As long as we're dealing with language models - those models will output human-readable text. An exchange of human-readable text is going to appear to be a dialog, even if it isn't really one.
You could tweak it, but humans are incredibly good at anthropomorphizing anything - even without an apparently dialog. I think it's a lost cause until we move away from LLMs completely to a more generic intelligence.
...it does? This level of automation is recent, and industrialization is the blink of an eye in human history.
If we're talking shorter scale, people have traditionally hand-waived it with 'Oh, these jobs will go away, but they'll be replaced with other, higher-skilled jobs!'.
That's an economist's idealism and doesn't fit reality.
CGP Grey has an older video now about what happened to horses over time.
For a while every economic advance seemed to mean more and better jobs for horses. But then the automobile comes along and there's no more need for horses and we can see what happens to an animal that has no economic reason to exist.
We still have a much smaller number of horses for the few economically viable roles a horse can fill and as toys for the wealthy.
The question is if labor will follow the same path.
At the risk of invoking “but this time it’s different”, AI hasn’t produced a new job sector. A farrier who can’t make a living off of horseshoes could at least go work at the Ford assembly plant.
In other words, I have no idea where all the white collar workers are supposed to go.
Population in developed countries is already decreasing, so who knows what happens after that? Unfortunately a lot of the foundations of our economy are built on top of an ever-increasing populace.
Domesticated horses are chattel. They existed for the needs of humans. When the needs went away the horses did too. Many of the world's poorest already exist without anyone's tolerance, even though their economic contributions are a rounding error. I suppose it's possible that the world's wealthiest will decide to commit genocide (maybe to create nature preserves?) but it feels like a very far-fetched outcome. If they do not, the price of commodity goods and human wages will decrease in tandem. Massive inequality, perhaps homelessness and lack of healthcare if those sectors remain captured by special interests, but I do not think most people will literally starve or die of exposure. More likely unregulated housing and healthcare will expand.
Well Bezos did actually state that he wants to turn Earth into a natural park.
But yeah, the robot armies don't need grain so why hike up the price of bread? Lack of grain makes those people resentful which means you need to deal with their anger. Sure, it can be dealt with but it's just cheaper to give the humans grain so they are docile. This is basic governance 101 that goes back to the romans (and further).
They also didn't slaughter all horses immediately. You can't eat that much horse meat anyways. It happened piece by piece.
The only good reason for an abrupt mass culling of the 99% (for a coldly calculating rich person with no empathy) would be game theory, i.e. them not being a contender for power any more. If there are no humans, there is nobody who can question the control of the 1%. It would be thus less about economics and more about power.
I am really rooting for the bottom 99%, myself being a part of it, but I really don't know what will happen to us.
I think his answer is just even more work. In this case it could be services where in general and for historical reasons people want to interact with people.
Show me the numbers. Show me an identical gaming PC running Windows 11 and then Linux, and show not just FPS - but things like frametime pacing, latency, etc.
This NTSync stuff is very impressive, but I haven't seen a lot of end-to-end numbers versus Windows. The last comparisons I saw showed pretty much every distribution on the order of 5-30% behind Windows, varying on the game. And Nvidia GPU support was still not great.
I WANT to swap. Please give me cause to do so. I'm sitting here with my finger on the button waiting for it to finally get good enough to make sense.
Your initial baseline was arbitrary. If the game had been 10% slower on Windows, would you have never enjoyed it? If not, how could switching with a 10% penalty be a deal-breaking downside?
Just do it. Swap and let go of objectivity. Let your subjective experience guide you.
For me, the subjective joy of not having to fuck around with Microsoft's bullshit was worth multiples of having to mess around with technical crap to get a game working (spoiler: I nearly never have to do that because I play single player games, Dota and CS). I couldn't give less of a damn if my FPS in some random title is 10% slower than it would be in Windows. So long as it's playable, I benefit in spades from the trade-off.
> spoiler: I nearly never have to do that because I play single player games, Dota and CS
I think most of the people who really care about game performance aren't people playing games like you do. They are either playing AAA games where the graphics quality is paramount, or competitive games where performance is useful for being competitive.
But it is also rare cases where a a few percent points actually make a huge difference. Remember when reviewers are doing benchmarks they're generally using a standardised test suite with uncapped framerates. For most people they would be perfectly happy to hit a target framerate, or if they really want to play uncapped they would first reduce a few graphical setting to archive good performance (most of time with imperceptible changes in the graphics). It is rare when the performance of the game is so tight in a hardware that a few percent points actually matter.
To give a particular example, I started playing GTAV on Windows after building a new PC since I had no spare drives. After finally installing Linux I decided to try GTAV on Linux just to see how well it would run. And it runs amazingly well, and yes, it runs a few percent points slower than Windows, but the only tradeoff I did was slightly increase FSR4 and the game still looks amazing. I didn't really notice any graphics issues, especially not during actual gameplay (if I stayed at the same place and started to nitpick I could notice differences).
it can’t really be a way to think about it when the recommendation is to not think about it and just do it. experience, observe, reach opinion. all in accordance with you and not some number that’s abstract to your perception.
Yawman, being on Linux for everything else feels great. In a personal way (rather than technical) it’s like being back in my 20’s hacking Redhat and FreeBSD. I also find the community support is great when I’ve run into the odd issue. My FPS are good and I don’t think about it.
I select games based on ProtonDB. There’s always constraints and I’m cool with the limitations that this brings. BF6 is a no-go due to its anticheat tool, no problem. Got lots of other choices.
My son is really into soccer, so I wanted to get the latest ~~Fifa~~ FC game. Oh it has anticheat and doesn't run, at all. Frustrating because I wouldn't want to play online anyway.
Happy to not give EA any money if they're so set on shoving online play and therefore anticheat down the players throats.
If you want to swap, then just do it right now? As far as gaming is concerned Linux just works, and reaches speeds that are more than good enough to do so, even if they're not exactly the same as windows - the steam deck is pretty much proof of this.
If Linux was measurably 5% slower on all benchmarks, would that mean you wouldn't do it even if you wanted to? Is every single nanosecond of performance really that important to you? I switched 10 years ago when things were a lot rougher than this, and in the end everything still worked well enough that I never cared to swap back.
5% would already be well within the margin of difference for separate identical clean installations of windows on the same hardware.
But the issue is that it is many multiples of that, especially on the most common PC gaming hardware (Nvidia GPUs), often more than a 25% difference in framerates. Not so important at 144fps, but very important at a 60fps baseline and for genres like fighting games.
A lot of people don't mind, say, an extra 5 frames of input delay. They don't notice it. But a lot of people do notice even an extra 2 or 3.
I do think that frame pacing issues kinda do have a critical thin threshold where it's either bearable or an unacceptable difference. And the native windows version can often already be riding right on that line. So while it's not fair to the Linux version to demand better, it is unfortunately the case that it might tip over that line.
I'd guess that the difference only matters if you have the latest most expensive gear pushed to the limit. I have a 2019 RX5700 XT and one of the DDR4 ryzen 5 cpus and all of my games run flawlessly on Linux with great performance.
