We desperately need to teach people when a 3rd party dependency is necessary and not just optional to save writing a single function (cough left pad cough).
Also when the dependency is really good but other considerations override it being a viable option like security or code ownership.
How we all didn't collectively learn our lesson from left pad baffles me.
I don't think I've actually played any of those so I can't speak to them but hopefully someone else can. There is a website you can check compatibility on although I don't know if it includes non-games and/or tools. Arizona Sunshine looks like it's fine: https://www.protondb.com/search?q=arizona+sunshine
If it's gold or higher it'll almost certainly play without issue. Silver will very likely play if you tweak the compatibility settings to change proton versions (go to game options in steam > compatibility > change the version. Bronze is hit or miss, you'll likely be able to get it to work but it might require more work. Borked is of course...borked.
Anyways, someone else can probably answer those games specifically but if not you can use the website to check.
Switched to Linux a couple years ago and at this point it is rare that a game doesn't "just work" and even rarer when it still won't work after trying other versions of proton in the Steam compatibility settings for the game.
Depending on if there is a specific game you know doesn't work that is a deal breaker for you, it might be fine at this point to switch. Just throwing that out there. You may not need more compatibility than what is available.
Windows is mostly so entrenched because Microsoft applied monopolistic practices in the 90's to ensure it was the most used operating system thereby cementing their place for decades to come.
Then, they applied monopolistic practices in the cloud industry to ensure vendor lock-in at the OS level with their most popular services (like Office).
You are right that most people just don't care though. I don't blame them, there is enough stress in the world.
I never used it on Linux so I can't speak to that but it's pretty bad on Windows. It wasn't great a couple years ago (on Windows) and it's only gotten worse. The downward slope of the product quality seems to be steeper each year as well. It's really frustrating to witness since they could have put out something great.
They were already sunsetting Skype, MSN Messenger was basically gone (or was it previously rolled into Skype? I can't remember). They could have started from scratch and built a really great communication tool using all of the knowledge they gained running the aforementioned products and not carrying forward all of the tech debt and glue they had to add to make the older services work with modern architecture. But they didn't and now the majority of the corporate world suffers relentless little pain points while using the software.
Not to mention it's poor quality has splash damage: loss of productivity due to issues and performance, increased IT tickets, increased computer specs to run the new features MS thinks we all need despite people not asking for. All of that amounts to millions (billions?) of dollars more spent each year for products that are themselves subpar. That cost is only growing as well.
Yeah the entire piece of software is just really poorly optimized, they use ambiguous language and labels, their controls are constantly in the way (when sharing), and so forth. It is objectionably a bad experience because so many fundamental things about it could be improved drastically.
Instead they needed a modern messaging application and Skype was poisoned by their handling of it so they took a bunch of individual things they had lying around and jammed them all together into a product they called Teams. If you actually look at how it works that is what they did. It's why MS Streams is used for video, Sharepoint is used for network stores, AD is used auth, and so forth. It isn't a single product but rather a shell of discrete things that were made to work together but clearly not originally designed in that way given the performance.
Since I just had to deal with a Teams issue, I'm going to list some reasons I dislike it. Obviously, everyone's mileage is different and something that bothers me may not bother others. However when people complain about Teams, it's generally because of the following:
The majority of the above comes down to bad design leading to bad UX and performance. Why are they using a Streams instead of rendering the video in-app natively? Because it was cheaper to just tie into their Streams service. Why is it that only Teams randomly loses the ability to function? Because for some reason it relies on a legacy registry connection key because...reasons?
There isn't a single bad thing about MS Teams, it's a bunch of kinda bad things that together make the product terrible. We should demand better of our software products but all leverage has been given to the people who already control these things so we're just screwed from getting actual good software made.
5.
Like all things in life there is balance that must be maintained. A language with few features but super detailed documentation is ultimately going to be less useful than a language with more features but not as strong documentation.
Obviously you want perfect documentation and full features but it just isn't realistic so you have to balance things to your requirements. So I went with 5 because the balance between language features and documentation is going to change based on requirements.
Yeah, it's like going to a restaurant and only judging the food by the restaurant's decor. It is arguing something that doesn't matter and most people get over it after they've worked in a number of languages.
