hEy, yOu lEaRnEd A bUzZwOrD aNd rEcEnTlY dIsCoVeReD tHe sHiFt KeY!!! cOnGrAtS!?!

hEy, yOu lEaRnEd A bUzZwOrD aNd rEcEnTlY dIsCoVeReD tHe sHiFt KeY!!! cOnGrAtS!?!

hEy, yOu lEaRnEd A bUzZwOrD aNd rEcEnTlY dIsCoVeReD tHe sHiFt KeY!!! cOnGrAtS!?!

But this issue wasn’t found because of code analysis per se, but because of microbenchmarking.

Oh, we play dumb ad-hominem without any basis in reality?

I can play this too: Was your last school homework hard?

If the vulnerability is in the wild, what other security mechanisms do you have until it’s patched?

The only real downside on the open source side is that the fix is also public, and thus the recipe how to exploit the backdoor.

If there’s a massive CVE on a closed source system, you get a super high-level description of the issue and that’s it.

If there’s one on an open source system, you get ready-made “proof of concepts” on github that any script kiddy can exploit.

And since not every software can be updated instantly, you are left with millions of vulnerable servers/PCs and a lot of happy script kiddies.

See, for example, Log4Shell.

Most people I helped getting Linux to work are actually not techy at all and they haven’t touched the CLI at all so far…

I guess it differs if you use Linux because you are interested in the technology or if you use it because Windows 11 doesn’t run on your PC.

Tbh, I don’t recommend beginners to try out multiple distros in the beginning. Realistically, if you don’t have in depth Linux knowledge already, all you’ll be able to differentiate is the look of the DE and the wallpaper.

I find, too much choice tends to confuse beginners more than it helps them.

So I’d rather recommend something simple like Ubuntu and let them try out the flavours with the different DEs.

Choice is better for later when people actually understand what they are looking for.

I said: Code changes are easy, all the other things in regards to supporting playing on Linux (anticheat, support requests, testing, …) is hard.

You said: But code changes are easy because steam has libraries to unify distribution.

Do you see the problem here?

What are you going to tell me next? That code changes are easy?

Yeah, that’s more due to need than due to technical difficulty.

Even in 2024 it’s still common that you have to print out documents to sign them or tickets for some event or something like that. All these (quite relevant) use cases just don’t work if you don’t have a 2D printer.

As much as I like my 3D printer, and as much as I recommend everyone to have one, is not nearly as necessary.

In regards to how difficult they are to make, consider the price.

2D printers have an advantage due to their much higher sales numbers (economy of scale) and they are subsidized by the manufacturer selling expensive ink. And still, a half-decent inkjet costs €100 or more, and a color laser easily costs €300 or more.

3D printers usually have much lower sales numbers and people usually buy 3rd party filament, so the printer needs to be expensive enough to generate money for the manufacturer. And still you can get a decent Ender 3 for as low as €150.

What’s different? Basically the whole thing.

A 3D printer (talking here about FDM because SLA really shares nothing at all with a 2D printer) is basically a tiny hot glue gun being moved on three axies by stepper motors. Of course, the temperature and extrusion controls are much more accurate than a hot glue gun, but that’s the basic principle. You got a single “printing point” that gets moved around and it only extrudes filament from that single point.

An inkjet printer has one stepper motor that moves the paper and another that moves the print head from left to right. So there too are axies moved on stepper motors. A very simple trait also shared by e.g. CD and disk drives, slot machines, camera lenses and many other things. All these things are as close to a 2D printer as a 3D printer.

The real magic of an inkjet printer is the print head. A print head doesn’t have a single nozzle but an array of many nozzles. This way, a printer cannot only print one dot at a time, but instead a few lines at a time. These nozzles are much tinier that the nozzles on a 3D printer, and they also are much more complicated to operate.

A 3D printer just uses a stepper motor to push filament into the printhead, where it melts and is then pushed out of a hole.

On an inkjet printer, you need to either rapidly boil the ink, so that a single vapor bubble appears that pushes just a tiny drop of ink on the paper, or you have a tiny piezoelectric transducer that creats a vibration that then pushes out ink.

This is orders of magnitude more difficult than a 3D printer, and much tinier. You won’t be DIYing a working 2D printer from scratch, while that isn’t all that hard for a 3D printer. With access to a decent toolshop, you can make all relevant parts of a 3D printer. The same is not true for 2D printers.

To rephrase your question: Why is it that so many people build DIY desktop PCs, but nobody is making a DIY flagship smartphone? What’s the difference?

Basically everything.

And the FOSS system seems to be collapsing right now for the same reason that anarcho-communism only works short-term until someone sees commercial value in it and abuses the system to the limit.

• Big corporations initially providing exceptional services based on FOSS and after a while use their market share to excert undue control about the system (see e.g. RedHat, Ubuntu, Chrome, Android, …)
• Big corporations taking FLOSS, rebranding it and hiding it below their frontend, so that nobody can interact with or directly use the FLOSS part (e.g. iOS, any car manufacturer, …)
• Big and small companies just using GPL (or similar) software and not sharing their modifications when asked (e.g. basically any embedded systems, many Android manufacturers, RedHat, …)
• Big corporations using infrastructure FOSS without giving anything back (e.g. OpenSSL, which before Heartbleed was developed and maintained by a single guy with barely enough funding to stay alive, while it was used by millions of projects with a combined user base of billions of users)

The old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook is everywhere.

