I'm terrified to use any of these Windows debloaters or do anything that gets me too far away from the default intended way of how Microsoft wants a Windows install to be because it's always just a matter of time before an update breaks things or you get impossible to diagnose behaviour since you disabled something and a new "feature" was written expecting that something to be there.
Microsoft can barely make Windows function when you're using it as intended. I don't expect them to make it work after I messed with their semi-functioning mess.
Imho it's pretty messed up that their translation tool doesn't actually translate the page and only translates one element. For the most part the site is a lark and the text unimportant. But the banner disclaiming any affiliation with any meme coin really ought to be translated.
God I hope Valve gets serious with Steam OS and it becomes a competitive target for PC games. They're making amazing progress with the Steam Deck, and I'm so ready to be free from Windows.
Is there something wrong with the many distros that make Steam a really easy install, or in the box? I mean Bazzite literally has a FS Steam option in the box for installers that's pretty close to the Steam OS experience with broader hardware support.
I'm trying to word this without sounding dismissive of Bazzite for simply not being from a big company with money to throw around. I'm sure the people making it are doing great work. But I just don't get the feeling it's anywhere near the position it needs to be a "real platform" that could disrupt Windows. It has to be looked at from the perspective of publishers, and whether it's worth their money to target a new platform.
Valve has good, stable funds to pay a team full time to build and support Steam OS which, over a long period of time and with enough user uptake, I think will have better chances of getting publishers on board with ensuring their games work on something that isn't Windows. Hell, they could probably make deals with publishers to say "hey, here's a pile of money to make sure your game works on Steam OS day 1, and put it in all the ads" and get the ball rolling that way.
Gaming is a tough space to crack. I think Valve's money and their history of supporting the most popular gaming platform on PC inspires more trust needed to make their platform a standard target.
The PLATFFORM from a game publisher's perspective is still going to be Steam/Proton on Linux... More likely than not, it's all still mostly going to be Win32/64, but with improved Proton testing/targetting... this will be for SteamOS or Steam on other Linux distros... it's the same.
From your perspective you aren't waiting around for "completion" ... in terms of scope, most of it is built on efforts from Fedora/Redhat with enough customization to make it friendlier to gamers. Linux distros aren't like Windows, they share a lot and are largely interoperable or compatible with a few major camps.
But very little of this affects what will happen with games. Your experience with Steam on pretty much any Linux distro is likely to be as good or better than Steam on SteamOS.
Edit: to clarify, there are differences between Linux distros... but the fact is, that Steam on pretty much any modern/updated distro will be a very similar experience wether it's "SteamOS" or something else that you aren't having to wait around for. For that matter, you can put together a current AMD system with up to a 9070XT and run SteamOS today, the hardware is supported and you don't actually have to wait for it if you don't want to. You may find the experience better with a desktop distro, if you plan on using it more or as much of a desktop as game platform. And more so if you want to run a non-amd GPU.
The core of bazzite has nothing to do with being from a big company or not. The complaint doesn't make much sense given the foundation Bazzite is actually built on is sponsored and developed by Fedora/RHEL.
Maybe I'm downplaying what the Bazzite team is actually doing, but from afar it is Fedora Silverblue with gaming related tweaks out of the box, probably targeting handhelds and common gaming hardware in testing.
The actual issue of adopting a new operating system is already rearing its head on this thread. "What's Bazzite? What's Silverblue? SteamOS, is that linux? Is that different from this other linux?".
There's too many options for someone that wants to sit down and play a game. Unless a major OEM decides to push Linux on their systems, SteamOS is generally the only real competitor in this space due to reputation and control of the PC gaming market. Time in the market, versus timing the market is what comes to mind here.
Paradox-of-choice issues are overblown. Every Linux distro is a repackaging of the same core components and same software. The PC is standardized for the most part, there is not much commodity hardware that lacks support, and the popular hardware that needs particular support (Nvidia drivers) is catered to by any popular distro out there.
Users are mostly afraid of wasting time trying Linux (any Linux) and having to go back to Windows for reason X, Y, or Z that they didn't even know about. For my partner who doesn't game, reason Z is one particular feature of Microsoft Word (the shrinkwrap application, not 365 Copilot App or whatever) that isn't emulated by LibreOffice or Google Docs. For competitive PC gamers, it's kernel anti-cheat. The Linux desktop story in general has been to slowly whittle down these reasons until there really is no good excuse for users not to switch and for vendors not to support the OS, even through compatibility layers.
The problem I have with this approach is that ultimately you're trading one owning company for another, rather than building to a standard that anyone could build around.
Because someday Valve may no longer be privately owned, and we're potentially back where we started. If we support having strong OSS ecosystems around computers we don't have to fight this battle over and over again.
Valve slow-rolling SteamOS and being coy about it ever being released as a "standalone, supported" OS is only because they're a private company and can build for open source ecosystems.
Too bad Proton and Wine are open-source, and they can't really remove them from the ecosystem...
So if your game runs under Wine/Proton today, there's a pretty good chance that game will continue to run years from now. I've had better experience with really old games under Wine than actual Windows for that matter.
SteamOS is actively shipping on consumer hardware today, that's the real major difference here. People who don't even know how to install their own operating system are using it.
There isn't a downside to these other distros like Bazzite.
I was hopeful that they'd finally give us something to make Alfred unnecessary but it's still slow as shit, so I'm still using Alfred.
