Not if your manager doesn't know what you are really capable of and your coworkers keep at about the same pace as you. Manager may get some portion of that productivity, but who says it has to be everything?
This is a big issue that I also thought about. Current crop of AI tools increases capital leverage, but workers are still left with existing tools. Without push-back, employees will get an even a shorter end of the stick than before. That ain't good for society.
Morrowind was my first TES too and I recently tried Daggerfall Unity. In 20 hours, I learned that I don't like shallow vast sea games at all. I don't want to "reolplay" and grind computer generated quests. Even Starfield was better as it at least had modern quest lines, although with awful writing.
Taskbar icons looking off was one of things that I immediately noticed after updating from 7 to 10 and then to 11. However, after I installed StartAllBack and enabled "large icons" setting, the issue went away and I forgot about it for years. Nowadays, when I look at older screenshots of my 10 or 7, I barely notice the difference.
This is why Valve invested so much in Linux. They saw the writing on the wall of Microsoft becoming Apple (but shittier). Now they have an alternative. If Microsoft charges a 30% tax on all Steam transactions and won't let Steam run unless they do that, Valve can heavily push Linux and Steam Machine sales.
At least Microsoft haven't fallen so low as to fail basic design principles like having transparent on top of transparent buttons, having disappearing controls depending on window size (scrollbars), or having corners so rounded that the click to drag mostly being outside the actual window.
The Windows 11 UI is annoying, but at least it doesn't look like a kid's toy.
I'm not sure how they could have failed that if that was never their goal in the first place. The entire point of Proton is that the Win32 API is infinitely more stable and worthwhile to target than anything Linux distros offer, and that the financial incentives aren't there for developers to 5x their platform distribution effort to reach 1% more users. An approach that relies on developers doing that would never work, and fortunately for Valve that isn't their approach.
You're thinking of now. Proton didn't exist yet the first time they tried Steam OS.
To be fair to Valve though, back then, there was a lot of movement in direct ports for Linux games. Humble Bundle (before they were bought) was spending real money on it and companies like Feral sprang up to help with titles like Mordor. It looked like there was going to be some real change.
But for various reasons the momentum waned. One of those reasons might be the existence of Proton itself. Some people were very against it because they thought it might lead to less native ports.
Is that a fair comparison? It seems like people have a compelling reason to use Linux (hardware compatibility, avoiding MS spyware, price, etc). I admit it was before my time, but what was the draw for OS/2? Even it's technical superiority to Windows was gone as soon as NT dropped right?
What's the purpose of a native build if the windows build runs just as good, or even better?
They ensured that the devs need not worry about another build target that requires extensive QA. Maybe in the distant future we will get ubiquitous native builds, but honestly and again, who cares?
Proton and Wine means there is a single target now, instead of the fragmented mess that is Desktop Linux today.
I think only the folder is still named Ubuntu12 or something (like Dota 2's folder is still called Dota 2 Beta), libraries in it surely are more recent than that. And even then, native Linux ports of games don't run that well anyway. Especially older ones, like Tomb Raider 2013, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Alien: Isolaton, those all will run much better over Wine. I kind of expect newer ports to fall apart as well in the future. I was playing Hollow Knight the other day (native port) and it drops FPS quite often on my laptop (hybrid amd+nvidia), while through Wine those drops don't exist almost at all.
kernel32+user32+gdi32+d3d[11|12]+dxgi is a pretty great API abstraction for game development. And unlike Linux desktop APIs the Win32 APIs are actually stable, so those games will also work in 5 years, and most importantly, performance is the same or better than on Windows. It's unlikely that game devs directly targeting Vulkan would do any better, and when using a high level engine, any layering overhead in Proton is negligible anyway. And don't even get me started about the state of audio APIs on Linux ;)
Also don't underestimate the amount of workarounds and tweaks that (most likely) go into Proton for games that make poor system API use. Without Proton those game-specific hacks would need to go into MESA, Wayland, X11 or various system audio libraries. At least Proton is one central place to accumulate all the game-specific warts in some dusty corner of their code base.
TL;DR: just think of Proton as an extremely low level and slim cross-platform API for games (not all that different than SDL), and suddenly it makes a lot of sense. And I bet that in 5..10 years Windows will have regressed so much that it might actually be better to run games through a Proton-like shim even on Windows (assuming Windows hasn't become 'yet another Linux distro' by then anyway) ;)
> run games through a Proton-like shim even on Windows
Already happening, to an extent. Specifically, modern Intel GPUs do not support DirectX 9 in hardware, yet legacy apps run fine. The readme.txt they ship with the drivers contains a paragraph which starts with the following text: “SOFTWARE: dxvk The zlib/libpng License” DXVK is a library which implements Direct3D on top of Vulkan, and an important component of SteamOS.
VS2026 is actually quite decent again (surprising tbh), but the good thing today is that a lot more UI apps support Linux than 20 years ago. E.g. I would just give my artists a Linux desktop running Blender, and generally test on a connected min-spec PC (also for the devs even if they are working on a high-end Windows PC in VStudio). E.g. similar to console-development, the low-end PC is essentially the devkit. Also has the advantage that there will be no performance surprises on release when most gamers try to run the game on their laptop or RTX2060 ;)
One thing I would definitely do is to replace MSVC with Clang, MSVC is just too far behind and it almost looks like MS abandondend it.
