It’s happening in 24 days: https://steamdb.info/sales/history/

This is great news.

Microsoft has ruined a lot of it’s products with it’s corporate rules placing accountability sinks everywhere so nothing can be examined and improved.

They ruined Windows’ UI by letting designers who didn’t use and didn’t know how to use windows design it.

They ruined Window’s UX by inserting ads and broken AI assistants essentially everywhere.

They ruined Halo (once the 3rd highest earning gaming franchise after both Mario and Legend of Zelda who had decades of games as an earnings head-start) by corroding the studios’ ability to actually produce games.

They ruined Xbox by trying to release to release it’s 3rd iteration (Xbox One) not as a gaming console but as a box for tv apps, then made a cheap underpowered follow-up console (Xbox Series S) that was so underpowered that game developers had to actually ruin their game’s experience just to get the game running on the console to fulfil contractual agreements signed by non-engineers.

They ruined Windows’ program release process by demanding that developers release apps on the windows store using unfinished APIs that didn’t support features that developers needed to make their apps technically feasible, all so they could take a cut of sales on the store (a la apple’s app store), to the point that Valve started seriously funding work to get graphically intensive windows programs (e.g. games) running on Linux.

Bringing unions in might actually reduce some of those accountability sinks that are slowly rotting away microsoft.

They told you to use “ed”

You missed the joke

I really want to switch from VSCode to Helix but not having a file tree is a deal breaker.

Luckily there’s been a lot of work on adding a plugin runtime with one of the proof-of-concept plugins being a file tree. Assuming the plugin runtime comes out this year in a helix release, and adding on a year for the community to settle on the first wave of plugins while giving them time to mature, I can see myself using helix fulltime in 2027 (before Microsoft has enshitified vscode enough to be unpleasant to use).

For a complicated project I get it, github’s PR system is kind of bad (horrible branch based workflow and no stacked diff support resulting in increased churn) compared to the alternatives.

That’s why we have tools like Graphite to add stacked diff support on top of github, and other devs creating new VCSs because git still hasn’t made it’s interactive rebase and merge conflicts easy enough to handle for juniors and it should be simpler.

I’m conflicted by this release.

On one hand it has a common sense feature where the editor shows what changes in a file are already staged which will be good because it’ll help people separate their code changes into different commits for unrelated changes (as opposed to just shoving everything into a single unmanageable tangled commit), but then it’s adding all this ai slop which pushes users to just put all the slop into a single commit anyway.

I really want to switch to helix, but its plugin system is still being developed.

Plugins mean we get a file system tree, LSPs, and integrated version control, the three things that turn an editor into an IDE.

I don’t have the time for a proper reply but just a heads-up about WSL2:

You can set up a dev drive to get around any IO issues by mounting a real storage drive directly into WSL2.

No one is entitled to anything from open-source projects.

I never said anything contrary to this.

but Mac/mac (what is it now?) without hardware or VMware wasn’t fun

Letting MacOS users support MacOS hardware is generally easy when you already have BSD and/or busybox support already.

Windows support should always be seen as charity, not an obligation, for all [open source] projects where it’s not the primary target platform.

Ordinarily I’d agree, except these are GUI Libraries.

The whole point of them is to be a generic interface that prevents you from needing to use the platform specific APIs directly.

If GUI libraries aren’t going to target the most widely used platforms, then why wouldn’t the developer just use the platform specific APIs directly?

Windows XP completely sucked until SP2

The service packs were mainly minor bug fixes, security changes, and support for new hardware. Besides a handful of new settings pages, almost none of the changes were noticed by users.

Also, of the whole windows XP era, SP2 is the one that most users experienced and remember.

, and then it was only “good” because it sucked less than what came before.

Windows XP came after both 2000 and ME. 2000 only focused on businesses and they loved it, and ME only lasted 2 weeks and was recalled, so almost no one had to deal with it. XP came after both good and bad versions of windows and was generally loved.

Windows 7 was only “good” because they undid the worst of the changes in Vista

Actually 7 was good because it continued the changes. Vista was half baked and rushed out due to the failure of the longhorn project. The user facing problems of vista fit into two buckets:

1. New hardware driver model
2. Poor optimisation

The new driver model wasn’t given to hardware teams early enough so almost no hardware worked out of the box with Vista. And the hardware that did, often had stability issues because there wasn’t enough time to test the drivers that they launched with.

Windows 7 used the exact same hardware driver model as Vista. People often thought changes were made to Windows but no, it just the fact that the hardware folks had enough time to sort out their own drivers and test them.

The poor optimisation was a Vista problem however. Vista was pushed out the door generally feature complete, but the devs didn’t have enough time to optimise Vista’s processes. Windows 7’s internals were mostly the same as Vista’s, except that the features were already there, so the devs could just focus on the already existing software.

and 8 sucked more.

8 actually continued the optimisations from 7, but the replaced UI was definitely a major screw up.

The same is largely true of 10, it’s only “good” because it’s less bad than 8.

10 actually continued the optimisations from 8, and the new UI resembling 7’s was a welcome change.

Funnily enough, 11 actually continued some optimisations from 10, but you would never know because there’s so much bloated adware inside it. That’s why people like the “fixed” versions of Windows 11, like the regular version after running open source fix of choice (Win11Debloat, tronscript, etc…), the open source debloated installs (like Tiny11), or the official debloated/debloatable installs (Windows 11 IoT LTSC, Windows 11 Enterprise).