I've long since decided that buying the latest top end hardware is just spending a lot of money to be upset by buggy drivers or not being able to get 5000 fps in a benchmark but has no real gains in how fun games are.
So you have very old hardware, can barely play modern AAA games (if ever), and are still happy. Good for you.
But your opinion is relevant to average gamer who enjoys playing games released in current year in the same way that someone drinking instant coffee can advise on coffee beens that it's all just caffeine in the end.
Not a power issue but a feature issue. No ray tracing stops Indiana Jones and Doom Dark Ages (though you can do it in software on Linux): https://youtu.be/aU2qwlCLWm8 . Doom Dark Ages also added a check for Vulkan Variable Rate Shading, requiring a workaround to spoof it. Mesh shader requirement prevents Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth from running.
This. I understand that getting your desktop fps to ridiculous heights is a hobby in and of itself, an obsession that I don't share at all, and good luck to them that do. But I'm colourblind and have the reaction speed of a slug. Anything over 25fps is wasted on me.
After building a few PCs over the years something I've noticed is every time I've bought the highest end new part I feel bad about the money spent, and then I feel bad every time there's a delayed frame or feature missing, and then I feel bad when the next model comes out.
Every time I get something mid range or second hand I feel good about what a good deal I got, and how I'm getting 98% of the features for 40% of the price, and how realistically as soon as you stop pixel peeping screenshots, you won't even notice your settings are on High instead of Ultra. You just take in the story, the sound design, and the actual game.
> all of my games run flawlessly on Linux with great performance.
Your definition of great performance is not mine, but it’s fantastic to watch Linux users continue to hand wave away real issues whilst continually claiming the same or better performance across the board, which is provably false.
> but has no real gains in how fun games are.
It absolutely does for me. Modern displays are absolutely dogshit. I won’t play at anything less than 144hz, as much as I can I aim for 200hz and I want that with consistent frame times.
This is exactly the mentality I'm talking about. People have entertained themselves for all of human history without anything nearly as sophisticated as modern displays. At some point this unchecked desire will suck all of the fun out of a hobby and leave you constantly buying the latest thing and dissatisfied at anything that isn't the highests specs possible to acquire.
The game story, gameplay elements, and such have become secondary to the real hobby of consumerism. If people could have fun gaming 20 years ago, there is no reason it isn't possible to have just as much fun gaming on low to mid range hardware today.
I think this is similar to how buying books is a related but different hobby to reading books, or buying board games is a related but different hobby to playing board games. I know people who have hundreds of board games, thousands of dollars worth, but rarely get to actually play them (for various reasons but mostly involving children).
The hobby of optimising your gaming desktop is a related but different hobby to actually playing games.
Completely agreed, I think most hobbies have this perverse side aspect that is just themed consumerism. And it's so easy to get sucked in to watching youtube videos about the latest board games that you just need to buy, while the reality is you aren't even playing the ones you already have.
It's much harder to step back and realise you don't need the new thing most of the time. Sure if you have a 15+ year old desktop and you can't run the new games at all then an upgrade could be good, but I'd guess most hardware purchases come from people who already have great hardware.
It’s a bizzare assumption to make that because people happen to have different preferences or needs than you do it must be “consumerism.”
I have very specific requirements for motion clarity in games on modern displays. Older display technologies like CRTs and plasmas achieved this naturally through the way they operated. Most modern sample-and-hold displays do not.
You may not notice or be affected by that difference, which is fine. Couldn’t be more thrilled for you, however I am affected. Anything below 120Hz on a sample-and-hold display causes noticeable discomfort for me, and for a long time I stopped gaming entirely because I couldn’t work out why playing anything had seemingly overnight become so bad to play from a comfort perspective. Eventually I realised the issue started when I moved away from CRTs and plasma TVs to modern sample and hold displays.
I was only able to comfortably return to gaming by using very fast displays at 120Hz minimum, preferably 240Hz, because that gets closer to the motion quality I was used to from years of using PC CRTs. For games locked to 60Hz or below, I still prefer playing them on a CRT for exactly that reason and I own a number of CRTs for this reason.
> At some point this unchecked desire will suck all of the fun out of a hobby
You’re projecting. I think I’ve got what I enjoy from my hobby figured out after 35+ years, but thanks anyway.
> The game story, gameplay elements, and such have become secondary to the real hobby of consumerism.
You’re projecting.
> If people could have fun gaming 20 years ago
I didn’t have to endure sample and hold slop 20 years ago, now I do. You may accept or tolerate it, I am under no requirement to do so, nor live in a world where I must accept a significant performance loss is “ok” in any circumstance.
If I wanted less performance, I’d buy something with less performance to begin with.
I gave it a try. Got a steam deck, tries steam os on my desktop.
I kept running into issues that took me time to solve. I understand that the only reason it took me time to solve these issues is because I'm new to it and that people who have been gaming on Linux for years already know how to solve them all. But what would happen was is I would sit down to play a game spend maybe an hour or two fixing issues and then after that I ran out of time to play the game. I kept this up for a couple months but honestly at some point I just gave up. Now I'm playing games on Windows again.
To be clear, I'm a huge proponent of Linux gaming. I just unfortunately am too busy these days to spend the time to get it to work.
I can recommend CachyOS as a linux distribution for gaming that has worked for me across multiple computers without any fiddling. It's the one that's led to me ditching windows entirely after a few failed attempts over the years.
Although, everyone probably says that about whatever distro they happen to use lol.
I was only able to install the latest CachyOS image by modifying the boot arguments in grub of the live installer, after reading the lengthy log file it pooped out after the first install fail.
I have no idea why people recommend this to people who aren't actually deep into tech and linux already.
Agreed. Recommendations to use Arch-based distros especially. My personal recommendation, which has ended up sticking for a few Linux-curious gamer friends, has always been Bazzite.
Yeah, that's why I added the qualifier at the end. But I legit flashed a USB with the ISO, booted, installed the OS, installed steam, installed a game, ran it, and had 0 issues or customisations required.
I haven't had it in the past with PopOS or Fedora, but it could be that the nvidia drivers back then weren't an issue. I could try with another distro if you're curious, that laptop is mostly a sacrificial machine for testing out distros and other stuff.
I think I’d avoid the Cosmic version of POP!OS for a while for gaming. I mean it works but you do have to get fiddling again unlike the previous not cosmic version.
Most egregious problem is that steam games start in a strange window rather than full screen and you have to press a weird key combo to fix it.
Nvidia based Acer nitro FWIW your mileage may vary
Depends a lot on your hardware. I've got a ~2020 gaming pc and I just installed bazzite on it, moved my desktop to the TV and only use it with an xbox controller. Never opened the terminal or configured anything, all my games just work.
> I would sit down to play a game spend maybe an hour or two fixing issues and then after that I ran out of time to play the game
I know you framed this as a negative, but this is something I yearn for; It's the one of the best games, imo. I often wish I ran into more issues, but for the most part, things _just work_^TM.
