woelkchen

woelkchen , 3 days ago

Steam does not have a monopoly by any actual definition of monopoly, though. A) Mobile gaming makes up the most of all video gaming revenue. B) On PC the most revenue is made by games that aren't even on Steam in the first place (Minecraft, Fortnite, Roblox). Steam's 2023 revenue has been estimated to be around 8.6bn USD out of 45bn USD of PC gaming revenue. That's barely a 5th of the market power. By no account this can be actually considered to be a monopoly.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/50-Years-of-Video-Game-Revenue-Dec-30.jpg

woelkchen , 3 days ago

EGS is the Fortnite launcher. Fortnite's player base is insanely huge. Those people have EGS installed, they just choose not to buy anything else on that platform, except maybe V Bucks.

PS: The installed base of the Microsoft Store and Xbox apps are even bigger because Microsoft is allowed to bundle those with Windows.

woelkchen , 4 days ago

I want to approve every update manually.

You can

woelkchen , 5 days ago

Shipping with Windows S. That's Microsoft's version of a Chromebook for some light web browsing for 188 dollars. I wouldn't buy it but this doesn't look like a rip off at this price point.

woelkchen , 5 days ago

Of course that notebook is bad but for the price point of shitty hardware, you get shitty hardware. Apple sells shitty hardware at the cost of premium hardware.

woelkchen , 6 days ago

As long as it stays off the Formula 1 race track!

woelkchen , 5 days ago

LLVM and Clang make massive strides over GCC thanks to its license. If it weren't for many of the infamous "GNU'isms", GCC would have dies years ago.

woelkchen , 5 days ago

If the proprietary extensions don't add significant value, nobody would buy it in the first place.

woelkchen , 5 days ago

He wouldn't mind if children did ...

woelkchen , 5 days ago

People making those comments don't realize that much of the desktop Linux stack is MIT/BSD licensed anyway. It's also not like those "permissive licenses bad" people would delete all such licensed software from their system because the result would be unusable.

woelkchen , 12 days ago

Rule of thumb: if your full license text is longer than your actual source code, you've probably picked the wrong license.

woelkchen , 12 days ago

That is actually a really bad rule, though you probably are only joking.

No, I wasn't.

There are many examples of short, but very valuable code. Just think about anything math or physics related.

A rule of thumb is not a strict law. I never disputed that there are certain edge cases. What has to be considered but is not on the radar of most people: Threshold of originality. A "valuable" 3 LOC bash script is likely not being able to be copyrighted in the first place. In cases where the work is tedious but not creative, the work may also not be able to be copyrighted (depending on jurisdiction). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow whether a certain jurisdiction protects tedious work or not.

woelkchen , 12 days ago

Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind what intel did.

Yeah, duh. Intelligent people read licenses before they pick one.

But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.

That's like signing a contract before reading it and then complaining that it contains provisions that surprise you when they are enacted. I'm baffled on a regular basis by how many people understand FOSS licenses only on the basis for hearsay, for example when people insist that GPLed source code must be made available free of charge for everyone. The GNU project has a FAQ about the GPL that spells it out that this is not the case and yet hardly anyone discussing FOSS licenses has even read the FAQ.

woelkchen , 12 days ago

And if I were to reverse-engineer a binary then I could still add that code to my software.

That's actually an important factor for ancient software whose source code was lost. A developer could, for example, declare all their old Atari 2600 games to be under GPL by just announcing it in their news blog. Collectors could then hunt for the binary files and decompile them. Decompiled software is still a derivative work, so that source code would still be under GPL. Sadly I'm just aware of one case from years ago where I can't even remember the specifics who and which software it was but he was like "I found some floppy disks from the 1980s, I lost the source code but binaries under GPL, so have fun".

woelkchen , 12 days ago

I think you’re ignoring that most people wouldn’t want their code used like that.

That's why you should read and understand a license before choosing it. MIT license is just a couple of lines of easy language, so it's not like you need a degree to understand basic English. Anybody who's surprised by the contents of the MIT license has no sympathy from me. Reading the text requires no more than one minute of time.

woelkchen , 12 days ago

People generally aren’t surprised by the effects of the MIT license, they’re surprised by the behavior of other humans.

Wait, people give other people the right to make proprietary variants of released source code and then are surprised when they exercise that right?

Less permissive licenses protect against that.

No, other licenses don't protect against not understanding which rights are granted. The GPL, for example, allows to make proprietary web services using GPL code and to never release any modifications to that code. Many people were very surprised many years ago that some web-based messenger could use Pidgin's libpurple to connect to ICQ etc. without ever giving anything back.

woelkchen , 11 days ago

LGPL

Depending on the provisions of a console's SDK, that may be not an option because you may be able to deduct some of the SDK's working from the released source code and that may violate the NDA.

woelkchen , 11 days ago

Does absolutely everyone have to consent to having the license changed?

Very minor changes (like fixing typos in comments) aren't copyrightable, so these changes don't require approval. When LibreOffice was relicensed, IIRC they they had some cutoff regarding lines of code.

woelkchen , 11 days ago

Sure but that attitude doesn't help game developers looking to make a living selling console games. Godot with its licensing, helped by Unity messing up big time, is about to become the entry level game engine... The engine universities and self-taught game developers will likely use it as learning tool. Godot got a big influx of donations even though it's under a permissive license. Small indies don't care to modify the core engine anyway. Most GZDoom games on Steam are living proof of that. Game logic in separate scripts isn't covered by the interpreter's license anyway.

woelkchen , 11 days ago

Game engines can't be LGPL because of console SDK NDAs. At best MPL.

woelkchen , 18 days ago

Everybody is using WhatsApp which is available for all platforms. I'm not the biggest fan of that but a user base of literally billions is hard to avoid.

woelkchen , 21 days ago

No, not any longer. In Windows 11 "update and shutdown" includes a reboot in-between and then shuts off. The only way you get this these days is to "update and reboot" and manually shutting off the computer during BIOS initialization.

woelkchen , 21 days ago

Three words: High Dynamic Range.

