It didn't make Linux a huge force in the mobile space. Google made Android huge in the mobile space. The kernel has simply been utilized, with little flowing upstream into it from Android and frequent GPL violations by Chinese ODMs.
It is, otherwise, incompatible with what's commonly referred to as "Linux."
there is nothing Acer or Dell or anybody else can do because win32 is too deeply entrenched and we are nowhere near an heir apparent
Given Microsoft's position in the industry, I think a fair tradeoff would be for MS to spin the Win32 platform and Office into separate companies. Then they could try and go the Apple route exclusively with formerly-Metro, while ensuring that the rest of the industry doesn't suffer for their greed.
Then Microsoft can go balls to the wall full lockdown end-to-end DRM that they've always wanted and never achieved.
It's just not as user-friendly, not as simple to use as say windows 7 that I'm currently running.
I find that a lot of comments like this mistake familiarity with a platform for it being "easy to use."
Linux would be the dominant desktop if they made a well working and competent desktop system where the majority of users would be able to expect it to just work overall - games or not.
AND if it were shipping in volume on PCs, along with the developer of said distro were receiving investments that allowed them to do what Microsoft does and put money into doing such work. Something that's only really begun to happen in the desktop space in the past few years. Prior to that, good luck breaking through Microsoft's lock on the OEMs.
This includes support for proprietary formats
Which ones? Many, even some of Microsoft's own, aren't supported by Windows out of the box.
a consistent UI that doesn't change drastically from one update to the next
Well, Microsoft just lost themselves that one with Windows 8.
an immediate cessation on the open source fanboyism
Hear that? Stop being fans of a social movement! NOW!
I believe several companies avoid the platform because of the expectation that they share their code
That's nice and vague.
All in all linux is not a welcoming platform for those looking to make a buck, which means market forces will NOT be swarming in. Ever.
This is borderline trolling with lots of hearsay, vague suggestions of "hostility," and zero specifics.
. It's good at what it does, small servers, home-brew routers, net-tops too weak to do anything worthwhile on anyway... That sort of thing. Linux does this job well.
It's good for much more than that. Unless you, for some reason, hate it. Then it suddenly becomes worthless except for situations where it's marginalized in favor of whatever other OS you use.
That's OK because hardware manufacturers don't support any distributions now, sometimes withrare exception for RHEL that no one really uses
You must not work in IT. SLES and RHEL are explicitly supported by virtually all of the system OEMs out there. Are you referring exclusively to Desktops?
Because whether the community wishes to accept it or not there is a LARGE amount of "purists" that believe GPL is law and anything that doesn't have the 4 freedoms is poison.
Well, you know. Fuck 'em. Valve is targeting Ubuntu which already includes non-free software in some repos. If they have a problem they can go use gNewSense which won't work with most of their hardware.
Frankly I would be VERY surprised if some of those vocal members of the kernel team didn't just "accidently" make changes that broke Steam every. damned. time.
I would. Such malicious changes would have be very, very deliberate to interfere with a userspace application. And then you'd have to account for the hypocrisy of doing that while not interfering with the use of Linux with other proprietary applications. Not that Steam would need a kernel module or anything, since it's an entirely user-space technology.
That said, given your history of childish, insulting, and hateful rhetoric, posting such baseless attacks against the kernel developers is entirely predictable, coming from you.
So whether one wishes to acknowledge the truth or not
I'm sure the truth lies somewhere, but it certainly does not resemble the picture you paint.
nothing should be allowed to 'contaminate" Linux, especially not DRM which again, like it or not, is EXACTLY what Steam is.
Thankfully, Steam does not integrate into the OS in any real fashion.
the purists simply won't have it, even if it causes Linux to grow.
The purists can cause a fuss, but like any other proprietary application that has appeared for Linux the end result will be nothing since it won't impact them should they choose not to use it.
Right now, just about every distro is free to download and install. No 'keys' and such you gotta enter. For somebody who's used to getting their software for free, why would they pay for a game, especially one that kinda sorta runs more or less ok, but crashes and burns with disturbing regularity?
Nice strawman. Oh and baseless attack on Linux users as a whole.
Let's face it, driver support in Linux is ok for things like word processing, surfing the web, and playing media files. Outrageous frame rates so you get that genuine 'blood in the face' experience? Not happening.
Are you deliberately being full of shit, or only accidentally?
By doing their own distro, Steam gets muscle to twist arms at the hardware shops and instant respectability to help develop the drivers needed for high frame rate games.
How does that give them muscle or respectability? It would be them reinventing the wheel when they could be working on making it work very well on an existing distro.
Linux has had 15 years to get it's own shit together.
Really? Considering that many of those years were when Microsoft was at its peak anti-competitiveness and laying the foundation for its own prosecution?