Yeah some hardware combinations are just broken. IF ur lucky everything will just work, if not you can likely fix it with enough skill. That's better than nothing, but understandably frustrating if you accidentally pick a bad combination of devices.
Unfortunately the install process is always going to be at least a little bit technical. I wish it wasn't, but idk how you'd do that without making the os like an emmu chip that you can swap out, instead of a thing you write on your drive.
I was in the same boat. You should try running an AI agent to solve your problems. Works like a charm. Most of the times. The times it doesn't, it wasn't worth it anyway.
Most folks are in this category. But most, including me, wont try anytime soon unless some very positive news come up. We have lives to live, kids to raise, work to do and so on.
Gaming moved for a lot of us from 'now I have 5 hours or whole weekend to gaming if I want to' to mere blips here and there, which need to be as frictionless as poasible.
Which is great - it means we are doing something actually meaningful and more worthy in our lives. But it also means I will never have enough time for such fiddling. I am fine with it, as much as I can be, but lets be honest to ourselves here.
Which brings up a point I've been wondering over the years.
Where are the hordes of kids like us back then who were content with the afternoons, evenings and wee early morning hours of endless fiddling? What I realize now is those years spent fiddling sharpened our debugging senses in both ineffable and tractable ways.
A larger proportion of the juniors I see coming through the corporate halls these days than I remember from even 10 years ago do not have that knack for fiddling, nor history when it comes up. And it shows in their debugging temperament. LLM's are making this worse.
I've seen the sentiment come up a lot, and I've talked about it with a buddy a lot.
For all the issues people claim to have with iOS or Android, they really "just work" compared to the shit we had to deal with back in the day. And I don't even mean bugs, but UX just wasn't as sleek.
I can find a pdf of the TTRPG I'm playing that's hidden deep in an iCloud drive by simply opening spotlight an typing the approximate name. And the same works on my iPhone. Apps that create documents for me hide their file structure, because it's all abstracted away from me. It works, and I don't have to think about it as much.
You still have kids that start fiddling with tech, but only out of clear interest. Not as a necessity.
That's a fair point. The equivalent in my day was when the PDP-11 with punched paper tape for offline storage could run BASIC (and lots else), but as soon as most kids saw it couldn't drive Asteroids, their attention waned after the first few weeks. I was church mouse poor, and didn't have the cash for the coinop arcades, much less for a microcomputer back then. I took what I could get.
So the bar to clear to get to gaming is much lower now, and it makes sense fewer kids get to the point where they must tinker to get at those games.
I have both a Windows gaming machine and a Steam Deck, so I am already using Linux for gaming... when I can.
Some of my favorite games that I play don't work on it, though, so I need to keep my PC. My issues are not performance, but inability to play at all.
For me personally, the biggest game that keeps me from only using Linux for gaming is EA FC (used to be called FIFA, it is the soccer game). It requires Windows to play online. The same for PUBG, which is another game I play with friends.
As long as I can't play those games, I have to keep my windows gaming PC.
I personally don't mind that much, honestly. It would be nice to play on Linux for everything, but I can dual boot when I am not gaming if I want to.
Absolutely not. It works, it doesn't "just work". Tuning is absolutely required for a lot of games to get them working. Random crashes, "oh multiplayer doesn't work? singleplayer does?", random glitches, random performance issues, etc.
I still prefer dealing with some issues over dealing with Windows, but it doesn't "just work".
I think the actual answer you are looking for is this paragraph:
> These old workarounds got subtle edge cases wrong in ways that produced occasional hitches, deadlocks, or weird behavior in specific games, which are bugs that don't show up on benchmark charts but can absolutely ruin individual experiences. NTSYNC fixes those at the source by matching Windows behavior exactly, and that means as soon as your favorite distro moves to the new kernel version, whether it be Bazzite, CachyOS, Fedora, or a flavor of Ubuntu, they all get this much-needed fix.
That's the crux of the article. NTSYNC isn't faster, it's more "correct". Most games are around the same level of performance, with certain outliers both ways. Right now there isn't anything performance wise that Linux has to do that would impact all games. Just tweaks and additions to the different layers [1][2][3] in the same way driver vendors do. Much of the poor performance is for API violations and other shenanigans.
It depends on what you're using now, though. If you're just using a vanilla wine/proton install, then NTSYNC should indeed be a lot faster as well. If you're using fsync or... I forget the name of the other one... then you many not see much in the way of perf improvements.
Esync was the other one. Basically either of those enabled (honestly probably both were) and it didn't hit a corner case with issues, NTSYNC is basically no benefit. (I personally would rather use NTSYNC)
If memory serves, Linux typically outperforms Windows with AMD and Intel graphics. Some of the gotchas are things like running games through Proton or anti-cheat/DRM stuff not getting the same attention that Windows does, but the raw performance is there. I wouldn't recommend using Nvidia on Linux though.
I run NVIDIA on my Bazzite box and I get excellent performance. I had to fiddle with a few things though that probably work out of the box on AMD (example: screen tearing in Steam Big Picture mode. Fix: enabling developer mode in Steam and setting "Force Composite" to true).
It typically will only outperform Windows *if* you are running lower-end hardware. The main thing here is that when running on Linux, your game is typically in less contention with the OS for getting access to CPU cores and RAM.
If you have a beefy CPU and plentiful RAM, then typically one should expect Linux to be slightly behind Windows performance (though there are exceptions), because then Windows' bloat becomes a non-issue, and the impact of the translation layers start to become more significant.
> I wouldn't recommend using Nvidia on Linux though.
This was true 4 years ago, but is outdated knowledge now. Nvidia used to disallow distributing drivers with distro images, but they have since made agreements with some popular distros. If the distro image you download includes drivers or you know how to install them, the proprietary drivers work really well.
Windows and Linux trade punches in terms of overall experience. What I've seen around is that if Linux has worse FPS, it tends to have more consistent pacing (it generally has better pacing - but not always, I had to abandon Once Human).
Gamer's Nexus has a pretty extensive benchmark video: https://youtu.be/ovOx4_8ajZ8?si=Cx5Q1a-lMMm14H4i . They refuse to compare to Windows, and it kinda makes sense: if it's satisfactory on Linux for your demands then who cares what Windows can do?
Here's a less professional, but direct comparison https://youtu.be/Giois6VtLPM?si=XFaVUMbea3u0AmP. An extremely important thing to note: AMD GPU. I personally have no idea what NVIDIA is like, but it sounds like their drivers are still all over the place.
And kernel-level anti-cheat doesn't work, though some (e.g. EAC) run in user mode if the developer allows it. Make sure to check ProtonDB for the games you care about. I have personally never had a good experience with Linux builds of games, so I just always use Proton now - but maybe I'm cursed because others have passionately disagreed with my experience. Either way, if a Linux game is broken/bad, try forcing it into Proton.
I don't want to say, "switch now" because it still has rough edges in terms of gaming. Better for you to have a great experience and stick around, than hate it and leave for good. Only you can figure out if it needs more time to cook based on some very light (ProtonDB) research.
