I'm not a fan of the look in Tahoe (especially Apple Music wtf happened there) but most of it I can totally ignore, and don't even notice anymore. Except for the tabs. I have Sequoia and Tahoe machines, and the tabs in Tahoe are so unbelievably bad in comparison. Like this ugly pill shape. I rarely hear this get brought up but they're astonishingly ugly, worse than the previous design in every way.
"locked down" is a vague, moving target. The criticisms of pre-OSX MacOS was that it was an operating system for little babies, and not serious tech enthusiasts and power users. Also they were too expensive, and you can build a PC that is 100000x more powerful for cheaper. This literally hasn't changed.
Are you being sarcastic? This has definitely changed with Apple Silicon.
Looking at hardware value, the M-series are way more competitive than the Intel macs ever were, and if you want to run an LLM locally, they are undefeated.
However, it is quite ironic that while the value of their hardware has sharply increased, their software has become the slop that everyone is complaining about.
I’ve wondered how much money was burned on Tim Sweeneys quixotic quest to re-create the Steam store. I know a lot of people who would religiously download the “free games” but never spent a cent.
The Epic Games store/browser is awful. I have bought one (insanely discounted) game on it and get all the free games, because i like to collect videogames. But i almost never play them, because the application is super slow. Steam has absolutely the best application, then (with a huge enormous gap) comes Gog, Amazon, Xbox, EA, Ubisoft and Epic at the rock bottom. I don't use Blizzards program, so i can't judge on that one.
My favourite thing about GOG is that it uniquely does not demand that you install their software, instead letting you download installers straight from the website.
They're not fake netinstallers either, which doubles as a guarantee that I keep all of my games even if GOG goes bankrupt/bans my account/wipes my library/etc.
Just a note, on Linux at least, if you use the Heroic Launcher, you can get your games from the Epic store without using their awful launcher. You can just run the games through Heroic, which I find less irritating.
> But i almost never play them, because the application is super slow.
And people say C++ is dead and everything must be done in Electron because developers are expensive and computers are cheap.
This here, is the reason performance matters and fast development time is not always the answer if the competition is strong and their product is high quality.
Starting thinking of it as collection licenses to maybe install games, assuming the license is still valid when you finally get around to playing it. And your account is still valid. And the servers are still running. And your operating system will still run it. etc.
Maybe just get off the train. Your numbers add to the awful business model these games are built on.
The majority of games on Gog offer fully offline installers, where the copy you download is enough to run forever (assuming Windows and hardware compatibility, of coruse).
What do you think these game companies should do instead? The license lets you make your own copies on your own devices while preventing stealing by people who might make a copy and then resell, which would absolutely happen if allowed.
You are absolutely right that they are just licenses and there always be a risk i cannot download or play the games anymore because of some decision. In that perspective Gog is absolutely the best. No doubt about that.
> I don't use Blizzards program, so i can't judge on that one.
It’s… fine. Unnecessary, if you ask me, but ok. OTOH, it is on a completely different scale compared to Steam and GOG. I am sure it would be a disaster otherwise, it really is not designed for that.
I think the following is the bare minimum to compete with Steam at this point:
1. Store with discoverability,
2. A functional cart feature at launch
3. A wishlist with notifications for discount
4. Relatively high download speeds (500Mbps at least)
5. Friends list and activity feed
6. Achievements
7. An equivalent to steam input API
8. Regional pricing with robust payment options
9. Development/Beta build distribution as easy as steam.
10. A useful in-game overlay with at least performance metrics. optionally a web browser and notes.
All of the competition has missed either one or more of the features, making them feel like only a cash grab trying to avoid Valve's cut for providing these features.
Those features are important but I think the key things are the actual games and friends. You cannot start with empty catalog and you also cannot start with older games people already own on Steam. You also need friends to be there on day 1 for multiplayer.
I guess everyone gets different value from different features but I for one would not even notice if Steam removed the overlay, achievements, activity feed, input API or beta distribution. It all seems like bloat to me.
