4 ms·

Microsoft has no incentive to make good software. Most people will use it no matter what.

by mouse_ 3y ago

lukan 3y ago
That is not true. People use it as long as the pain of using it, is lower than the pain of switching. Assuming they have even something to switch for.
- npteljes 3y ago
  >Assuming they have even something to switch for. This one hits the nail on the head, and the reason why not just Microsoft, but a lot of large software players are not incentivized to create better software. At the end of the day, people like power, to make money, and the people at Microsoft are no exception. And businesses are businesses, enterprises to make money, not altruistic benefactors of humanity, or optimizers of a specific domain, like software. So what business will do are their original thing AND business tactics, and the larger the business, the more tactics they have to employ, otherwise they won't be as large, or even simply won't be, at all. So, on the top, it's all ruthless business tactics. As Microsoft is a large player for a long time, they have quite the rep sheet[0], but they are not unique in doing this. It's the name of the game. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Thankfully Valve is doing the good work to keep game developers targeting Windows and DirectX without caring about alternatives on the PC space.
  - timlatim 3y ago
    Apologies if I'm misreading your intention, but are you suggesting that Valve's work on Wine is somehow worse than asking game developers to target Linux/other OSes natively? As a Linux desktop enthusiast, I much prefer the Valve's approach: the library of existing Windows-only games that are unlikely to be ever ported is too vast, and the benefits of targeting a disjointed[1] platform with <2% market share[2] for new games are not at all clear. It's only thanks to Valve that I (and hopefully many other Linux users) do not need to maintain a second Windows system for fun, as the majority of games run perfectly fine on Linux and require nothing more than clicking Install then Play in the Steam client. [1] Case in point: glibc's compatibility guarantees are weaker than what you get on Windows. (For instance, your system's glibc cannot be older than what a game is built against, which may present problems for devs using Fedora/Arch and players on Debian/LTS Ubuntu, something I've experienced first-hand for my apps.) The X11 to Wayland migration is also still underway. (Though things are getting better, the attitudes of some Wayland maintainers are a bit concerning: "I don't [care] what you think is normal behavior for games. You get certain guarantees with wayland. Deal with it. If clients decide to do exactly what they do on windows or X11 they won't work correctly." [3] I'm not sure game developers would enjoy such reception.) [2] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey [3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/18359#note_1832873 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/18...
    - blibble 3y ago
      indeed Windows is going to end up as the 2030s version of dosbox edit: as in Windows ends up with the same fate as MS-DOS: replaced with a piece of software analogous to dosbox
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Which runs MS-DOS games, not GNU/Linux.
        blibble 3y ago
        yes, that was indeed my point
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Yes I am, everyone worshiping Valve for that, has skipped classes on OS/2 history lesson. Porting games from Android/NDK into GNU/Linux is relatively a child's play. Playstation OS is also POSIX friendly. Finally every serious middleware engine supports GNU/Linux. Still the amount of studios that care about GNU/Linux is almost zero. With Valve, there are no reasons to bother at all as a studio, target Windows/DirectX, let Valve do the work, collect the money with zero additional effort. Now with Windows based handhelds, Valve will learn what happened to netbooks.
      - pjc50 3y ago
        "GNU/Linux" doesn't have a stable binary graphics API. Someone rather controversially pointed out that if you want to make a binary that runs for the longest possible time across the widest set of linux distributions, you should make a Win32/DirectX binary and tell people to install WINE/Proton.
        kbolino 3y ago
        Wine/Proton works because it can be recompiled for every version of every Linux distro, whereas the average video game can't. Honestly, somebody could have done something like this for "native" Linux but the incentives never really fell into place. It could even have been Valve, but I would guess they weighed the options and found this to be the one that gave them the widest compatibility without expecting too much of the game developers, many of whom were reluctant to make their games available on Steam at all.
  - WhyNotHugo 3y ago
    Honestly, I don’t think this is a bad idea. Games are usually distributed in binary form, and Linux is an awful target for distributing binaries. Especially if you want them to work 10 years later. Imagine games that dynamically link some library (or glibc). They wouldn’t run on other Linux distributions with mismatching dependencies (or a different libc). Sure, 100% statically linked binaries might work. But wine also runs on non-Linux. Windows is a sufficiently homogeneous target, and wine works well enough. Heck, some games run better in Linux+Wine than they do in windows.
- herbst 3y ago
  This. The majority of people I just switched to Linux just stayed there. All it takes is reducing the daily pain of using their own hardware. 'Most' just want their browser to behave like always anyway.
chollida1 3y ago
I mean, this is an absurd statement. Microsoft uses this software to make their own video games. They have a very vested interest in making any software they use better.
- yazzku 3y ago
  It is not absurd at all. Just look and how every PC ships with Windows (and lately doesn't even allow you to boot an alternative OS unless you fiddle with Secure Boot in the BIOS). There is consequently little incentive to make Windows better, and we all know what a complete piece of utter garbage it is. Their next milestone is shoving ads in Outlook and your start menu. And then the same can be said about a lot of Microsoft products. DirectX is no different; it's the canonical Microsoft piece of shit, and that goes all the way back to the OpenGL days [1]. [1] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/why-you-should-use-opengl-and-not-directx https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/why-you-should-use...
  - delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
    > we all know what a complete piece of utter garbage it is Are you saying this as a qualitative statement, or as an emotional and irrational outpouring of hate? By qualitative, I mean things like performance, compatibility, UI/UX, programmability, software design, etc. Somehow I doubt it's the former...
    - yazzku 3y ago
      Are you really trying to argue that Windows does just fine on all the fronts you mentioned?
      - delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
        Yes.
  - chollida1 3y ago
    What does any of what you typed have todo with what we are talking about with the shader compiler? Are you responding to the wrong comment? To bring you back into the fold, we are discussing how Microsoft writes video games and therefor has a very vested interest in making their shader compiler as good as possible because their games use it. At no point were we discussing dual booting to another OS. I have to be honest, I have no idea how you got to there from a shader compiler discussion :)
immibis 3y ago
This is no longer true. Smartphones are the default computing device, and Microsoft has to make an effort to keep people on desktops.