29 years is a lot more than the 5.. years time window I'm talking about. 3 decades is basically "I will need an emulator for that" ;)
But I think even a lot of D3D9 games should still work, and that's 2002 stuff. Also try running a 1997 Linux game binary on a modern Linux distro without recompiling, I doubt that's works all that well...
> As long as they depend on Proton, they haven't fully solved their problem.
Maybe not, but they fully solved my problem with games, which was that I could not play on Linux. I started playing again just because of the SteamDeck, I think it's a pretty big achievement :-).
MAME is an emulator running games in fully emulated machines, Proton/Wine is a compatibility layer that runs games natively by the interfaces they expect.
The closest situation would be with comparing Wine running via CPU translation under ARM or RISC-V with how RPCS3 recompiles PowerPC games to native x86 code, but even then the comparison wouldn't be accurate as RPCS3 still does full system emulation whereas Proton/Wine integrates with the underlying OS.
Proton/Wine is closer to Java/JVM than MAME (or any other emulator) and that is when running on a different CPU than x86/x86_64 as on the latter it is just a PE loader with a bunch of DLLs reimplementing various APIs.
Same, but my PC runs on Linux so I don't feel threatened.
I feel like at some point normies may end up just using iPadOS or Android as a "convergent" device: a tablet/phone that they can plug into a docking station and use as a computer.
I am sort of hoping that it will work with something like GrapheneOS, so that I will be able to benefit from it on my phone.
Well, you should feel threatened. Where do you think the push towards TPM and secure boot is heading? Microsoft is insanely envious of how Apple and Google locked down their platforms and have total control over app stores, and that’s what Microsoft wants too. It’s a huge revenue stream they’re leaving on the table. Now that there’s precedent on mobile, they’ll have no problem pushing it through on desktop.
And once all the normies have moved to iPads, there won’t be a big enough market for anyone to manufacture PC hardware for hobbyists anymore.
In general, I don't care so much if Windows or macOS become as locked as Android or iOS, as long as I can install Linux on my hardware.
My point is that many people seem to complain because they want to be root on the Google-certified Android. I disagree with that: Google makes an OS where you cannot be root. If you want an OS where you can be root, you should be able to install another OS on the hardware you bought. Because you should own that hardware. But you don't own Google.
The problem is more that you're forced to use Google's OS. Usually just less convenient, but often in a literal sense too with these government services increasingly requiring attestation.
And also a third party should not be able to inspect my device and discriminate against my owned device. The device should attest its authenticity to me (or my organization that owns it) alone. Arguably, this is a social/political problem more than a technical one, but it tends to have a similar effect by imposing a cost on having control over your own computing (now you need to carry two phones).
Also while you can debate about stuff like Netflix DRM, access to banks and government services is not a privilege, it is a right (for a transaction that isn't otherwise illegal). The counterparty is not subject to freedom of association because in many places it is illegal to have cash transactions over a certain amount, and you can't choose a different government.
Yeah I agree with that as well. Fine if Google wants to lock some stuff on Android, but a bank should not be able to prevent me from using GrapheneOS (or Linux, or whatever I want).
Is that what you are saying or did I misunderstand?
Yeah, but the whole point of Google's locked down system and integrity APIs is to offer a way to subjugate users and transfer power from the users to the providers. Arguably it shouldn't work in an ideal competitive market where most consumers are intelligent, but it is how it is in our world.
Banks, governments, and anything else that's required to participate in society should not depend on proving the loyalty of my device to Google or any other entity that isn't me.
Linux seems to be gaining a lot of traction, both with the fall of windows and gaming being more than feasible.
It makes sense for the tech savvy option to succeed, now that personal computing is disappearing. Average folks won’t use a windows/macbook, they’ll use phones and tablets.
My only concern is ending in a macOS+asahi situation where supporting a single device requires mountains of effort.
Yes, and I also have seen they come back to Windows, when they got into issues sharing software or files with friends, or local goverment requirements, and didn't had a relative to do their IT support for free.
And yet it's undeniable that 2025 had some of the biggest Linux hype in recent times:
- Windows 10 went EOL and triggered a wave of people moving to Linux to escape Windows 11
- DHH's adventures in Linux inspired a lot of people (including some popular coding streamers/YouTubers) to try Linux
- Pewdiepie made multiple videos about switching to Linux and selfhosting
- Bazzite reported serving 1 PB of downloads in one month
- Zorin reported 1M downloads of ZorinOS 18 in one month and crossed the 2M threshold in under 3 months
- I personally recall seeing a number of articles from various media outlets of writers trying Linux and being pretty impressed with how good it was
- And don't forget Valve announced the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, which will both run Linux and have a ton of hype around them
In fact, I think that we will look back in 5 or 10 years and point at 2025 as the turning point for Linux on the desktop.
Where do you think normies that don't live in cities with Apple stores, or with salaries unable to afford Apple tax, get their smartphones and tablets?
I have made zero mentions of Windows tablets, that market died with Windows 8, replaced by 2-1 laptops.
So just don't use windows? The only reason I use android to begin with is because the mobile centric distros I looked into didn't appear to be to the point I would want to daily drive them yet. If and when that changes I'll switch.
The only real issue is sourcing good mobile hardware that isn't locked down. At least for the time being the pixel line satisfies that.
Different people have different levels of what matters. If I didn't read the news, I wouldn't know that my country would search my phone at airport and prosecute for acts it didn't like. Or which countries are safe for get together with family. Or that I may lose the chance to renew my passport in third country and have to urgently renew it, otherwise risking a trip to hostile homeland and potential residency permit issues.
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