Pace makers keep you from dying so they’re sort of on a different level of need. Also, if corps did planned obsolescence on one, you’re probably not around to buy another.

If they were invented today, they would definitely have a predatory subscription model for “monitoring” your heart, or require occasional maintenance at cost to the end user.

The prequels were redeemed? That’s news to me.

I’m with you on 1 and 2, but “reduced lingual skills” I think is a bit of a stretch. Becoming fluent in another language takes a lot of effort and people only do it if they have a good long term reason.

I think it’s more likely this would cover the vacation / short term business case that is already covered by human interpreters (or apps already) instead.

Yeah, I was part of those arguments too. In a perfect world Linux would have enough market share to warrant native ports, but Proton getting Wine one-click integrated into Steam and easily targetable is a more realistic bridge to that scenario than holding out on principle. As it is Linux gaming is in the best shape it’s ever been in thanks to Proton.

I also think the argument held more weight 20 years ago, before we started packaging up end user apps in giant self-contained images regularly.

This is a non-issue. If you’re a gaming company in the era of Proton, it makes more sense to just focus on Windows issues than to open yourself to support requests from people running any brand of Linux. Proton is just so much easier to target than standalone Linux and you can serve the Linux community / Steam Deck users without needing any actual expertise.

I agree. I have become more amenable to things like Flatpak or Podman/Docker to keep the base system from being cluttered up with weird dependencies, but for the most part it doesn’t seem like there’s a huge upside to going full atomic if you’re already comfortable.

GNOME 3 introduced the current shell paradigm where you don’t really have a start menu but a variety of searches, integrated indicators, per-app desktops with a dock etc.

Before, it was far more conventional experience like Plasma/Windows/Cinnamon are now. GNOME 2 was forked to be the MATE desktop if you want to check it out.

John Carmack, author of the Doom engine, is a long time Linux user and for a while the policy was to open source the idTech engines once they had moved on.

However, Doom was hugely popular on its own before this, and was actually more pivotal for making Windows a gaming platform (over DOS).

The reason it runs everywhere is a combination of it’s huge popularity, it’s (now) open source and it’s generally low system requirements.