I work in tech for a large financial company (not JP Morgan) and they’ve invested heavily in AI and expect a return. But it’s a multi-pronged approach. More offshoring. Transitioning from internally maintained platforms to external SaaS solutions. More aggressively performance managing staff out of the company including older workers like myself. Setting expectations for those who will remain that they will be expected to use AI to work much faster with smaller teams.

So AI isn’t the sole cause. But it is accelerating the trends that were already happening.

My boss, who is in the process of managing me out, told me point blank last week that they expect software engineers to use AI to work much faster with less people. That’s “the reality of the situation”.

Mac gaming would have been light years ahead of where we currently are if Apple officially supported Vulkan. I believe early versions of Proton targeted both Linux and MacOS. But Valve walked away after Apple showed little to no interest in working with them.

I haven’t had an account since the Apollo purge but fuck Spez.

They tried various pricing plans although I forget if they experimented with both usage based and capped plans. Anything other than unlimited did not go over well with users. I had no desire to manage a monthly cap since my own daily usage varied so much. People had also become very conditioned to having unlimited search.

To me, if Valve wants Linux multiplayer to have a future, they need to demonstrate that they can develop a good Linux anti-cheat solution.

That’s much easier said than done. But I hope it’s a problem that they’re working on. Otherwise, it’s going to limit the potential of the Steam Deck and other future Valve Linux hardware.

Valve’s faults are very well documented but I don’t understand the ticking time bomb reference at all.

I absolutely appreciate all of Valve’s Linux efforts. Linux wouldn’t be thriving as a gaming platform without them.

Native Linux support was often problematic because too many developers would use a third party to port the game and then fail to maintain it.

I absolutely love the Steam Deck and I’ll easily take the trade offs that Proton gives us. Maybe one day Linux will gain enough market share to justify more first party native support.

Where is that tldr bot when you actually need it?

The original SteamOS was based on Debian. But that’s been unmaintained for years. Don’t use it.

SteamOS 3.5 is currently available for the Steam Deck only and is based on Arch Linux. Valve plans on generally releasing it but they haven’t yet.

The latest Debian or Ubuntu should work fine.