Reviews for sure but I think you could drop linux and just add it whenever everything is stable, I don't think Linux is that big of a gaming population( though growing, thanks deck! )
If Epic wasn’t actively hostile toward Linux (to the point of calling Linux cancer) I could be persuaded, but as it is now Steam is basically the only company actually trying to make gaming on Linux a thing. And because of that Steam will always get my money.
I was at EA during peak Origin mania and the defining regret of my career is not having slapped sense into the appropriate people when I had the opportunity to do so.
We really did have a far better shot at it than even most insiders appreciated (to the point rival companies would tell me to my face how confused they were by the apparent failure to execute), however, the core team were more interested in fighting over who would take credit for it when it succeeded than ever ensuring that it would.
Always thought the hate against EA Origin was unwarranted. They 24 hour no questions ask refund policy back in ~2010 that took steam like 5 years to implement themselves.
Outside of being forced to use a game launcher to launch their games, what was the real crime? Not enabling gambling on their platform like steam?
> Outside of being forced to use a game launcher to launch their games, what was the real crime?
To me, this was the crime. Me and my friends played mass effect 3 multiplayer around launch, which was an EA Origin exclusive. It was a total pain! All of us needed to download and install the launcher, then buy & download the game through it. Then add each other as "EA origin friends". The whole process was riddled with bugs at the time - including payment problems and download problems. Origin would crash sometimes. Sometimes we couldn't see each other in multiplayer, and needed to restart origin to fix it. Sometimes another of our friends would join us - and it was always "oh god, what do I have to do to make this work??".
I really love mass effect 3. But the experience was traumatic enough that I never bought or played anything through EA Origin ever since then. The quality of Steam is table stakes now. And there's so many good games coming out that game exclusivity usually isn't enough to get you over that initial hump.
The biggest gripe I have with the origin launcher (and to a lesser extent, the epic launcher) other than "why does it exist at all?" is how laggy all UI actions are. Game developers can render a 3d world at 120+fps. Why on earth does it take multiple seconds for the UI to respond to a button press sometimes? Its completely inexcusable. The blizzard launcher is (IMO) the best launcher by this metric. You can tell competent people made it, because everything responds instantly. (The EA launcher might be good now, I wouldn't know. I mostly only play games that release on steam.)
I bought Battlefield 2 and it's DLC and one of the earlier Dirt games on EA Origin and it was an absolute nightmare. My games and the DLC would constantly not be authed in my account and I still have like dozens of support threads in my old mailbox trying to get things working.
At the same time Steam had polished a lot of the rough edges like this for their catalog and other publishers so there's really no excuse. I've never had to open support tickets with any other storefront because the DLC map pack for a game would stop loading while the base game kept working.
Yes but EA Origin was still very consumer friendly at that time. They were one of the only people offering digital refunds at the time. Being able to refund a game on origin then buying a different one on steam was definitely a peak in consumer gaming (that plus the humble bundle being good added to the feeling).
I agree with you about the consumer friendlyness at the time and honestly it was not bad at first, but the problems they had were way more technical with difficulties in buying and downloading and hell even just friending someone and jumping in. When it first came out I thought it was decent and improving but then it just....stopped. They could have competed with Valve but it really felt like they stopped caring one day
No matter how consumer friendly they were, nobody trusted them in the long term. Buying games on EA Origin meant giving them control over games' sales, and a EA monopoly in digital distribution was a nightmare scenario. Their bad PR at the time simply killed the platform, no matter how good or bad the product itself was at the time.
Everyone that needs to respond to shareholders has tried already, and failed against a privately-owned company.
Gabe Newell is a billionaire and has shown no particular need to enshittify his brand just to extract more profit. May he blessed with health and a long life.
I can't even play the decent free games I got because I can't find them in the UI. It doesn't have sort by rating (or any other popularity metric) so you have to wade through the junk. Imagine paying for that experience...
I wouldn't say it was quixotic. Think about it this way: If fortnite made at it's peak $5.5b, and 2/3rd of that was PC (I have no idea of the ratio, just guessing), Epic would have been paying $1b to Valve in just that one year (3.66* 0.30).
You could spend a lot on developing a store to avoid paying $1b in fees!