I last used a Windows machine about a year ago, and I can say with confidence that the average desktop experience is significantly superior to the barrage of bullshit that Windows puts you through.
You're implying that Gamers Nexus is some form of Linux outlet/content creator. They aren't, they only started doing Linux content this year/late last year (and only plan to do it rarely).
You've taking a surprisingly hostile stance on the one (at the time of writing) pro-Linux comment that suggests that it might not be ready for everyone, and to wait if it's not a good fit.
And it isn't beef wellington vs bread and water. It's 80% lean beef vs 82% lean beef, in the majority of cases (and in either direction). And "suitable for your purposes" also means that 160FPS is really fine if your screen is 144Hz - doesn't matter if Windows does 180FPS (unless you're doing something competitive or extremely latency sensitive).
I think Microsoft can do fine without people tilting at windmills for them.
Depending on storage constraints, you could always dualboot. That would give you the exact same hardware to compare, and it's not a full commitment.
Anecdotally, I find that getting Linux on somewhat older or underpowered hardware is always a massive positive. Better performance as well as battery life. I'm not as familiar with modern hardware's relationship to either OS ("OS vs. some flavor of OS based on a similar or same kernel" - I know) with modern hardware. Worth a shot though!
Every supercomputer seems to do quite well with Linux kernels. Probably good enough for Crysis :)
Unless you're playing CS competitively and really need 720fps for your 360Hz monitor, is 5-30% fewer frames (all else equal) really a deal breaker? Is this hardware thats barly good enough or something else?
I ask because I feel like I can frequently play games at, say, 150fps, and losing 30% would mean almost nothing to me to switch to Linux. I worry more about general capatibility and anticheat.
I'm not saying it's not noticeable, I'm saying it's not a deal breaker. If my only holdout from switching to Linux from Windows is gaming, I'd take a 30% fps hit, assuming my fps is generally in the ~150 range, not the ~60 range.
Then swap! Partition and dual-boot into Bazzite. Or get an extra SSD and flash Bazzite there.
It's an easy weekend side project, and any numbers people give you will be ballparks anyway - the performance of Linux drivers for YOUR specific GPU running YOUR specific Steam games are all that actually matter.
Just take the two hours to do it. You won't regret it.
I've running the game Black Myth: Wukong on my dual boot PC systems. The OS are openSUSE Tumbleweed and Windows 10, hardware is AMD RX7800XT and intel i7. Turned out Linux is 10% faster than Windows, and more stable fps.
A lot of the revolution is just getting within 5-30% of Windows!
If you need every last bit of FPS maybe it is lagging, but 5-30% slower is roughly on par at a large sense, it's less than the difference of e.g. one NVidia GPU generation to the next, so it makes it playable.
One problem is that having better FPS stops mattering if the frame pacing and timing is bad, making the game feel like a juddery mess. Or if there is significant input delay differences.
That's why all the data matters for all of these dimensions; game performance is much more than FPS per watt over time.
When people see "linux gaming is great now, look at the fps" it comes across as potentially disengenuous because of all the other factors that matter and should be tested. Or rather, if a reviewer is talking entirely about framerate, then I just can't trust their opinion and expertise when it comes to the state of Linux gaming.
Another problem is that having better frame pacing, or better timing stops mattering if the OS decides to reboot for updates mid game. Game experience is much more than just game performance.
Part of the issue is that a large part of linux gamers are saying "linux gaming is great" and meaning "linux gaming is good enough now that it is better than putting up with microsoft and windows 11"
Some people would rather put up with slightly worse frame pacing if it means no microsoft. Some linux folks are super gung-ho pro privacy, some are just super anti-microsoft but can't game on mac. There's a whole lot of reasons to wind up on linux, so the importance of specific performance details may vary depending on WHY you would be swapping.
And some people are playing games on good enough hardware that there arent noticeable frame pacing issues, so good raw FPS numbers just reinforce their views, and they just genuinely mean they are having a good experience themselves.
To tack onto this a big annoyance for me right now is the lack of knowledge in the community about frame pacing and how to configure the computer.
The user will say 'it lags' but does not mention if they have tearing enabled in wayland, what are their 1% lows, have they set an fps cap, what vsync settings have they chosen in-game. On top of that there is an ecosystem failure as not every game supports arbitrary caps and you have to configure some mangohud thing.
Linux is only a 'just click play' experience if you have no standards because I have never had this stuff be correct out of the box on a fresh install.
> Linux is only a 'just click play' experience if you have no standards because I have never had this stuff be correct out of the box on a fresh install.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but the standard you've outlined excludes Windows too.
Its never going to happen. Because console players by far dominate the gaming scene. Microsoft is going to push Xbox first, which will drive all development of the games, which is going to be windows focused. As such, all major release studios are going to target that.
Until we get something like CoD titles being Steam Console first, linux is allways going to lag behind.
That being said, I think we are on a precipice of AI being able to simply just rewrite games from concepts. Start with generic source code for an FPS or 3PS, then people can contribute changes in english language to tailor the game. So it won't be even copying source code, it would be copying concepts and then making a new game with it. There have been a lot of games that have very rudimentary graphics that people played in large numbers because the complexity and gameplay was quite good.
Most major platforms already have enough asset flips cluttering their storefronts[1][2] -- generic games made from preexisting engine templates with some assets bought from the store. Using AI will just make producing the slop easier, it wouldn't make something that's worth playing.
Anyone actually looking to make something genuinely fun will probably go the old fashioned way of spending countless hours honing their craft, which in turn gives them a good eye to make sure what they're making doesn't have the shovelware stink.
they installed Linux on a PS5 and somehow the Windows games running through proton get same or sometimes a little bit more fps then the native ps5 game, its crazy
I have not seen the numbers, but even a game running 10% faster does not replace the fact that many games wont even start in Linux (League of Legends for example).
Just produce your own numbers. Install whatever flavour of Linux you like (all distrohopping leads to Debian) on a separate partition and benchmark it yourself. It isn't complicated.
In the case of my machine, I haven't observed any difference. And by observe I mean with my eyes, I haven't bothered with actual benchmarks because it seems to work about the same, which is good enough for me. I haven't booted my Windows partition in months, and I'm probably just going to blow it away next time I need storage space.
Getting reliable, consistent, meaningful performance numbers is in fact, extremely complicated:
* You need a consistent way to reproduce the exact same outputs - accounting for things like the game's RNG. You can't just walk around and snap the FPS counter in the corner of the screen and call that good.
* For Windows (and occasionally Linux) you need to ensure nothing is running that will taint the results (updates, AV scans, etc)
* Sometimes individual driver versions work very poorly with a specific game. Just because it ran badly doesn't mean you got good data, it may just be a bug in that specific driver version
* You can't just run the benchmark once. You need to run it many times, establishing run-to-run variance
* There are often a good dozen-to-hundred individual OS settings which can impact performance, and in some cases run-to-run variance. You need to know which to tweak, and which to leave alone.