Microsoft has no incentive to make good software. Most people will use it no matter what.

by mouse_ 3y ago

Microsoft has no incentive to make good software. Most people will use it no matter what.

That is not true. People use it as long as the pain of using it, is lower than the pain of switching. Assuming they have even something to switch for.

npteljes 3y ago
>Assuming they have even something to switch for. This one hits the nail on the head, and the reason why not just Microsoft, but a lot of large software players are not incentivized to create better software. At the end of the day, people like power, to make money, and the people at Microsoft are no exception. And businesses are businesses, enterprises to make money, not altruistic benefactors of humanity, or optimizers of a specific domain, like software. So what business will do are their original thing AND business tactics, and the larger the business, the more tactics they have to employ, otherwise they won't be as large, or even simply won't be, at all. So, on the top, it's all ruthless business tactics. As Microsoft is a large player for a long time, they have quite the rep sheet[0], but they are not unique in doing this. It's the name of the game. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft
pjmlp 3y ago
Thankfully Valve is doing the good work to keep game developers targeting Windows and DirectX without caring about alternatives on the PC space.
- timlatim 3y ago
  Apologies if I'm misreading your intention, but are you suggesting that Valve's work on Wine is somehow worse than asking game developers to target Linux/other OSes natively? As a Linux desktop enthusiast, I much prefer the Valve's approach: the library of existing Windows-only games that are unlikely to be ever ported is too vast, and the benefits of targeting a disjointed[1] platform with <2% market share[2] for new games are not at all clear. It's only thanks to Valve that I (and hopefully many other Linux users) do not need to maintain a second Windows system for fun, as the majority of games run perfectly fine on Linux and require nothing more than clicking Install then Play in the Steam client. [1] Case in point: glibc's compatibility guarantees are weaker than what you get on Windows. (For instance, your system's glibc cannot be older than what a game is built against, which may present problems for devs using Fedora/Arch and players on Debian/LTS Ubuntu, something I've experienced first-hand for my apps.) The X11 to Wayland migration is also still underway. (Though things are getting better, the attitudes of some Wayland maintainers are a bit concerning: "I don't [care] what you think is normal behavior for games. You get certain guarantees with wayland. Deal with it. If clients decide to do exactly what they do on windows or X11 they won't work correctly." [3] I'm not sure game developers would enjoy such reception.) [2] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey [3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/18359#note_1832873 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/18...
  - blibble 3y ago
    indeed Windows is going to end up as the 2030s version of dosbox edit: as in Windows ends up with the same fate as MS-DOS: replaced with a piece of software analogous to dosbox
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Which runs MS-DOS games, not GNU/Linux.
      - blibble 3y ago
        yes, that was indeed my point
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Yes I am, everyone worshiping Valve for that, has skipped classes on OS/2 history lesson. Porting games from Android/NDK into GNU/Linux is relatively a child's play. Playstation OS is also POSIX friendly. Finally every serious middleware engine supports GNU/Linux. Still the amount of studios that care about GNU/Linux is almost zero. With Valve, there are no reasons to bother at all as a studio, target Windows/DirectX, let Valve do the work, collect the money with zero additional effort. Now with Windows based handhelds, Valve will learn what happened to netbooks.