Windows 11 is optimised enough that a bunch of devs enjoy sticking it on ever underpowered and unsupported hardware. Someone ported it back to a 9 year old smartphone (32-bit arm), and recently someone got it running on a smartwatch. Technically, you could run an app in a containerised Windows 11 install on a server and have it take up 290mb storage but I wouldn’t call that a typical windows 11 user experience.

I actively like my hybrid CLI + GUI workflow, and Windows offers a terrible CLI experience.

Windows used to offer a terrible CLI experience.

Now it comes with Windows Terminal and either powershell for a powerful non-posix shell, and WSL2 for whatever posix shell you want (and wslg for launching linux gui apps from said shells).

I highly doubt any script could make Windows usable for me. There’s just far too much I hate about it.

Windows XP and 7 were almost universally praised. They were consistently usable, productive, performant.

Windows 10 was seen as a successor to 7 but was more of a rolling release that saw a gradual transition to a new user interface for system components that was haphazard and lacklustre at first, but slowly improved over time. You can’t really give Windows 10 a specific rating because what Windows 10 was changed over time.

Windows 11 is a case study in what happens when a product is stolen away from a product team and given to a business team with no product team oversight. They started off with a great base, created products they could commodify then bloated the base with those adware / microtransaction filled products.

The good thing is they couldn’t change everything with wreckless abandon, lest they lose their enterprise customers, so every piece of bloat they added can be turned off with a switch somewhere for each enterprise’s sysadmin to find.

The open source fixes mentioned above (Win11Debloat, tronscript, etc…) just run through every switch and turn them off. As soon as Microsoft’s business team adds another “product” to windows 11, the open source community just adds the new switch to the open source fix.

The closest comparison is using the internet without an adblocker vs using the internet with an adblocker.

It’s a night and day difference, and makes the internet actually useful again.

That said, opinions on openSUSE? It’s developed by SUSE employees (good or bad, depending on your perspective), Tunbleweed is arguably the best rolling distro, and the installer is great.

Personally I wouldn’t recommend openSUSE purely because it’s not really intended to be a general purpose OS. It’s for a specialised use case and caters for those users in particular.

Let’s not conflate defending OSs (and their derivatives) with the organisations that produce them.

Ubuntu has always been a great entry for Linux users yet canonical has always had at least one thing going on to infuriate the community (flip-flopping around half-baked DEs and the transitions between them, snaps, etc…)

Arch has always been the most customisable, but the leads have shied away from including a little setup wizard/script to automate what 90% of all users end up installing anyway.

Fedora has always been a great middleground, but on the other hand: Red Hat

Windows and Microsoft are no different. Base install Windows 11 is a 5/10 experience, but with your set-and-forget open source fix of choice (Win11Debloat, tronscript, etc…) becomes a solid 9/10 with next to no effort.

Good.

Too many libraries/frameworks/products don’t factor in accessibility from the start.

Along the same vein, too many open source projects don’t factor in non-“gnu/linux” environments from the start.

It’s a lot harder to tack on after the fact rather than just having it be a part of the base design from the beginning.

Making these front and centre in a survey should be a be a bit of a wakeup for people who don’t consider what doesn’t run on their machines.

The 2/3/4/5-000 series cards use a driver that’s more open than the older cards, so nvidia support tends to be better than it was before.

Flip-flopping in and of itself isn’t bad.

What it is - is a symptom.

A symptom of being an absolute dumbass. Now that is what’s bad.

Huh?

You can be right wing in FOSS networks.

There’s two things you can’t do (at least if you want to keep a community healthy):

1. Break the rules of the network (which are usually things like: don’t spam, don’t scam, “Wheaton’s Law”, etc…).
2. Be so unpleasant to be around that others don’t want to be around you.

There are cases of those who dehumanise others (e.g. racists, anti-trans, literal nazis, etc…) who get banned because they’re doing the two things you can’t do. But in those cases they’re not banned because they’re right wing, they’re banned because those actions break communities, so the community has to ban them to continue existing.

display port cables are cheaper than usb-c cables that support display port

Two things:

1. Learning git reflog will save you from needing to worry about the sudden dread that comes from using reset hard in git.

2. Using an proper git client will save you needing to use reset hard in the first place. I highly recommend the confusingly named: Fork. It’s free the same way that sublime text and winzip are: about once a month it asks for you to buy it but you can click on the “I’m still just trying it out” to keep using it for free.

Colemak DH.

Got proficient with Dvorak two decades ago but it didn’t really give any tangible benefits over qwerty. It’s nice in theory but doesn’t really pan out in practice.

Since I already knew how to touchtype in qwerty, colemak-dh was really easy to learn (as far as new layouts go).

To prevent myself from looking down at my hands while learning, I made this legend, printed it out and hung it just under my display: https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/XWBeyRd

Just as with any layout, if you don’t do explicit training you will hit a natural performance plateau.

I did some colemak dh training here: https://gnusenpai.net/colemakclub/

If you’ve never done type training before, you need to do more than 10 mins a day on a dedicated training app to see any results. I did 15 mins a night while I had dinner cooking. After 3 months I was back to my normal typing speed post-training qwerty typing speed.

Also, if you have the opportunity to get a split keyboard, you can do this neat thing where you can put the brackets along the inner columns of the keyboards, you can see me doing that here: https://configure.zsa.io/moonlander/layouts/Mvngb/latest/1