* Sometimes the result of individual in-game settings differs between driver versions. Just because setting X had a big impact once, doesn't mean it always did
* FPS is not a great metric - it's an average. You need to check and see if there are huge frametime spikes. If there are, the game will have a 'good' FPS but feel horrible to play due to stuttering.
* You need to decide if you're benchmarking more GPU-heavy or CPU-heavy - those types of benchmarks require drastically different settings. If you run a CPU-like benchmark you may see a wildly different gap in framerate compared to a GPU-heavy one for the same game.
Benchmarking properly means accounting for thousands of tiny variables. Only a handful actually do it right.
You are making benchmarking WAAAY more complicated than it has to be. We're talking about some dude considering a switch to Linux, but isn't sure the performance is on par. Just load up your game and hit the benchmark button. No sane and rational person is going to be clowning around with driver revisions or regedit, because those types of people think that is more fun than playing the games.
>nothing is running that will taint the results
No, running background crap IS the result, because that's real world conditions, and not some artificial lab condition.
>You need to know which to tweak, and which to leave alone.
That one is easy. You leave all of them alone. Windows tweakers do more harm than good. Besides, replicating benchmark results is impossible after you do brain surgery on the OS.
>You need to decide if you're benchmarking more GPU-heavy or CPU-heavy[...]
You benchmark the games you play. Benchmarking anything else would be completely pointless.
>Only a handful actually do it right.
Rumors say that Hattori Hanzo used to work for AnandTech. I wonder what he's up to these days.
> You are making benchmarking WAAAY more complicated than it has to be. We're talking about some dude considering a switch to Linux, but isn't sure the performance is on par. Just load up your game and hit the benchmark button. No sane and rational person is going to be clowning around with driver revisions or regedit, because those types of people think that is more fun than playing the games.
Benchmarking is uncomplicated in the sense that you can press a button and watch the pretty things on-screen and get it to spit out a number; but is your room a little hotter than usual today? Was something downloading in the background? Did you have a transient network issue that caused some process to stall and eat some CPU time? Is one of your fans running a little slower than usual? Did you wait for the precomputed shaders to fully compile? What about the ones Steam supplies?
It's not about fun, it's tedious work. But without proper controls in place, data is just noise.
I don't even know that FPS helps in that game, to be honest.
In my experience, CS2 plays better at 150ms ping than 19ms ping. It's not even K/D ratio bias as the far away server has better players than the matches.
19ms and everyone else is just janky-warping around. 150ms and maybe there is a rollback where yeah that whole thing 5s ago didn't happen but otherwise it is very smooth.
> Show me the numbers. Show me an identical gaming PC running Windows 11 and then Linux, and show not just FPS - but things like frametime pacing, latency, etc.
No.
> I WANT to swap. Please give me cause to do so.
If you won't put the work in, why should we help you? Just stay on Windows, and we'll enjoy our Linux gaming rigs.
It's diminishing returns, but for those who want it and have the hardware to support it, why not?
I have a 360 and when I play something I can actually get a full 360 out of, it's wonderful! Though honestly anything over 100 I'm perfectly fine with.
Plenty of people who test monitors also compare things like color coverage, brightness, latency, contrast, viewing angles, etc, etc, etc. If you mean the entire monitor, they generally also cover things like how the display swivels/mounts among other things.
Brightness and contrast are also gamed to hell and back. You have to go to some very specialized review sites to read about contrast at low brightness (lights off software development scenario, or maybe even lights off gaming).
I must admit I've sometimes seen a description of how wobbly the monitor is when you hit your mechanical keyboard like it's stolen your car and killed your dog. Veeery rarely though.
People complain a lot about Gmail, but honestly I kind of understand Google's plight here.
They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.
But it's expensive, complicated and time-consuming to maintain - and both a source of and recipient of endless waves of spam and scams. It's an endless pile of data to hold onto, FOREVER, as well.
I enjoy hating on Google when appropriate. But when it comes to Gmail, I understand what they're dealing with.
It's honestly why I believe the idea of free e-mail is just bad, fundamentally. You can't expect a free e-mail service to be good or have any kind of support. The fact that it still exists is more out of shear fear of the repercussions than any good will on the owner's part.
Just get a paid e-mail service. They're better, and offer a lot more peace of mind.
> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.
I’ll stop you here. Google offered it for free and, at the time, offered such an high amount of mail storage for free it sounded insane. At the time, my ISP gave me a 25MB or 50MB inbox and that was considered pretty decent, when Google was trying to get people in with 1-2GB.
They absolutely have a right to take ant steps they deem necessary to prevent malicious use of their product, and certainly aren’t obligated to provide it for free, but Google wasn’t forced to provide a free email service, much less one that went so far above and beyond their competition.
> and certainly aren’t obligated to provide it for free
And I'll stop you here. It's less than obvious that there's no obligation. If you provide a critical service that folks rely on at a price less than your cost, you drive out competition, and it's a critical part of your own business model, dropping the service without warning is IMO on the border of what Google should be allowed to do.
I’d say that if Google suddenly stopped providing Gmail for free, destroying the primary means of communication for billions of people, governments would be justified in immediately nationalizing Google with no compensation.
Corporations aren’t magical entities that somehow exist outside of social obligations and can do whatever they want as long as their own terms of service permit it.
> Corporations aren’t magical entities that somehow exist outside of social obligations and can do whatever they want as long as their own terms of service permit it.
Where's your support for this statement in the law?
When push comes to shove, the law stops mattering, every time. That’s true for individual rights and it’s true for corporate entities too. The era where things like that don’t happen is a very small slice of human history that is currently coming to an end in real time all around the world. Not long ago, a government simply taking over a company was something that occurred quite regularly.
The existence of law itself is the only necessary support... Law is merely encoded social obligations that the government will enforce. That a single law constrains corporations in any way (and that is clearly the case) proves the statement.
In the broader context GP is clearly advocating for what the law should be, or should be changed to should certain events come to pass. Demanding support in existing law for a proposed change in law is nonsense if that's what you meant to do instead of narrowly discussing the nearly vaccuously true quote you pulled out.
It does feel like a lot of very intelligent people here basically start at a first principles belief in property rights, and discover or dispute all of the rights and protections put in place over centuries to patch up the issues that occur when that philosophy meets reality. It reflects poorly on our education systems that these apparently weren't covered or were unconvincing when presented. Or maybe it's just a reflection of the era? In practice organizations seem to be repealing these protections through limited interpretations or loopholes, so maybe that skews people's expectations?
It's not a poor reflection of our education system, it's all just motivated reasoning. Smart people will move heaven and Earth to argue themselves into a belief that their self-serving position is actually borne of some global altruism.
That our education system wasn't resilient to that well-funded propaganda machine is what reflects poorly on it. That such a machine is allowed to exist reflects poorly on our institutions more broadly. I'll never blame human greed. Systems are designed for humans, if they fail to account for human nature then they're bad systems. I'm not really interested in litigating whether humans as a species are bad.
