the limits but many releases are more modest yet lots of them are gravitating around full featured leading edge Unreal/Unity. Having a lower barrier to entry for graphics programming that lets them make something that's a closer fit to their requirements.

The other big push would be Epic cutting royalties until you're earning a significant amount, which would encourage studios not to hire or allocating as much resources to in-house.

I don't really think it is related. Graphics aren't really the most difficult part of a modern engine, and there are high quality open-source 3rd party solutions for rendering anyway.

In fact the "engine" part itself is quite small compared to the editor, and the hardest things can be done with third-party solutions, a lot open source: physics, rendering, audio, ECS, controls, asset loading, shader conversion.

The reason people gravitate towards Unity/Unreal is because of the low barrier to entry. This caused the monoculture among hobbyists.

The reason studios are gravitating to those engines is because of there is plenty of cheap labour available.