Nothing was preventing them from making a good player and good software before or after Apple entered the market.
Yes there was. Microsoft. Apple only managed to succeed because they were completely insular and had an existing loyalist userbase that hated Microsoft.
nothing is preventing Linux and the distros from getting their shit together.
Define getting their shit together in a way that doesn't boil down to "do it my way and no other."
This is probably one of the dumber Ask Slashdots I've seen, and for a couple reasons:
- It feeds directly into the flamewar-inciting platform war that seems to dominate discussions these days. Case in point, the iteration of the Apple-fanboy inspired "fragmentation" bullshit. - Valve works on games and a store, not OSes. Maintaining one entirely on the inside is pointless and gains them nothing they can't get by working closely with an existing distro vendor (namely, Canonical.) Hell even Nokia acknowledged that maintaining a core OS entirely inside was silly as the work was already being done, which is one reason they had plans to migrate to MeeGo (thus pushing a ton of core development off on Intel.)
Valve will work with Canonical to make Steam and their own games work well on it. Maybe others in the future, but for now they're going to target the one that's getting the most attention from users and OEMs. Any comments that suggest other distros even matter at this point are either foolish or deliberately inciteful.
Addon developers could always use the Beta, Aurora, or Nightly channels and be months ahead of the curve. I'm guessing that there are a lot who don't and, as a result, don't fix their shit until the newest version hits Release.
Qt isn't that huge a concern for Microsoft. Far more was the fact that no one was really interested in putting out Windows Phone devices, most made a half-hearted effort that was likely the result of legal shenanigans rather than any honest desire to produce a handset.
Nokia didn't get fucked so much as suffer a coup d'etat via their board of directors. It's effectively owned by Microsoft without Microsoft having to spend the money to acquire it (instead, pushing the losses off on the shareholders.) And they did it because they wanted a handset vendor that would go all in on their platform. Nokia was weak at the time, so they managed to run the CEO out and put Elop in place.
And it's a win-win for Microsoft and Elop. If it fails, Microsoft blames Google, buys the patents, rehires Elop, and go full patent troll with Nokia's patents on Google.
Indeed, it can never happen and never will happen. This is true because it has not happened. And nothing will ever make it possible to happen, no matter how hard anyone tries. The fraction will always remain small because it is small and things can never, ever change.
Surface-based radiotelescope on the far side of the moon, in the giant EM shadow the moon makes of our emissions?
I'd much rather see us spend the same money on robotic probes.
For what we've burned a moonbase and even more probes wouldn't be out of the cards. We've chosen not to do one and spend as little as possible on the other.
Like the NOAA? The USGS? Federal funding for NPR/Planned Parenthood? The reason those are targeted, despite being a pittance compared to other things, is purely political. Cutting them will kill extremely useful services while saving precisely shit.
We shouldn't raise taxes, either.
Well that's genius. Even if we had a balanced budget we'd need to raise taxes.
What the hell is raising taxes going to solve?
Paying down the massive debt we've accrued?
They'll spend more and our deficit will only get slightly less bigger than it would have otherwise!
So instead you insist we not raise taxes and... do what, exactly? Nothing? Got it.
Conservatives are currently the ONLY civil libertarians left in government
Conservatives? You need to get specific, as currently the Republican party lays claim to that term and they are ANYTHING but "civil libertarians."
the mass of Democrats voting in lock-step.
Hilarious. The diversity of opinions in the Democratic party is one of the reasons they've had a hard time pushing past Republican stonewalling. If you want lock-step voting, look at the Republican party.
as long as it means less intrusive government
You will not see this from anyone currently in DC.
consider picking for the other offices you vote for the most conservative candidate possible
Again, define "conservative." The most "conservative" candidates today seem to be religious fundamentalists who are all too happy to cater to corporate interests.
for the candidates that at least say they want to reduce the power and scope of the federal government.
They at least "say" that, but then do so by attacking useful bits of the government in favor of the corporations stuffing money in their pockets.
In the even that China reaches a point that we achieved 40 years ago... and that we haven't been able to do again since? No, I will be disappointed in my government insisting we spend more putting bullets in the heads of children, bombs in jungles and scrub hillsides and bailing out incompetent, greedy industries. All the while idiot Republicans scream constantly that we need to cut even more government spending on irrelevant things while not raising taxes to pay for the debts accrued due to shitty spending policies over the last 30 years.
We could be going "Welcome to Armstrong Base!" to the Chinese taikonauts landing on the moon, and for a fraction of what we've spent slaughtering people and covering for the incompetent. Instead we've squandered what we had with only a death toll and debt to show for it.