>Systems are designed for humans, if they fail to account for human nature then they're bad systems.
Systems will always be bad. It's why corporations will always be bad. The complexities are too much for humans. You will never account for all variables. Account for one, with that you are exposed to another. This becomes clear to me when you look at government and the systems it tries to use, since forever. Climate change is another great example. Requires coordinated change across the globe. Many many many factors why that will never change. Change in the system of that size is too hard. So is it the system that is bad, or maybe it's just a reflection of limitations within us as a species, today?
A terribly defeatist attitude. The same could be said about, say, death during childbirth. For hundreds of thousands of years people tried methods of midwifery to ease that process and reduce deaths to little effect. People considered that to be women's lot, an immutable fact of human nature. Then we figured out how to reduce deaths during childbirth to a relatively tiny fraction of all-cause mortality, and that level of care became standard, at least in parts of the world. Why would you be so convinced that systems of organization are unsolvable? Where is your hacker's spirit?
Competition on its own is a very bad system for improving organizations as is selects for the most ruthless and underhanded, not the best for society. Unless you can 100% ensure that companies don't externalize their costs then the company that learns how to will win the competition game.
> Competition on its own is a very bad system for improving organizations as is selects for the most ruthless and underhanded, not the best for society.
If a company is ruthlessly screwing you but you have 50 other viable alternatives, nothing is forcing you to continue using them, which is a disadvantage for them, not an advantage.
If a company is lying to you, there are already laws against that, and on top of that actual competition means you also get to stop doing business with them.
Which companies screw people the most, the ones with limited competition (Comcast, Microsoft, Boeing) or the ones with lots of competition (Costco, Framework, IKEA)?
They also happen to be designed by humans, and if you're just begging to have the system fix people's beliefs about corporate greed for you but don't think people themselves are at fault I have no idea why you'd think the systems would be fixed.
Always these complains about corporations or systems or institutions, the responsible person is never "I". If you're unwilling to take responsibility for your institutions why do you think they'd fix your problems? The beauty is people always get the institutions and rulers they deserve, it's not some mysterious system that allows these things to happen, it's you and I.
This doesn't sound like a meaningful critique. You're basically arguing for a culture-first approach to a systemic problem, but insisting that that culture should be one of individual responsibility. I contend that it's exactly that culture that divides the oppressed and justifies exploitation. You've decided a priori that people get what they deserve. I see injustice and try to spread understanding of how our systems create that injustice in hopes that people will change these systems to rectify them.
I'm not at all opposed to the concept of personal responsibility and accountability. In one's personal life it's important to be responsible for yourself. It's also important to understand the context you exist in, and how your actions affect others. It's bad to, say, litter on the streets, and I'll reprimand someone interpersonally for doing so. But if you live in a world where a company comes by and dumps truckloads of trash into your park every week and your government lets them, no amount of personally refraining from littering or scolding your neighbors will get you a clean community. In this case those who need to be held accountable are whoever decided on the dump-trash-in-the-park policy and whoever was supposed to stop them and didn't, and the only solution is a change of policy and creation of accountable enforcement mechanisms.
I'm not just talking about individual responsibility, but collective responsibility emerges from individual responsibility. You start with yourself, then your family, then your community, then your state, then your country, bottom up.
When the company dumps garbage in the town you don't blame the company, you and your neighbors go and put a stop to it. If you're both individually and collectively indifferent then you indeed get what you deserve. That' not an a priori assumption, that's a logical fact. You either take control and self-govern or you're governed. This idea that education or social life works like McDonald's where you yell for the manager if something broken is pathetic.
Vague complaints about 'the system' or crying for some hero CEO, strongman president or influencer or activist of the week to save us poor souls isn't how a free people act. These are problems that can be solved locally from the ground up. You don't need to wait for 'policies' to change, you and your neighbors drag whoever is responsible for that out, or even organize the garbage disposal yourself if need be.
Fun little exercice: How is education funded (not just school, the rest as well) ? What does the salary scale look like ? Would you jump into that boat if had the qualifications ? (and probably: why haven't you jumped into it until now ?)
Once you've got through all of that, how resilient do you expect the system to be ?
Human systems have a critical bottleneck, it's run by humans. That doesn't mean it's necessarily a flaw, but it means all systems are corruptible if it's run by corrupted humans.
And I mean this for any sort of system from corporate, nonprofits, dictatorships, oligarchs, and democracy. Democracy is still a human-run system and that people seem to think democracy is somehow this bastion of freedom is a delusion.
If we want better systems we need better people running them, but that's a conversation that's emerging so we'll see how it goes.
right-wing ideologies are meant to augment concentrated wealth and power, which means there are incentives for the rich and powerful to create right-wing propaganda machines.
left-wing ideologies are meant to create diffuse wealth and power, which means there's no incentive for individuals to create such propaganda machines.
This is why there are enormous amounts of right-wing media, and almost no left-wing media in America.
So all the media that Trump calls "Fake news" is not-left wing?
> left-wing ideologies are meant to create diffuse wealth and power, which means there's no incentive for individuals to create such propaganda machines.
Maybe this was true at some point.
But I think today the left ideologies are used largely as a front, by the people who just want to "augment concentrated wealth and power". I think these are the truly malicious people, because they hide behind the a large mass of gullible population.
They use these shallow "left" idelology to mobilize the masses, and they are shallow exactly because it have to be relatable to the least common denominator. So no nuance, no balanced perspectives, no risk/benefit consideration. Anything that sounds nice on the surface will do (even when it is truly evil after a moments consideration)...
You speak as if Stalinism and the Great Leap Forward are anywhere near the Overton window for mainstream left media discourse.
When in reality it's too busy trying to outdo itself on how hard it is willing to sanewash and give an equal platform to truly insane far-right-authoritarian bullshit.
I asserted that there is very little left-wing media today, because it is far more profitable to make media intended to enrich specific individuals.
And your counter-argument was that... there is very little left-wing media today, because it has been hijacked by specific individuals who want to be enriched.
Cool.
Side note: your decision to claim that trump attacking something means it is left-wing shows both that you are completely detached from any sort of reality, and that you lack even the tiniest hint of thought.
Ok so let me get this straight. According to you, the news channels that tries to make Trump administration and republicans look bad, is actually "right wing"?
> the existence of an immense right-wing propaganda machine
The biggest trick corporate oligarchs have managed to pull off is convincing people that consolidated markets are "right-wing". Adam Smith is in the public domain, you can read it for free:
A core premise of the book is basically that competitive free markets are good, antitrust is important and government regulations have a tendency to favor cronies and impair competition.
The cronies, of course, don't actually like competitive free markets, so they pervert this as "government regulations including antitrust are always bad" whenever someone wants to do some trust busting. Which in turn sets up their own misconstruction as the straw man to knock down whenever they want to demonize competitive free markets in order to sustain or create regulations propping up their monopolies.
America's right-wing has never wanted competitive free markets, and has never been represented by Adam Smith, the man who said:
"the disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."
America's right-wing has always been about enriching the connected and the already powerful. Nothing more.