Works fine on Steam Deck. (The comment you're replied to is about Linux, not a specific DE, so your experience with a specific DE doesn't really count as counter argument about Linux in general.)

And if you have a newer GPU, there’s also AI upscaling, which is great for watching HD and SD content on a 4K display. Pretty sure you can’t do they at all in Linux, at least not in real-time.

That is wrong.

woelkchen , 21 days ago

It’s expected for HDR to mature on Linux later this year.

HDR works on Steam Deck right now. It may take a while until it trickles down to distributions other than SteamOS and not every compositor may support it equally but in general support is there.

woelkchen , 21 days ago (edited 20 days ago)

Most distros don’t use Gamescope.

Well, that's the problem of the person making a general statement about all of Linux and not going into specifics.

woelkchen , 22 days ago

Sure but at Microsoft they fire people based on dice rolls

woelkchen , 22 days ago

According to the screenshot the question is only asked embedded in the start menu. Windows 10 does that all the time without actually asking. Win11 is better at actually keeping the configuration.

woelkchen , 23 days ago

That's so annoying about motorsports in recent years. Commentators are tasked by the race series owners to hype up that BS. Researching the technology is fine. Scientists may find ways to capture carbon at a better rate at acceptable energy cost but shouting that an inefficient combustion engine is somehow better for the environment than EV because "batteries bad, carbon capture great" is just stupid.

woelkchen , 23 days ago

First bundling everything in a tar file just to compress the thing in an individual step is kinda stupid, though. Everything takes much longer because of that. If you don't need to preserve POSIX permissions, tar is pointless anyway.

woelkchen , 23 days ago

Use an archiving format that does both at once then, preserving whatever tar use cases has and compressing. The two steps are stupid, no arguing against that.

woelkchen , 26 days ago

I dislike using a slur for disabled people as the name but it's only partially why I stopped using it. Bad cross-platform support, sticking to ancient GTK versions, GNOME-fication of the upcoming 3.0 version, etc. also pushed me away.

woelkchen , 28 days ago (edited 28 days ago)

Teslas run Linux. Not sure they finally comply with the GPL, though.

woelkchen , 30 days ago

Win11 has excellent WSL support. Way better than Win10.

woelkchen , 1 month ago

Some information in the documents appears to be in conflict with public statements by Google representatives

I would have never guessed that.

woelkchen , 1 month ago

Do you think Valve is going to start deleting accounts over 100 years old?

If Valve actually counted how old my account is, they'd stop asking me how old I am for mature games.

woelkchen , 1 month ago

These days a will should include documentation of logins. No need to bypass Steam DRM when my relatives have my phone's PIN and email credentials to just access all games. Pretty sure my local laws cover digital inheritance.

woelkchen , 1 month ago

They already have a curated data set. It's called Google Scholar.

woelkchen , 1 month ago

Ever since KDE made their software more modular with Plasma 5 / Frameworks 5, a Plasma session can be cut down by a lot. Personally, I don't think it matters much because as soon as you browse the web, the RAM demands of the web browser dwarf that of even a fully decked out desktop anyway, but the options are there – perhaps for certain use cases that don't involve web browsing.

woelkchen , 1 month ago

It’s a shame that male birth control has been so much more difficult to develop

Nah, condoms exist since ages and has many other benefits.

woelkchen , 1 month ago

Let this be a lesson and next time just spend 5 to 10 minutes browsing alternativeto.net or Wikipedia's list of image editors yourself.

woelkchen , 1 month ago

Wikipedia then. Lazy people asking stupid questions instead of googling on their own are even more annoying.

woelkchen , 1 month ago

maybe they want to gauge different opinions and reasoning.

If those people cared to google first, they'd stumble onto existing answers to the same question. Such questions get asked over and over again. Those people would know that if they cared to google first.

if u dont want to answer, ignore the post.

Same applies to answers you don't like: Ignore them, don't whine how toxic people are.

woelkchen , 1 month ago

Cool crime in my book. Fuck Adobe with a pineapple.

Getting people out of the Adobe ecosystem fucks more with Adobe than circumventing cost to get into the ecosystem.

That's why Adobe silently tolerated pupils and students to pirate Photoshop: They knew some of those became paying customers in the future.

woelkchen , 1 month ago

krita ai paint is pretty dope

Oh wow, wasn't aware of that plugin. Looks nifty.

woelkchen , 1 month ago

technology and the opinions around it change, so some new discussions should be started regularly, if just to prevent information from stagnating.

Not that often, no. This is among the questions that get asked all the time. It amounts to spamming. We're not talking here about a question that was last asked 10 years ago and is now massively out of date.

People make regularly updated lists of possible alternatives to various applications. Finding them is a matter of firing up the search engine of choice and just entering the search terms.

Also: That question literally gave no context at all. Something along the lines of "My circumstances are XY and Gimp is not suitable because of YZ" is missing completely. I got a proper answer by asking Microsoft Copilot "What are alternatives to GIMP? I'm looking for an option that I can use with Debian 12. An open source application is preferred but not mandatory." and got a proper list of open source and web-based solutions that includes Krita, Photopea, Pixlr, and Pinta.

My mom is approaching 80 years old and can do better web searches than the person from the screenshot.

woelkchen , 1 month ago

It also took lethargic European car makers who rather lobby for combustion engine cars than go with the times

woelkchen , 1 month ago

So you were fine with Brave before when they scammed others?

Brave has always been despicable.

woelkchen , 1 month ago

Rapid deployment and iteration belongs on race tracks, not the public road.