Totally. The more I hear Hank talk about his philosophy and thought process, the more I realize that even when I don’t agree with his decisions I really respect how he got there (and often I end up coming around to agreeing with them, too). By all accounts they’re both entirely who they seem to be, which is kind, decent, and effective people. Sometimes I wish they were a little bit less pragmatic, but even within that I can’t knock them too much because it’s so hard to argue with results.

No, they’re probably doing it too. They definitely did it in mobile phones, suing Apple for having phone call ringer silencing tech in their phones for instance; I would be surprised if they aren’t doing it in gaming too.

Honestly, if Hank Green turned out to be awful, I would be thrown for a total loop. There are some people whose heel turn didn’t faze me at all, but I’ve followed the Green Brothers for my entire adult life, and if it all turned out to be a long con, I’d be flabbergasted.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m not even saying I disagree, but I don’t think those move the needle on public sentiment like the Sony and Microsoft stuff. “Well, I don’t pirate Switch games, so my console won’t get bricked.” vs “Hey! But I buy physical copies of games!” and “Hey! They’re laying off a bunch of people, and I can imagine how that would feel.”

Honestly, what Sony is doing to capture platform lock-in isn’t substantially different from what Nintendo did. They were just quieter about it, or maybe they phrased the announcement better, or maybe they just get away with it because it’s not as visceral.

I don’t know how big a hit they actually took from that. If you ask the average gamer, I don’t know if they even are aware that it happened. I think the Sony physical media thing and the Microsoft layoffs have broken containment much more than the Palworld thing, though I don’t have any evidence of that.

I mean…on one hand, it’s pretty easy for Steam Valve to be doing well. They’re the only major platform that’s released a new console this year (except for Nintendo), they’re the hardware manufacturer with the biggest recent success (except for Nintendo) in the Steam Deck, and they’re the only major platform without any well-publicized egg on their face (except for Nintendo). It also helps that they basically own the entire PC space outright, where the other platforms are fighting amongst themselves (except for Nintendo).

But that brings up the Italian-plumber-with-a-powerup-that-turns-him-into-an-elephant in the room. Nintendo has been doing really well, too; and while, since the Wii, they’ve largely abandoned the power gamer space to the three players mentioned in this headline, the Switch 2 was a crazy release.

Obviously, Steam has made a lot of great bets that have paid off, they’ve managed to keep up customer goodwill by limiting anti-competitive behavior and focusing on good product and service over vendor lock-in, and they’re clearly the least anti-consumer player in the space right now. But Nintendo’s strategy of “make the games so compelling and polished that people won’t care about the lock-in” is basically the polar opposite, and it’s working too; so I don’t know how well we can draw conclusions about the industry from this.

Ooh, active hostility toward people who might consider switching. Another bold strategy.

MacOS doesn’t.

Anymore.

Windows doesn’t.

Anymore.

The only one that does is Linux, the one that no one in the grand scheme of things wants to use.

So you think making it harder to use is the right path for greater adoption? Bold strategy.

No one […] should want

The moment you’ve written those words, you’ve already lost. Because they obviously do want it, and operating systems have supported it for decades, which means it’s perfectly reasonable for people to expect it to continue.

“Grim” says ye.

“He he hee ha haw ha haaa haaaa heh haa ha ha ha hee haa haaaa haaaaw…!” says I.

I’ve tried that. For me, it’s also about the app ecosystem and the way multitasking is implemented. But also, perching a Bluetooth keyboard on my lap while the tablet was up on top of something else just separated things in a way I couldn’t reconcile in my mind.

Yeah, I had to switch to Fedora because my three monitors with two different scaling factors and three different aspect ratios never played nice with Mint. I recognize that this was a bit excessive, but I’m still glad this is going to be fixed.

How do you write anything long-form on a tablet? You seem to live a different life than me, if you find laptops redundant.

Or that Framework goes out of business.

Even if they do, they use mostly off-the-shelf components, and the designs for the stuff that isn’t are open-sourced. You can still repair them even if Framework doesn’t exist.

The tech debt always gets paid one way or another. Either preemptively, as part of ongoing maintenance; or after a data breach in the subsequent lawsuit and settlement; or in the slow, inexorable trickle of increased infrastructure costs and lost business from slow dependencies and ineffectual bandaid solutions.

It’s just newsworthy when it happens to companies.

and developers

Windows developers largely use Windows Server or Enterprise, neither of which have telemetry, spying, ads, or AI, depending on group policy.

I’m a little confused by the inclusion of .NET. Most Windows developers actively use that.

I wonder if they see the constant, gigantic updates to the framework distributable and think that’s a bad thing somehow.

It’s just like the Nvidia > OpenAI > Oracle triangle, but all on a single balance sheet. Hey, that’s efficiency!

I’ve never run actual Windows 11 before, so I did boot it once out of curiosity. It was actively trying to make me hate it before I ever got to the desktop, so to the bin with it. I still see the OEM Windows license sticker on the back every once in a while and chuckle.