How can we end up blaming the right wing when the propaganda machine is bigger on the other side and even bigger on the government side It's always someone else
I think the idiocy required to agree with the some of ideas of the "american left" vastly exceeds what is required for a complete lack of self reflection.
Ah yes, the left wing propaganda machine. On one side you have Fox and Newsman, on the left you have what? Hasan Piker's Twitch channel? Zeteo maybe? Who are we talking about?
There is a lot of information, in various forms, on the internet that are specifically designed to misinform those who hadn’t taken a course on that particular topic, but leaves the reader feeling they learnt something. Right now LLM’s are good at picking those apart for the reader if they decide to dig deeper, however, I fear this era might not last.
> LLM’s are good at picking those apart for the reader if they decide to dig deeper. I fear this era might not last.
Yeah, I'm not sure that pinning one's hopes for a better-educated populace on LLMs is going to pan out well. Education requires trust and active defense against malign actors.
I've self-hosted email systems for businesses for nearly 20 years. I've actually had far easier times delivering to Gmail/Workspace clients than Outlook. Outlook constantly breaks strict DKIM with some of their protection scanning nonsense for emails that seem to get good deliverability almost everywhere else.
No. It will do things when shuffling the email through its various scanner platforms that will make their systems think the original sender is outlook's systems. So then when their later downstream service looks at the email it's like "cool an email from Outlook, let's see if Outlook is allowed to send for this domain...hmm...seems like outlook isn't allowed to send and I'm supposed to reject emails coming from unapproved senders so rejected!"
The way it sometimes bounces emails around in their own systems lead to them sometimes mixing up who actually originally sent the message. This causes all kinds of problems and seems entirely unique to their crappy setup.
In our case, we're a small business, and we don't do email marketing. So I'd say that anything of ours that gets dropped by Outlook isn't trash. The only non-hand-typed email we send are transactional - actually transactional as in "here's your invoice" or "here's you're tracking number".
You know, you could achieve 100% spam filtering by just deleting every email. You wouldn't see any spam at all!
They basically force yourself to register to their service go allow your emails to be possibly analyzed. It takes dozens or hundreds of emails to warm up a single self hosted email account
Regulated "Emails cost 1 penny" would have worked fine. All you need to do to meaningfully fight spam is have a cost that isn't completely negligible; Spammers started out at a rate where they spend less than a day's wages to message literally every human being on the planet; At those costs even finding a single person you can convince of your Nigerian prince account nets you a profit.
We controlled the pipes and the formats in the 90's and 00's almost unilaterally. We should have made a stamp.
YMMV but I never had issues with Gmail accepting mail from my personal server. And I didn't even do anything Gmail-specific, just standard SPF+DKIM and making sure my server is not an open relay etc.
I'm not able to continue to receive mail at the apartment I lived at a decade ago. It turns out after I stopped paying for the apartment I lost the ability to control that mailbox.
This is a normal thing to happen in the physical world. We really shouldn't have such strict connections between email being a primary identifier for a user, requiring only a single one on an account, and not letting users change what they consider their primary email address. Email addresses can and should change over time. If someone really wants to ensure you have a piece of digital real estate one should get into the "ownership" game and get your own domain. People somehow end up buying and selling houses all the time which is far more complicated paperwork-wise, and yet we act like registering a domain name and configuring it for an email provider is just nearly impossible for normal people to handle.
Is there an RFC for email to redirect email for a user no longer at that address? Not exactly like setting up mail redirection with the postal service, but similar in outcome.
e.g. a server connects to the gmail MX server, and gets a response like "example@gmail.com now found at foo@example.com"
There's probably a ton of issues with this approach, but it would make switching email providers simpler on the user-end.
Most email platforms support some form of forwarding. Its not quite the same as your suggestion that's similar to an HTTP redirect but still the ability to configure your email user to just pass along those emails to another address is a common feature. These systems usually just rewrite the envelope recipient address and reprocesses the email based on that new address.
In the end though this still requires that original user to have exclusive ownership to that username in perpetuity and requires the email hoster to continue to actually host email services. It does nothing if, say, Google wanted to shut down email services on @gmail.com or start requiring paid accounts or whatever.
It's a giant pain in the ass in the real world. I don't think we should accept such friction for switching providers online just because we have such limits in superficially similar operations.
I don't disagree but how would that work given the existing internet infrastructure? The gmail domain and MX records will always necessarily be at the behest of google and so the label 'xyz@gmail.com' will always necessarily be 100% under their control.
The only real solution is to use your own domain and MX records, which anyone who cares about keeping a vanity email address should do. Which to me is the virtual equivalent of keeping a PO box or such.
Having migrated off an @gmail to a personal domain, yeah it's a pain, but you rip the bandaid off and you're free. Changing the address on my mail sucked when I bought a house, but it would be silly to never ever move because changing your mailing address is unpleasant.
Its not really just superficially similar, its incredibly similar. Its their servers, its their domain. If they want to stop hosting email services on their domain and delete gmail.com IN MX records they should be allowed to do so in line with whatever contractual promises they've made. If an apartment complex wants to shut down and tear down the building they can do so once they've completed all lease commitments.
What are you suggesting happen otherwise? Once you're an email provider you're forever committed to being an email provider for those users until the end of time?
> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.
This argument would have flown 30 years ago with Yahoo.
Since then we had Uber pumping so much money into a losing business until it drew the competition bankrupt.
And now we have AI pumping so much money into a losing business until they hopefully replicate Uber, only won't work and signs are all over the wall that they just burned a trillion dollars.
Which opens great prospectives for incumbents WHO LEARN FROM THE MISTAKES of the powers be at the time.
About time to start a "Don't be evil. FOR REAL." This time.
If in 30 years it's necessary to start "Don't be evil. REALLY, REALLY, REALLY this time" then so be it.
I'm starting the 2.0 version. Fuck AI. Fuck incumbents. Long live long life and freedom of choice!
also, people changed. Seems like nobody wants to see cute fun stuff anymore. I bet they'd get lawsuits of people claiming false advertising since the numbers aren't strictly true.
Google's annual revenue is $350 billion. I can't believe someone would feel bad for such a company, because as you pointed out, this entire Gmail thing is part of the reason they have that revenue.
Google has done nothing but be a wolf in sheep's clothing. I'm not going to shed a tear because they have to maintain an email service.
Try signing up for a Google Gemini Paid account with a third party email...
Better still, try signing up for a Gemini Paid account with a registered android phone that isn't triangulated to a desktop.
If they can't own you, they don't want you at all.
"when Google was trying to get people in with 1-2GB."
The G in Gmail was for a gigabyte and that was what I got in the noughties for "free", when as you say my ISP offered something like 5MB on the end of a POP connection.
To be fair you can cram a lot of ASCII into 5MB. However you can email piccies to a mailbox with a 1GB limit if your modem doesn't melt first.
Obviously, this was during the "don't be evil" days.