And so it’s no surprise that many well-known FOSS developers are advocating for some kind of post-FOSS system that forces commercial users to pay for their usage of the software.

Considering how borderline impossible it is for some software developer to successfully sue a company to comply with GPL, I can’t really see such a post-FOSS system work well.

Python sure has changed since I last used it.

It sucks a lot when people are so deep in their petty trench fights over brands that they think there is only “Me for this, You for that, You simp”.

I don’t care about Epic and neither do I care for Steam. I buy my games where I get them the cheapest: Key resellers. And I don’t care on which online store the cheapest price lands.

If I was still developing games, I’d deploy them on both or on the one who pays me the most for an exclusivity deal.

With that out of the way: I am only explaining simple backgrounds to people interested to listen.

But sadly so many people fight over an online shop as if it was politics.

Do you fight like that for your favourite online retailer? Or your favourite supermarket chain?

What Steam and Epic do is business. They are no charities. They do stuff that makes them money. So any sane user should see it as a business transaction and buy where the price is best for what you get.

There’s a difference though.

If the game doesn’t work for (some or all) Linux users, that’s not a big problem from Epic’s POV. They’ll lose a couple users that wouldn’t have been able to play the game without Linux support anyway.

But if the Anticheat faills on Linux, that is a completely different story. Then cheaters would all dual boot over to Linux to cheat all they want. That’s now a problem for the whole game’s user base and consequently for the publisher as well.

Something as low-level as an Anticheat would have to be rewritten almost from scratch to work on Linux and this one really needs to be tested with every possible permutation of installed relevant software. Because if one combination is found where it doesn’t work, you can be sure that the day after every cheater will be running this config.

(Just to check, do you have a background in game development and/or low-level Windows/Linux programming? I got all of that and I can tell you, nothing that looks easy from the outside is actually easy. I think you are vastly underestimating how much work goes into something until it “just works as expected”)

Companies just because they have money doesn’t mean they know what they are doing. And sometimes even less than random people.

Well, if half a million people are guessing on a choice of two options, some are going to get it right. But that’s not due to the insight of the people, but due to numbers.

Every time someone makes the business argument all I can think of Microsoft flopping with Windows Phone despite all their money. Google failing with Stadia and losing opportunity they had with hangouts to imessage. LG bowing out of smartphones. Blackberry and Nokia too late to enter smartphones despite prior dominance. Epic was so late into trying their hand at digital distribution until 2018 when doing it earlier over the past decade would have made entry easier.

These examples really don’t apply here.

• Windows Phone, Blackberry and Nokia were caught up in a massive market change where they where too little and too late.
• Stadia was a purpously risky gamble to be first at a potential “next big thing” and was scrapped when the global economy crumbled and cloud gaming showed no signs of wide spread adoption. If anything, this is the opposite situation than Epic and Linux.
• Hangouts was renamed and merged with other Google chat apps, but in the end they now have messages, which is the messenger with the highest install count worldwide.
• EGS is still a comparably new thing, considering that Steam is in the market since ~20 years while the EGS is here only ~5 years. They are growing steadily, so this is not an example that we can look at in retrospect, because it’s still unfolding. Also, sure it would have been great if they would have had to run a game distribution platform in 2003, but their money shower didn’t start until Fortnite exploded in 2017. And they pretty much immediately got into the business when they had the money to.

Also, there are some other factors in play that you didn’t consider.

Smartphones exploded between 2007 and 2010. It went from nothing to almost everything in just a few years, and those who got lucky and where ready at the right time managed to take the new market. Windows Mobile proves that it’s not enough to be super early. You need the right timing in both directions.

There is no indication that Linux will have >50% market share among gamers within the next 3 years. Yes, it nudged Linux over the 3% mark but at that rate it’s going to take a long while. Also, contrary to smartphones vs feature phones, the steam deck is an additional gaming PC for on the go. It doesn’t replace desktop gaming.

Also, when it comes to mobile gaming, the Steam Deck is a distant fourth between Android, iOS and the Switch.

And even if you limit the scope to x86 mobile gaming, they are by far not the only competitor. There are lots of others, many of them using Windows, who do the same.

And the biggest edge the Steam Deck is it’s value, because Steam subsidizes the Deck with their Store sales. Most people don’t care whether it runs Linux or not.

Did you read the second line of my post?

The code changes aren’t the issue.

Lone indie devs don’t have to care about giving support to players, testing or cheaters.

So sure, if you completely ignore the difficult/expensive parts, the rest is super easy.

Apparently, their cost calculation is different. Also, Fortnite has about 50x active users compared to Apex Legends. That also changes a lot.

Sweeny said it doesn’t make business sense for them and if it will make sense in the future, they will support Linux.

I’m pretty sure that someone who does know their business figures and frequently has to justify them to shareholders has a better overview about what makes business sense for them than anyone of us.