    - pjc50 3y ago
      "GNU/Linux" doesn't have a stable binary graphics API. Someone rather controversially pointed out that if you want to make a binary that runs for the longest possible time across the widest set of linux distributions, you should make a Win32/DirectX binary and tell people to install WINE/Proton.
      - kbolino 3y ago
        Wine/Proton works because it can be recompiled for every version of every Linux distro, whereas the average video game can't. Honestly, somebody could have done something like this for "native" Linux but the incentives never really fell into place. It could even have been Valve, but I would guess they weighed the options and found this to be the one that gave them the widest compatibility without expecting too much of the game developers, many of whom were reluctant to make their games available on Steam at all.
- WhyNotHugo 3y ago
  Honestly, I don’t think this is a bad idea. Games are usually distributed in binary form, and Linux is an awful target for distributing binaries. Especially if you want them to work 10 years later. Imagine games that dynamically link some library (or glibc). They wouldn’t run on other Linux distributions with mismatching dependencies (or a different libc). Sure, 100% statically linked binaries might work. But wine also runs on non-Linux. Windows is a sufficiently homogeneous target, and wine works well enough. Heck, some games run better in Linux+Wine than they do in windows.
herbst 3y ago
This. The majority of people I just switched to Linux just stayed there. All it takes is reducing the daily pain of using their own hardware. 'Most' just want their browser to behave like always anyway.

chollida1 3y ago

I mean, this is an absurd statement. Microsoft uses this software to make their own video games. They have a very vested interest in making any software they use better.

yazzku 3y ago
It is not absurd at all. Just look and how every PC ships with Windows (and lately doesn't even allow you to boot an alternative OS unless you fiddle with Secure Boot in the BIOS). There is consequently little incentive to make Windows better, and we all know what a complete piece of utter garbage it is. Their next milestone is shoving ads in Outlook and your start menu. And then the same can be said about a lot of Microsoft products. DirectX is no different; it's the canonical Microsoft piece of shit, and that goes all the way back to the OpenGL days [1]. [1] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/why-you-should-use-opengl-and-not-directx https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/why-you-should-use...
- delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
  > we all know what a complete piece of utter garbage it is Are you saying this as a qualitative statement, or as an emotional and irrational outpouring of hate? By qualitative, I mean things like performance, compatibility, UI/UX, programmability, software design, etc. Somehow I doubt it's the former...
  - yazzku 3y ago
    Are you really trying to argue that Windows does just fine on all the fronts you mentioned?
    - delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
      Yes.
- chollida1 3y ago
  What does any of what you typed have todo with what we are talking about with the shader compiler? Are you responding to the wrong comment? To bring you back into the fold, we are discussing how Microsoft writes video games and therefor has a very vested interest in making their shader compiler as good as possible because their games use it. At no point were we discussing dual booting to another OS. I have to be honest, I have no idea how you got to there from a shader compiler discussion :)

immibis 3y ago

This is no longer true. Smartphones are the default computing device, and Microsoft has to make an effort to keep people on desktops.