I essentially use it as an app switcher. Sometimes I'm jumping between 6 different apps across multiple monitors and multiple workspaces on each and it's faster do type the first couple letters of the app I want and hit return than to Cmd+Tab, parse the icons in their unpredictable order (made harder by all icons being squircles now), and tab to which one I want.
But native spotlight is too slow and unpredictable.
I know sometime around Trump's first presidency, in Bill Clinton's Wikipedia entry, under the Impeachment section they added in a picture of Trump and Clinton shaking hands, apropos of nothing in the surrounding text.
> Learn to create a script in Python or similar and put all logic there so you can execute it locally and can port it to the next CI system when a new CTO arrives.
That's a perfectly good several weeks of time un-estimateable busywork I could be getting paid for!
> Second, some of the increased deaths may be due to rising alcohol consumption. According to data from the National Survey of Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), the percentage of people aged 65 or older who consume alcohol each month increased by 16% between 2002 and 2019. From 2002–2003 to 2021–2023, the share of this group who reported binge drinking in the past 30 days rose from 7.3% to 11.4%
I've been hearing nothing but the complete opposite, that people are drinking less than ever
> Americans' drinking habits are shifting amid the medical world’s reappraisal of alcohol’s health effects. After decades of relative steadiness in the proportion of U.S. adults who drink, Gallup has documented three consecutive years of decline in the U.S. drinking rate as research supporting the “no amount of alcohol is safe” message mounts. Compounding the challenge for companies that sell alcohol, drinkers now appear to be dialing back how much they drink, as well.
I suppose so. But the leading line before their 5 points made it sound like they were trying to explain why the fall deaths were increasing regardless of age.
> Why have deaths from falls, on an age-adjusted basis, risen? There are at least five possible reasons.
It's a tricky term, but the definition given towards the top where "age-adjusted" is clickable helps clarify. It's introduced in "But an aging population only partially explains the rise in these deaths. Deaths by falls have risen 2.4-fold on an age-<adjusted basis>. " The <clickable> part in brackets (easy to miss) expands to:
> Age-adjusted data helps to compare health data over time or between groups more fairly by accounting for the age differences in populations. For example, suppose Population A has a higher average age than Population B. In that case, age-adjusting ensures that Population A's naturally higher death rate due to age doesn't skew comparisons of overall health between the two. This measurement makes death statistic comparisons more accurate than crude death rates.
An "age group" might be "45-54" or "85+" but a "population" would be "all age groups in 2000" or "all age groups in 2023". Age-adjusted here means the differences in the number of people in each population (2000 vs 2023) are normalized to each so we can compare the absolute numbers from each age group directly, not the other way around.
There is some immediate follow-up text which helps clarify they do not mean to normalize the age groups themselves together within a single population for comparison:
> While they [population age-adjusted fall deaths] have fallen among younger people and only risen slightly among the middle aged, they have risen substantially within every age bracket of the elderly.
This all gave me flashbacks to stats class, and I now need to go relax :).
Notice the age range is 65 or older. There is a large cohort of Boomers/GenX/Millenial drinkers who are aging up. The overall downtrend is that younger people are not starting to drink. But those who contributed to the initial rise are getting older.
I imagine that would be one positive effect of endless entertainment being ubiquitous- since people can zone out in front of a screen with any entertainment medium of their choosing, they are less likely to opt for alcohol.
Though interestingly, drunk driving fatalities are rising despite lowering alcohol consumption[1], even discounting the pandemic contriting large jumps up. So of the people that do drink, they're more likely to drive after doing so? It seems like an interesting topic to study.
Anecdotally the drinking culture that existed for me in my youth has completely disappeared. House parties, a staple of my college years, are nonexistent. Talking to recent grads from the same school, their social life looks very different.
I think this is connected to social media but in a different way. Young people are very aware that any deviant behavior will be recorded and posted. Also they are deathly afraid of being "cringe."
Talking to some recent grads (last few years) last summer, parties were pretty much confined to frat parties. The school had a very vibrant house party scene circa 2010, but it sounded dead even pre-Covid. The people I talked to were at a music festival, so high cross over with those who would have attended the parties, not those who spent college locked in a dorm. I was very shocked to hear the difference in experience with within a decade.
Affinity supports it. Photoshop supports it. Microsoft Photos supports it. Gimp supports it. Apple has had systemwide support for it since iOS 17+ / macOS 12+, including in Safari and basically any app that uses the system image functions.
Chromium isn't on the bleeding edge here. They actually were when it first came out, but then retreated and waited, and now they're back again.
Half the point of JPEG XL is support for HDR and higher than 8 bits per channel. Most of the apps you listed don’t support that fully, especially iOS, which converts everything to SDR or shows garbage — except for their own proprietary gain map encoding that their camera app produces.
Actually, in my recent vibe coding adventures I tested making a ProRAW converter app that also applied the included gain map to the image and encoded via libjxl on device. Surprisingly, Photos.app was able to display the converted image with HDR, but the HDR tag in the UI is only displayed for images with the proprietary gain map.
There seems to be some support there, though I tested on iOS 26.
That I of course didn't test. Yeah, I'd expect them reencoding images to save on bandwidth, and they're probably doing so naively for JXL (maybe even converting to HEIC).
I mean even Microsoft (that Titan of Lightning-Fast Development) has implemented a JPEG XL add-on, so now that Google's giving up the ghost, i think JPEG XL has a real chance.
It's also an LLM chat UI, I don't know if it's because of my work but it lets me select models from all of the major players (GPT, Claude, Gemini)
https://github.com/copilot
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