Please, it's not a bad idea and it's Google's store anyway. Following his thought, anyone who objected could either release without certification or not release in the store at all.
exactly the same rules as Apple so no possibility of an Anti-Trust action cranking up.
Microsoft is still totally dominant in the PC market. The store can still open Microsoft up to anti-trust actions.
Steam on WIndows will be as impotent as Amazon is on iProducts.
Which is bad for everyone but Microsoft, in the long run.
Hopefully this control and greed fueled push to closed platforms will result in some anti-trust actions and some long overdue breakups. I wonder who will be first?
And there's nothing they could possibly add, Microsoft made absolutely sure of that a decade and a half ago.
I'd be OK with Microsoft ditching the OEMs if and only if they spun off Office, Windows 7, Xbox, etc. into separate companies and went exclusively Metro for all of their products. Then we would see how far Microsoft's "innovation" would carry them.
Slashdot Mirror
They did? The reactor cores at Fukushima exploded? The live fuel was exposed directly to the atmosphere and started burning?
It didn't make Linux a huge force in the mobile space. Google made Android huge in the mobile space. The kernel has simply been utilized, with little flowing upstream into it from Android and frequent GPL violations by Chinese ODMs.
It is, otherwise, incompatible with what's commonly referred to as "Linux."
Given Microsoft's position in the industry, I think a fair tradeoff would be for MS to spin the Win32 platform and Office into separate companies. Then they could try and go the Apple route exclusively with formerly-Metro, while ensuring that the rest of the industry doesn't suffer for their greed.
Then Microsoft can go balls to the wall full lockdown end-to-end DRM that they've always wanted and never achieved.
The moment ReactOS becomes anything remotely competitive, Microsoft will unleash their lawyers on it so quick the developers' heads will spin.
It's a Wil Wheaton-ism.
They did. This stream was pure comms and nothing else. I kept the annoying PR stream open in another tab but muted.
I find that a lot of comments like this mistake familiarity with a platform for it being "easy to use."
AND if it were shipping in volume on PCs, along with the developer of said distro were receiving investments that allowed them to do what Microsoft does and put money into doing such work. Something that's only really begun to happen in the desktop space in the past few years. Prior to that, good luck breaking through Microsoft's lock on the OEMs.
Which ones? Many, even some of Microsoft's own, aren't supported by Windows out of the box.
Well, Microsoft just lost themselves that one with Windows 8.
Hear that? Stop being fans of a social movement! NOW!
That's nice and vague.
This is borderline trolling with lots of hearsay, vague suggestions of "hostility," and zero specifics.
It's good for much more than that. Unless you, for some reason, hate it. Then it suddenly becomes worthless except for situations where it's marginalized in favor of whatever other OS you use.
You must not work in IT. SLES and RHEL are explicitly supported by virtually all of the system OEMs out there. Are you referring exclusively to Desktops?
Well, you know. Fuck 'em. Valve is targeting Ubuntu which already includes non-free software in some repos. If they have a problem they can go use gNewSense which won't work with most of their hardware.
I would. Such malicious changes would have be very, very deliberate to interfere with a userspace application. And then you'd have to account for the hypocrisy of doing that while not interfering with the use of Linux with other proprietary applications. Not that Steam would need a kernel module or anything, since it's an entirely user-space technology.
That said, given your history of childish, insulting, and hateful rhetoric, posting such baseless attacks against the kernel developers is entirely predictable, coming from you.
I'm sure the truth lies somewhere, but it certainly does not resemble the picture you paint.
Thankfully, Steam does not integrate into the OS in any real fashion.
The purists can cause a fuss, but like any other proprietary application that has appeared for Linux the end result will be nothing since it won't impact them should they choose not to use it.
Nice strawman. Oh and baseless attack on Linux users as a whole.
Let's face it, driver support in Linux is ok for things like word processing, surfing the web, and playing media files. Outrageous frame rates so you get that genuine 'blood in the face' experience? Not happening.
Are you deliberately being full of shit, or only accidentally?
How does that give them muscle or respectability? It would be them reinventing the wheel when they could be working on making it work very well on an existing distro.
Really? Considering that many of those years were when Microsoft was at its peak anti-competitiveness and laying the foundation for its own prosecution?
Yes there was. Microsoft. Apple only managed to succeed because they were completely insular and had an existing loyalist userbase that hated Microsoft.
Define getting their shit together in a way that doesn't boil down to "do it my way and no other."
This is probably one of the dumber Ask Slashdots I've seen, and for a couple reasons:
- It feeds directly into the flamewar-inciting platform war that seems to dominate discussions these days. Case in point, the iteration of the Apple-fanboy inspired "fragmentation" bullshit.
