As someone who bought Half Life 2 when it was released …

I only remember people being excited about Steam, Web stores weren’t a thing back then and they were the future! (It was the following years of audio and ebook stores locking stuff down and evapourating that taught us to hate it).

Game/Audio CD DRM hacking the kernel and breaking/massively slowing down your PC was pretty common back then and Steam’ s DRM didn’t do that.

The HL2 disc installer didn’t require you to install Steam, once installed it asked you to setup Steam and there was a sticker under the DVD with the Steam code for you to enter.

You were then rewarded with a copy of HL2 Deathmatch and Counterstrike Source.

Steam wasn’t always on DRM, back then ADSL/DSL was relatively new and alot of people were still stuck on Dial Up modems.

Steam let you sign in and authorize your games for 30 days at which point you would need to log into Steam again. This was incredibly helpful feature for young me.

Basically Epic like every other publisher has created their own launcher/store.

They aren’t trying to compete on features and instead using profits from their franchise to buy market share (e.g. buying store exclusives).

The tone and strategy often comes off as aggressive and hostile.

For example Valve was concerned Microsoft were going to leverage their store to kill Steam. Valve has invested alot in adding windows operability to Linux and ensuring Linux is a good gaming platform. To them this is the hedge against agressive Microsoft business practices.

The Epic CEO thinks Windows is the only operating system and actively prevents Linux support and revoked Linux support from properties they bought.

As a linux user, Valve will keep getting my money and I literally can’t give it to Epic because they don’t want it.

Wikipedia lists all 12 subs as having Rolls Royce Pressured Water Reactors.

Your PWR reuse idea is is kind of where Rolls Royce is looking to go with Small Modular Reactors (https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx).

I suspect refurbishing decades old PWR reactors would be far more expensive than just building new ones, for example a SpaceX Merlin engine costs $1 million and a Blue Origin BE-4 costs $15 million. Nasa argued it would be ‘cheaper’ to reuse Shuttle components for the Space Launch System (SLS). Refurbishing Shuttle RS-25 engines has cost Nasa $50 million dollars per engine, restarting a production line is costing $100 million for each new RS-25 engine.

Doesn’t the fact you have to use a separate mouse tell you the design is poor?

The better approach would be to detect clicks on the left and right of the trackpad as left/right buttons and support two finger right clicking.

I have had a vareity of HP, Dell, etc… laptops. The trackpads will do gesture stuff but you can clearly feel a left and right button if you push down on the trackpad (e.g. push on left side for left button).

I have a Mac book Pro for work.There is just a lot of random weirdness.

There is no right click, your supposed to do a light two finger touch for right click.If you click too hard it opens the dictionary.

If you plug in a mouse you can get right click, but it isn’t consistent in working.

By default scroll is inverted (up is down, down is up), also windows can have scroll bars but they aren’t clickable, you have to do a scroll gesture.

Almost every Left control + Button action is now Meta key + button. But not everything, its annoyingly inconsistent also new random shortcuts.

For example lock screen isn’t Meta key + l like on Linux or Windows. Its Meta + Shift + Q, shut down is Meta +Left Control + Q.

The keyboard doesn’t match the your countries layout, so keys move around and is missing traditional keys like print screen. To do that you press Meta + Shift + 4 to switch the mouse to a screen cut tool and select the area you cut.

I could go on and on, none of it is obvious and I wouldn’t say any of it is an improvement at best its just different.

@ergoplato I didn’t suggest that.

Personally I don’t think its ego. I think you have two issues.

The first is people go through stages learning DevOps. Stage 1 has people deploy a CI because its cool, they build a few basic pipelines and then 90% of people get bored. The 2nd stage is people start extending those pipelines, it results in really complex pipelines requiring lots of unique changes based on the opinion of the writer. You move to the 3rd stage when your asked to recreate/extend for a new project and realise how specific your solutions are.

Learning how to make minor tweaks and hook in a few key points to get what you want takes years. Without that most packagers will want to make big changes upstream which won’t go down well.

The second issue, I have met quite a few developers who become highly stressed when the build system is doing something they haven’t needed to do or understand.

A really simple example I have a Jenkins function which I tend to slip into release pipelines, it captures the release version and creates a version in Jira.

I normally deploy it first as a test before a few other functions to automate various service management requirements.

Its surprising how many devs will suddenly decide every problem (test failed, code failed review, sharepoint breaks, bad os update, etc…) is due to that function.

For me this little function is a test, if the team don’t care I will work to integrate various bits. If they freak out, I’ll revert decide if it is worth walking them through the process or walk away.

One of the reasons for the #DevOps movement is developers see building and packaging as #notmyjob.

The task would historically fall on the most junior member of the team, who would make a pigs ear out of it due to complete lack of experience.

This is compounded by the issue that most C/C++ build systems don’t really include dependency management.

Linux distributions have all tried to work out those dependency trees but they came up with slightly different solutions. This is why there are a few “root” distributions everything branches from.

That means developers have to learn about a few root distributions to design a deb/rpm/aur package systems to base their release around.

That is a considerable amount of learning in a subject most aren’t interested in.

The real question is why don’t package maintainers upstream a packaging solution?

Engineering is tradeoffs.

A command shell is focused on file operations and starting/stopping applications. So it makes it easy to do those things.

You can use scripting languages (e.g. Node.js/Python) to do everything bash does but they are for general purpose computing and so what and how you perform a task becomes more complicated.

This is why its important to know multiple languages, since each one will make specific tasks easier and a community forms around them as a result.

If I want to mess with the file system/configuration I will use Bash, if I want to build a website I will use Typescript, if I want to train a machine learning model I will use Python, if I am data engineering I will use Java, etc .

You’ve just moved the packaging problem from distributions to app developers.

The reason you have issues is historically app developers weren’t interested in packaging their application so distributions would figure it out.

If app developers want to package deb, rpm, etc… packages it would also solve the problem.

Nice out of date dependencies with those lovely security vulnerabilities!

Just to add.

Look at any hobby in your life and break out the money spent vs the enjoyment you got out of it.

For example the Cinema costs me £10 and a film is 2 hours long, meaning my fun time costs £5 per hour.

A £100 console would have to provide me 20 hours entertainment for it to be comparable to going to the cinema.

These days any PS4 game will have 10-40 hours content, but buying them costs money. Popping on CEX website the most expensive PS4 games are £12. Assuning you only get 10 hours of fun from a game…

The question you should ask yourself is are there 3 games on the PS4 you are interested in playing?

Its a really immature and niave response from Kev. Information is power, he’s chosen to operate without knowledge for internet points.

Meta think there is potential to enlarge their market and make money, Kev’s response won’t impact their business making decisions.

Kev should have gone to the meeting to understand what Meta are planning. That would help him figure out how to deal with Meta entering the space.

I don’t expect he could shape their approach but knowing they want to do X, Y or Z might make certain features/fixes a priority so it doesn’t impact everyone else