Plus, your chance to launch a store is when you have a big product. Valve launched Steam with Half Life 2. It didn't really work that well at first but everyone wanted to play HL2.
It's a noble quest. And realistic; it's almost beyond reason how bad EGS is/was for so long with so much money and "the best people" thrown at it for a decade+.
I've been involved enough with a few (mobile and PC) efforts in this direction, and now believe the US business culture can't create new ones in established markets.
The reason is the highly successful competitor, in that case Steam, inspires a sort of megalomania in those aiming to compete with them, which leads to spectacular self destruction and consumer confusion as stores try to act big long before they are self sustaining.
Also really makes me question your average USA based developer. Making a program and storefront to manage few dozen to few hundred applications can not be that complicated problem. I am not here even talking about scale of Steam libraries that outlier customers have.
There must be some fundamental problem with either developers or management system or both...
my completely uninformed speculation is that they didn't want to just build a clean, simple store that got out of your way, they wanted to throw in some sort of rent extraction or user control at every step.
It's the same issue as games. No one ever says "I bought this game becsuse of its clean UI". Not unless you're a dev doing market studies. But at the same time, a bad UI in many genres can sink a game. So UIs tend to be as minimal as necessary to ship. Even Steam had the same UI for some 15+ years beffoe finally giving it different library views
The minimal here was to take the Unreal Launcher (which was always meh. But devs rarely interact with the launcher) and shove the tab into there. Any problems with that launcher were passed to the EGS, and amplified by being B2C.
If I have to be honest, it's also tribalism. Exclusives are not a new concept even on PC. But the reaction to some EGS exclusives was so extreme. The PR hit didn't do many favors.
> Tim Sweeneys quixotic quest to re-create the Steam store
Building a marketplace or AppStore isn't quixotic - it helps build distribution and gives Epic the power needed to drive studios to the Unreal Engine, though this strategy clearly went to the backburner due to Fortnite and it's entire ecosystem becoming the golden goose.
That said, Epic is also significantly more overstaffed than it's peers.
Ugh this sounds like when I worked at Oracle/OCI. Some environments required a VPN, some a jumpbox, and some required logging into a virtual desktop, and then logging into a jumpbox. Just thinking about it gives me PTSD
All the corporate stuff is behind Okta, so that easy enough.
But all the dev/test systems are a mix of SSO, individual logins, etc. At least they're all behind the same VPN (except when they aren't, but that's less common).
And of course, if you're a cloud engineer (vs "normal" software engineer), you also have to deal with AWS access, which is a whole different can of worms.
And yet, somehow AWS managed to get this right-ish. They evolved, learned by making mistakes, and created de-facto standards (like object storage protocol) on the way, while at the same time supporting decades-old services. And I'm sure they'll withstand the current AI craze.
Allocators like that aren't the default for every process because they have higher startup costs. They are targeted to server workloads where startup cost doesn't matter, but it matters a lot if you're doing crud like starting millions of short-lived processes.
I typically just create a "new" connection in a separate tab when I want to add tunneling.
I put new in quotes because I use another little-known feature, "ControlMaster". Multiplexes multiple connections into one, it makes making " new" sessions instant (can also be configured to persist a bit after disconnecting). Also useful for tab-completing remote paths. It does not prompt for authentication again, though. And it's a bit annoying when the connection hands (can be solved with ssh -o close, IIRC).
> I use another little-known feature, "ControlMaster". Multiplexes multiple connections into one, it makes making " new" sessions instant
Is this what secureCRT used as well? I remember this being all the rage back when I used windows, and it allowed this spawn new session by reusing the main one.
I'm using that as well but had issues with tunneling where it creates the tunnel in the background and terminates and so you might not know the random port it assigned or I couldn't figure out how to un-tunnel it and tunnel again to the same port. Just bypassed the control master then.
Ditch the Aluminium and go with a copper MacBook Pro. Or silver. If you get it with a terabyte of RAM, the silver shell will be a small part of the total costs.
Argentium 960 would most likely be the best alloy for the job, as it’s a good heat conductor and doesn’t tarnish like pure silver.
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