I suspect you’re just repeating arguments you’ve heard, so don’t take this internet rage personally, but that is complete bullshit.

• Hosting costs nothing. Devs will gladly foot the bill for that if given the option. Even if you distribute your apps on AWS (which is notorious for severely overcharging on egress), your expenses will be no where near 15%-30% of your revenue.

• Payment processing is a competitive field outside the appstores. Even 15%-30% is ludicrous when “overpriced” processors like stripe charge 2%-3%

• APIs are not something sold to developers. They build them as part of the operating system because they have to. That’s how it works. They could try selling licenses, but it would result in devs not building on their fancy new features.

(you didn’t mention the ones below, but people with your argument usually do, so I’m adding them for completeness)

• Security is also bullshit. The Appstore and Play store are FILLED with malware. It is not physically possible to manually review the sheer volume of apps published to those stores. They also are not incentivized to improve the process much, because each time your kid or grandma accidentally activates a $40/week subscription, Apple/Google take a 15%-30% cut.

• Curation/promotion is bullshit. Discoverability on these stores has always been bad, but has been particularly awful since both Apple/Google have started selling search ads in the store. The other day I almost accidentally downloaded a fake ChatGPT app because it was the first result when I searched, it had a very similar icon, “ChatGPT” in the name, 5 stars, and millions of downloads.

These stores also heavily incentivize devs to push subscriptions. I suspect (but haven’t confirmed) that the Appstore and Google Play both rank subscription based apps higher than others, and subs tend to pay a lower revshare fee than other monetization types.

I could go on all day about the rotten dumpster fires that are these disgusting stores. The only people who defend them are fanboys and people who have never actually had to deal with them professionally.

Python is the best language for tooling and systems stuff. It’s like bash, but good (and portable)

barf emoji

OpenAI is no different

That’s not exactly true. OpenAI is structured like Mozilla, where there’s a nonprofit parent part which owns a for-profit subsidiary.

Idk all the details, but I suspect that the typical exit strategy isn’t in the cards for them without some legal shenanigans.

There’s also a distro called Hannah Montana Linux, but that doesn’t make Hannah Montana literally Linux.

I keep seeing stuff like this but I don’t get it. Azure is Linux because if it was Windows only, nobody would use it. It’s a shit service filled with tricks to lock customers in.

It’s obvious that WSL is EEE. It only exists because of their focus on the cloud, and they realized that Windows was a poor dev environment for Linux software. Microsoft is directly incentivized to kill Linux so people get even more locked in to their ecosystem.

Is the reason you have a good impression of them because you use VS Code? That’s not even open source. The proprietary parts are all more spyware and walled garden shit designed to lock you in.

Or maybe you’re not a dev, and it’s because you like Xbox gamepass? That’s an anticompetitive attempt to monopolize the game industry. It’s unsustainable and designed to price out the competition and lock in customers, which is classic monopoly shit. It’s the best deal in the game industry today, but prices will shoot up when they get the market share they want.

The golden rule still applies today, as it did 20+ years ago: never trust Microsoft

You mean that’s how Bill Gates gives your baby autism.

Oh shit, you’re actually a modder! Thanks for helping to keep these old games alive, and keep up the good work!!

I’m a sucker for nostalgia.

I don’t remember all the steps I had to do, but I do remember it being a pain in the ass. I downloaded the black edition from myabandonware.com and installed a widescreen mod (which messed up the UI since some elements were slightly offscreen, but it didn’t bother me).

Besides that, the only other annoyance was the controls. There are actually a lot of community layouts for this game, but the ones I ended up using were a pain when navigating the menus. You’ll definitely want to try a few.

FWIW, here are my current working launch settings for it:

• Proton 8.0-4
• Launch Options: WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8=n,b" %command%

So I guess if you get past the installer, those should get it to launch.

Even Steam themselves say it sucks for preventing piracy:

The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy (i.e. copying all game files to another computer) and has some obfuscation, but it is easily removed by a motivated attacker.

Plus, it’s optional for devs.

I pirated Need for Speed Most Wanted (2005) and played it from start to finish on my Steam Deck because it was impossible to buy. I would’ve paid $20 for that old ass game if it was available for sale, but it was literally impossible.

The problem is that these giant publishers are led by MBAs, and as someone who went to business school, I know first hand how stupid those people are.