Ars Technica declares SteamOS the victor (plus other 🐧🎮 news)
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Better kernel = better performance I guess?
There's more to it than that, but that's a pretty big factor.
The other two main things:
Windows is full of bloat/malware garbage that spies on you and does shit you don't need, and it gets harder and harder every year to figure out how, or even if you can strip this garbage out...
And all of Windows is a jumbled mess of 30+ years of spaghetti code at this point.
New versions of windows are not like ... ok, we're gonna refactor everything, build it all again from the ground up in a more efficient way.
More like a snowball that rolls through snow and mud and sticks and dead leaves.
Miracle it hasn't collapsed under its own weight at this point, what with so much work being done by temp contractors who have no singular consistent approach to anything, who tend to either not document things at all, or very poorly.
I am forced to work on Windows server and they keep adding an ugly veneer to the legacy UI, its amazing how ugly, cluttered, and lacking basic functionality it is. Something as basic as adding more than 2 DNS servers is impossible without the legacy UI.
Last time I used Windows was 10, and I was able to find 4, 4 different fucking historical UI schemes/frameworks by digging deep enough into arcane settings menus.
I was working at MSFT when 8 released.
Broke every server tool, SQL Manangement Studio, fucking everything, for weeks.
We asked them if there was a way to go back to the 7 UI.
Nope! It's been removed!
... And a few days later, word of mouth and email chains start spreading an arcane series of override procedures to get back to the Win 7 GUI/Desktop, that is almost entirely still there... and after almost a month, our team finally gets the whole process forwarded to us or our team lead unofficially obtained it or something who fucking knows.
So much for 'its been removed'.
After a month of so of that, MSFT realizes that a tablet only interface for desktop PCs is fucking stupid, they make the 7 UI/Desktop into an easier toggle, and kablamo, thats Windows 8.1!
We totally planned this the whole time everyone!
I hate MSFT more than most, because I used to work for them, they're fucking awful.
haha, I was a Windows Kernel dev for Intel. What a shit show. Both companies would fuck each other over. So many times. We would start project, get Microsoft to buy in. Microsoft would pull in a bunch of engineers to support it, 3 months later, we cancel on Microsoft. Or Microsoft does the same thing to us, I get pulled on to a team to support Microsoft, 3 months later, Microsoft cancels. No wonder those two companies are imploding. Good riddence.
Damn, you actually wrote kernel code?
That's some real graybeard, dark wizard shit imo, I am unironically impressed.
I've always been sort of a jack of all trades in my prior corpo work... anything related to a database or data or analytics, backend, frontend, input forms, data analysis/reporting... somehow I always end up doing all of it, because wheeee ever expanding job description!!!
But yeah, that exact corporate nonsense dynamic of how projects are proposed and then we agree, and then we don't agree, and then we do agree but only according to one party and then the project is csncelled, and then its not...
This is fucking everywhere in tech megacorps, both internally within themselves and also with external partnerships, and its basically just impossible to explain to a lot of try hards, normies, and non corpos that like...
At a certain point, the actual technicals of implementing whatever solution in code... doesn't matter.
Because if everything is a fucking exploding clownshow driving off a cliff on the project management side... making a sensible technical solution is fundamentally impossible.
No one even knows what they are supposed to be doing, who is supoosed to be responsible for what.
I can't tell you how much time I've spent emailing a person to email a person to email a person to figure out who I am supposed to email about to report a very niche but critical bug in something my workfloe is dependant on...
And wow hey wouldn't you know it, no one is actually maintaining that thing any more, and also no one knows that!
So what do we do? Hire another, different contractor for that, and make this all worse!
I would literally rather put my balls in a wood chipper than do large scale corpo tech work ever again. My mental health is not worth it.
Yeah man, have code in Win8, WinPhone, and Win10. Bet you didn't know Intel had a WinPhone device. Of course, Intel cancelled it. I definitely avoid mega corporations now. Won't even take their interviews. The small company I work for now, they said, "Can you make this integration in 8 months", I said yes. Two months later, all done and deployed to production. Everything is much easier when you can actually talk to other teams and submit PR's you need.
I'm with you. I'll never work for another big corporation. The have no interests in making good products. All Intel did was use their money to artificially keep AMD from selling chips. Which is crazy, Intel pretty much did everything first. Now they do nothing.
Bet you didn't know Intel had a WinPhone device. Of course, Intel cancelled it.
Entirely seriously, and... also ironically:
I think I actually do remember hearing about that from a decade + ago... when I was at MSFT.
... and what I heard was we cancelled it.
Jesus fucking christ, lol.
I'm with you. I'll never work for another big corporation.
I like to think of this as 'we both chose the former corpo preamble to cyberpunk 2077'.
Anyway, yep, I am fully linux and fully team red now.
What a fucking world.
… and what I heard was we cancelled it.
That might have been true. There were actually two phone teams at Intel working with the same hardware. WinPhone and Android. Our budget came from the Android budget, as they had already been funded and working on the Android version for 6 months already. It came time to demo the phones and our WinPhone could make calls, get internet, and connect to wifi. The android phone could only boot. So the Android team took back what remained of the budget, because it was felt that more Android phones would sell. The WinPhone was put on pause. Then, the android team ran out of budget and the whole thing was scuttled, including WinPhone. I bet MSFT was doing Intel a solid by not trashing Intel because it's Android team dropped the ball. Props to MSFT for that.
Anyway, yep, I am fully linux and fully team red now.
Same. And I'm never looking back.