- Valve works on games and a store, not OSes. Maintaining one entirely on the inside is pointless and gains them nothing they can't get by working closely with an existing distro vendor (namely, Canonical.) Hell even Nokia acknowledged that maintaining a core OS entirely inside was silly as the work was already being done, which is one reason they had plans to migrate to MeeGo (thus pushing a ton of core development off on Intel.)
Valve will work with Canonical to make Steam and their own games work well on it. Maybe others in the future, but for now they're going to target the one that's getting the most attention from users and OEMs. Any comments that suggest other distros even matter at this point are either foolish or deliberately inciteful.
Funny, they seem to have fixed it in newer versions of the browser. Don't know when it rolled in, but on Nightly 17 those images work perfectly fine.
Addon developers could always use the Beta, Aurora, or Nightly channels and be months ahead of the curve. I'm guessing that there are a lot who don't and, as a result, don't fix their shit until the newest version hits Release.
Qt isn't that huge a concern for Microsoft. Far more was the fact that no one was really interested in putting out Windows Phone devices, most made a half-hearted effort that was likely the result of legal shenanigans rather than any honest desire to produce a handset.
Nokia didn't get fucked so much as suffer a coup d'etat via their board of directors. It's effectively owned by Microsoft without Microsoft having to spend the money to acquire it (instead, pushing the losses off on the shareholders.) And they did it because they wanted a handset vendor that would go all in on their platform. Nokia was weak at the time, so they managed to run the CEO out and put Elop in place.
And it's a win-win for Microsoft and Elop. If it fails, Microsoft blames Google, buys the patents, rehires Elop, and go full patent troll with Nokia's patents on Google.
Indeed, it can never happen and never will happen. This is true because it has not happened. And nothing will ever make it possible to happen, no matter how hard anyone tries. The fraction will always remain small because it is small and things can never, ever change.
Therefore, just continue using Windows.
Says who? That good 'ol authoritarian mindset poking through again.
Guess which one is a monopoly with a legacy that its creator is having a hard time breaking with?
Surface-based radiotelescope on the far side of the moon, in the giant EM shadow the moon makes of our emissions?
For what we've burned a moonbase and even more probes wouldn't be out of the cards. We've chosen not to do one and spend as little as possible on the other.
I thought my point was quite salient. How is that not what has happened during and after the Apollo program, and particularly in the last decade?
Am I supposed to have sympathy or respect for the modern Republican party? Why?
Like the NOAA? The USGS? Federal funding for NPR/Planned Parenthood? The reason those are targeted, despite being a pittance compared to other things, is purely political. Cutting them will kill extremely useful services while saving precisely shit.
Well that's genius. Even if we had a balanced budget we'd need to raise taxes.
Paying down the massive debt we've accrued?
So instead you insist we not raise taxes and... do what, exactly? Nothing? Got it.
Conservatives? You need to get specific, as currently the Republican party lays claim to that term and they are ANYTHING but "civil libertarians."
Hilarious. The diversity of opinions in the Democratic party is one of the reasons they've had a hard time pushing past Republican stonewalling. If you want lock-step voting, look at the Republican party.
You will not see this from anyone currently in DC.
Again, define "conservative." The most "conservative" candidates today seem to be religious fundamentalists who are all too happy to cater to corporate interests.
They at least "say" that, but then do so by attacking useful bits of the government in favor of the corporations stuffing money in their pockets.
In the even that China reaches a point that we achieved 40 years ago... and that we haven't been able to do again since? No, I will be disappointed in my government insisting we spend more putting bullets in the heads of children, bombs in jungles and scrub hillsides and bailing out incompetent, greedy industries. All the while idiot Republicans scream constantly that we need to cut even more government spending on irrelevant things while not raising taxes to pay for the debts accrued due to shitty spending policies over the last 30 years.
We could be going "Welcome to Armstrong Base!" to the Chinese taikonauts landing on the moon, and for a fraction of what we've spent slaughtering people and covering for the incompetent. Instead we've squandered what we had with only a death toll and debt to show for it.
Please, it's not a bad idea and it's Google's store anyway. Following his thought, anyone who objected could either release without certification or not release in the store at all.
Microsoft is still totally dominant in the PC market. The store can still open Microsoft up to anti-trust actions.
Which is bad for everyone but Microsoft, in the long run.
Hopefully this control and greed fueled push to closed platforms will result in some anti-trust actions and some long overdue breakups. I wonder who will be first?
And there's nothing they could possibly add, Microsoft made absolutely sure of that a decade and a half ago.
I'd be OK with Microsoft ditching the OEMs if and only if they spun off Office, Windows 7, Xbox, etc. into separate companies and went exclusively Metro for all of their products. Then we would see how far Microsoft's "innovation" would carry them.