It just doesn't matter and instead adds noise to the language feedback loop for something that isn't changing and isn't a problem to begin with.
The main point I took away from your comment, and the thing that I think is missing in most of the other comments, is application of this concept to the real world. You nailed it. Always read the manual is a nice sound bite and something that can be flippantly thrown around to feel superior but that is terrible advice without any context.
What it should say is: Always refer to the manual.
Part of being a human is prioritizing tasks based on need and/or want. Another part is understanding your personal needs to accomplish a task. Reading a manual may provide value. Spending the 2 hours with family also provides value. If I choose the latter I can still refer to the manual when needed.
It drives me crazy when people double-down on some distinct thing (always read the manual) and then preach that it should always be the case or apply to all situations. There is a concept of diminishing returns and people should teach how to figure that out rather than blast out a good sound bite. Let people identify what works for them and be respectful of that. I'm not sure why that is such a hard concept for people.
We talked about this in my software engineering course back in 2001. Surely we can start acting on these finding a quarter century later right? Right?? Joking (I guess?) aside, this really should be taken more seriously.
For the most part it is just soul crushing to constantly be interrupted but people legit die because of software errors due to these kinds of things. You think someone who has 30 minutes free a day to do code reviews for a whole team is going to do a good job, regardless of their intention?
Software is driving cars, flying planes, scheduling trains, pretty much everything in modern life. Yet we are fragmenting our codebases, micromanaging to the point of focus and productivity loss, and to make up for that we are trying to leverage ai tools that were rushed to market. Buckle up folks, we are in for a bumpy ride.
This and justifying the cost of office space are the reasons.
Just because we can do everything in C and Assembly doesn't mean it is a good idea or that we should.
It makes sense, you aren't telling sql server how to do something, you just tell it what you want and it figures it out. You aren't even doing procedural stuff at that point.
I like the RAD tools being qualified as 4GLs as I haven't really thought of them that way but again it makes sense.
Also screw PowerBuilder. I am sorry if anyone in this thread likes it...but it is seriously awful.
Edit: Before people jump me, I do know that you have some influence over execution plans with join orders, hints, etc.. but by and large you don't tell SQL Server how to do it's job.
The - works with git branching as well for those who didn't know. git checkout - will switch to the previously checked out branch so it effectively toggles between your two most recent branches.
This is a huge one for me. For those who don't know, this brings up the rev-i-search utility which allows cycling from most recent to oldest commands executed. It also supports partial finds so if you did 'cd' it would cycle the most recent change directory commands.
The forward search (in case you're somewhere in the history stack) is ctrl+s and operates the same except crawls the command history forwards.
I use these constantly in my normal workflow and they save a ton of time.
This person obviously has their own way of doing things that works for them and that's great. Some of his views are patently absurd though. This is mostly commenting on his reasons against using a forge and not a comment that he should do something differently.
Trust
100% fair and I think this is the main take-away from the blog post. If you don't trust something, don't use it. Full stop, the post could have ended there and been fine. But then it goes on to say:
You get a workflow imposed on you
You mean like forcing people to use email to submit pull requests to your self-hosted git repos? It doesn't matter what you are doing, if you are working on an open source project you are going to have workflow limitations. This is arguing a fallacy.
In particular, your project automatically gets a bug tracker – and you don’t get a choice about what bug tracker to use, or what it looks like. If you use Gitlab, you’re using the Gitlab bug tracker. The same goes for the pull request / merge request system.
Nothing is forcing you to use these features so just don't use them. Plenty of teams use 3rd party tools but host their code in a forge site. Having options available to you automatically is not the same thing as being forced to use them. If it was, JIRA wouldn't exist because everyone would use github/gitlab/whatever's built-in issue tracking and project management.
The majority of the post comes across as someone who just doesn't like the forge sites and aside from the trust aspect, then spent a bunch of effort trying to create associations and limitations between things that don't exist.
Trust is 100% the main reason not to use a forge site and all the other things cited are superfluous and/or very subjective.
Well said. I find I have a hard time with trying to get devs who cut their teeth on Node to take a moment and think before just reaching for a dependency. A dependency might be the right move but taking a moment to consider is a bare minimum and most people don't do that.
I'm trying to keep my panic over how that behavior translates to AI code in check but it's a struggle given human behavior time and time again.