Sony believed that they had so much market share that they could make a console that was leaps and bounds more complicated to code for, which would lock devs in and prevent them from going elsewhere, and they’d just have to suck it up because of said market share. Sony was wrong, and they lost out big time that generation (although they did manage to win the Blu-ray vs hd-dvd format wars).
Microsoft seems to believe they have so much market share that they can force people to upgrade to a privacy invading, ai infested piece of crap, and that everyone needs to suck it up because market share.
I’ve already started hearing wind that people, in statistically significant numbers, are finding alternatives… so is this the same situation as the ps3?
Just a passing musing without much to back up the gut feelings.


While I run Linux on a desktop, I’ve always owned a Windows laptop. I decided last week that instead of ever running Windows 11, I’m going to buy a Macbook and dual boot it with Linux. Yes I know I can run Linux on any number of PC hardware laptops, there are occasionally windows only utilities needed to run firmware or some other proprieatry application. If I can know I can always fall back to OSX for system updates and running proprietary commercial software, I’ll know I never need to touch Windows 11.
May when Microsoft realizes Windows 11 is Vista 2.0, Windows 12 may be great. With Linux and OSX, I don’t see myself coming back to Windows even then though.
Don’t you have problems with ARM not being able to run x86_64 software?
I’ve been in the Raspberry Pi world for awhile and had a taste of both the more limited selection of ARM based binaries, but also exposed to a bit of cross compiling. I’m sure I’ll run into things that are x86 specific, but that will also give me a chance to be exposed to the benefits and limits of x86 emulation on Apple Silicon.
This brings me to cloud compute. For x86 binaries with no chance of substitution/cross compiling, I am planning on spinning up an x86 cloud instance that will likely accommodate a few more of my needs. I’m fully aware that there will be some applications that will simply have no accommodation, mitigation, or substitution on ARM and I’ll have to “go without”. I do have x86 a Linux desktop in regular use.
Lastly, I also take advantage of ARM based cloud compute, as it is SUBSTANTIALLY cheaper than x86 cloud compute. Having a native workstation architecture matching the cloud compute architecture, I think, can possibly make live easier instead of harder.
Worst comes to worst, I can press an old x86 laptop back into service running Linux.
Yeah, it seems like kind of a headache to try to get Linux distros that work properly on Macs from what I’ve searched at least. Asahi Linux seems like the only one that works reliably compared to all the options available to Ryzen and Intel CPUs.
When it comes to Mac since they’ve moved to their own chips it’s seemed like its better to get a Mac to use MacOS, and Linux is more a fall back option in the future when it loses support with how it can be buggy.
Didn’t Valve just fix this with Fex?
Valve didn’t make Fex, and while it’s a compatibility layer, that doesn’t mean it runs everything.
Just look at Proton and you can see after years (and focusing exclusively on games) it’s still not near 100%.
I’d be curious to hear how you end up liking it.
As someone who spends a lot of time on the command-line, I’ve generally preferred MacOS over Windows as my not-Linux OS. But my impression is that for people who like the Windows or Linux GUI, MacOS is a bigger (and less pleasant) change.
And even on the command-line, MacOS is a different *nix distro and makes seme pretty weird choices (launchd, plists, /etc is actually /private/etc, …) whereas you could have vanilla Ubuntu inside WSL2.