To be fair, I think people looked at the folks who were into mermaids as outlandish too. “Been around for a long time” doesn’t mean the same thing as “totally accepted socially”.

These things have a lagging indicator. You don’t see these feelings increase when the problems happen - you see them when people lose faith that they’re temporary.

This works. I ran a linux distro in off hours on my work laptop for years this way.

Yeah, but most of those layoffs have been in traditional studios making traditional pay games, not GAS studios.

Two reasons:

First, rather than just overseeing the most profitable game in the world, Sweeney tied his leadership at Epic to picking fights with Apple and Steam to try to muscle his way into a broader industry position. With how broken and barely functional the EGS is, it’s incredibly obvious there is no way he can muster a team to do ANYTHING like Proton, so his solution is to go full throttle into pretending Windows is fine and not a dependency with existential risk.

Second, the bread and butter of EGS is Fortnite, and the developers at Epic are apparently completely unable to engineer any kind of effective anti-cheat which doesn’t involve kernel level access. It is actually easier to save face by pretending the entire Linux ecosystem doesn’t matter than to officially support Linux and then have to explain why Fortnite isn’t available.

The ironic thing is, if he’d put the money the company wasted on exclusives and free giveaways into actual development, they could EASILY have solved all of these problems. It is fascinating, however, to watch Fortnite players dump literal billions of dollars into the company each year, just to watch it get flushed away into absolutely nothing.

Tim Sweeney (crying): “There’s no future in Linux gaming. No! Stop it! Stop enjoying the good thing that isn’t from me!!!”

My Nvidia card won’t properly resume the display after suspend with the default suspend script, but if I correct the script file, every time aptitude updates the nvidia drivers, it restores the bad version of the configuration file. If you set the file immutable with chattr, aptitude throws a fit and goes into a broken state when it can’t overwrite the file on a driver update.

So I keep a good copy of the script file in the directory, and in my pre-suspend script file I overwrite the main suspend script with the good version. Every single time.

Red Star OS!

Possibly. But it’s also pretty common in many instances of technology adoption that as more users come, the quality gets worse, and while open source doesn’t have to worry about a shareholder-driven profit motive driving it, it’s still easy to wind up with a muddled focus. I wouldn’t expect that Linux and all of the associated software projects that make the functional desktop are going to be an exception overall. If you’re an open source developer working on a project now, basically any user is some form of power user, and it’s easier to find consensus of what to prioritize on a project not only because Linux users tend to be better about understanding how their software works and are actually helpful in further development, they’re also likely to direct development towards features that make software more open, compatible, and useful.

Now fast forward to a future where Linux is the majority desktop OS, those power users are maybe 5% of the software’s user base, and every major project’s forum is inundated with thousands of users screaming about how hard the software is to use and, when bug reports and feature requests are actually coherent, they mostly boil down to demands for simpler, easier to understand UIs. I can easily imagine the noise alone could lead to an exodus of frustrated developers.

Some things are better for NOT trying to be the answer for everyone.