Even then the reason they were giving people so much storage space was because they wanted people to get in the habit of keeping their private data on Google's servers so that Google could mine it whenever they felt like it. Giving users effectively unlimited space was a selfish move on Google's part, not a gift.
Also they make it really difficult to mass delete stuff. I'm basically stuck paying for their storage because I don't really have the skills to self host (but I'm working on it!)
They make it impossible to delete stuff if you stop paying!
I was on Google Workspace for about 10 years. I moved off their service because the mandatory Gemini price hikes meant that it no longer represented value for money.
I get excessive storage utilisation warnings for some shared drives I used to have but because I no longer have a paid up license, I can’t manage shared drives anymore. So I can’t delete them.
Google’s “support” team in India told me all sorts of lies about how to resolve the issue, but they’ve finally settled on a position that I would need to reinstate my Workspace account, at my own expense in order to delete the data to stop the emails and save Google money.
They refuse to acknowledge the patent absurdity of this situation and escalate it to someone who can actually fix it.
> I get excessive storage utilisation warnings for some shared drives I used to have but because I no longer have a paid up license, I can’t manage shared drives anymore. So I can’t delete them.
I had the same problem, and when my account was suspended, it was practically impossible to resubscribe because no Workspace plan could accommodate the amount of storage I used.
I'd thankfully managed to transfer out most of my important data elsewhere, so I made my peace with the less important Linux ISOs getting deleted.
Not only that. I was probably not even a teenager or barely a teenager when registering a gmail was not as simple as clicking "sign up". You needed someone to refer you and upon registration you got 25 referrals in return. Needless to say, entirely ditched gmail forever ago and use it as a spam mail. They can have all the fun they want training slop on that.
> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free
What you mean for free?
First, they have all the data they get from you. They now track you even when you are not using your phone. They can/could know if you are doing your number 2 regularly or not only.
They control how the internet moves. Https? Sure can enforce. Trackers, etags ? Why not.
They sell every single bit of information on you for a good price. And now they are even more friends with a very good orange buyer. They have a TOS on you that they can chop and sell you whenever they want and you can't complain.
What you mean for free? Maybe for you it seems free, but people are paying them premium for lots of stuff.
Google used to be admired by the innovation and good ideas that shaped the world to a better world.
Now they are still shaping the world, but not for everyone
You're correct that it absolutely isn't free but the gall of Google to, once they have all the data, to turn around and demand additional payment for continuing to store all the data they sought out and that they've resold many times over - it's shameless greed at this point.
And it's isn't even like they're struggling with profitability, either. It'll be hilarious if this forces common folks to switch back to IMAP since once a user has been burned into spending the trivial cost to set up a local mailbox sync they're unlikely to go back into Google's arms (especially given how cheap (in money and time) disk space and cloud backups are these days).
> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.
Not even remotely true. They regularly shut down products and services with impunity. If Gmail cost more than the data they directly or indirectly mine and sell from their users, Gmail wouldn't exist either.
Shutting down GMail would practically amount to shutting down email. It's by far the largest email provider in the US (and probably in the world but I don't have that data). There's no other provider who could take up the slack; if it were to abruptly shut down, a lot of users would simply lose access to email altogether.
They'd generate a huge amount of ill will by shutting it down, and that in turn would likely lead to a nontrivial share of people moving away from Google core products (like search) out of pure spite.
To what? Google Search sucks thanks to the idiot who ran Yahoo into the ground, but everyone else sucks more. Every time I try to use non-google search the results are virtually useless.
Google has firmly been in the "we're so big we can suck at everything, but you'll still use our stuff because you have no other choice" phase that Microsoft was (is?) in.
They've dominated email so much that their spam filter makes it a very risky proposition to run your own domain; chances are very good it'll just start dropping your messages. Even if chances aren't great, can you take the risk of an important email getting zapped?
To this day I still routinely have to fish out my gmail spam folder dozens of emails from various open source mailing lists that have been around for a decade or two, some hosted on kernel.org, because the spam filter is convinced they're spam. Google is too fucking stupid or lazy to whitelist sites like kernel.org.
FFS even google groups I'm in that are technical get obviously-not-spam messages tagged as spam!
No, that wouldn't happen. Lots of people don't have email through Google, for one. Those people will still use email just fine. Moreover, the people who do use Gmail will simply sign up with another provider. It won't be a big deal.
> No, that wouldn't happen. Lots of people don't have email through Google, for one.
Based on some data I collected around five years ago, roughly 80% of US customers used GMail for personal email. It was overwhelmingly the most common choice. I suspect that number has only drifted upwards since.
(What about the rest? 15% were using Yahoo; the rest were spread thinly across AOL, Microsoft, ISPs, and colleges.)
At one point AOL was the largest ISP and email provider on Earth too. If gmail died off people would just move to something else. It'd be annoying, but it wouldn't be the end of email
Google could actually do everyone a solid by killing gmail. They have enough influence in the industry that they could create a standard for email address portability, and then slowly force everybody to move off. By the end, one of the biggest problems with email would be solved and people would be able to switch email providers like how we can switch phone providers without needing to change our phone numbers. And Google would get to save a lot of money by no longer needing to provide everyone's emails
In a better time I would expect the government to step in a acquire this fundamental service and fund it with tax money. Right now? The only intervention I would expect is a massive subsidy to pay Google to keep providing it, while also letting them continue to spy on everyone's mail (which is a crime, but not if the mail is on a computer, I guess).
Why is this inconceivable? I don't know where you live, but the Post Office is extremely cheap and reliable around here. What drives you to pretend that states can't provide services to their people?
An excellent example of how not to do a government program!
> On October 1, 2013, HealthCare.gov was rolled out as planned, despite the concurrent partial government shutdown. The launch was marred by serious technological problems, making it difficult for the public to sign up for health insurance.[4] The deadline to sign up for coverage that would begin January 1, 2014, was December 23, 2013, by which time the problems had largely been fixed. The open enrollment period for 2016 coverage ran from November 1, 2015, to January 31, 2016.[5] State exchanges also have had the same deadlines; their performance has been varied.[6][7][8]
> The design of the website was overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and built by a number of federal contractors, most prominently CGI Inc. of Canada. The original budget for CGI was $93.7 million, but this grew to $292 million prior to launch of the website. While estimates that the overall cost for building the website had reached over $500 million prior to launch[1][9][10][11][12] and in early 2014 HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said there would be "approximately $834 million on Marketplace-related IT contracts and interagency agreements,"[13] the Office of Inspector General released a report in August 2014 finding that the total cost of the HealthCare.gov website had reached $1.7 billion[14] and a month later, including costs beyond "computer systems," Bloomberg News estimated it at $2.1 billion.[15]
Got it. So if you're fighting an obstinate faction that would rather the government not exist than provide services then that can cause issues. Further, contractors will fleece you for everything you're worth. Compare to a successful project like the Post Office that gets pushed through with overwhelming political will and is run directly by a government agency (oddly structured as a government-owned corporation) and then even despite attempts to destroy it it continues to provide good service.
It's not easy; you need someone competent heading it up and setting it up for success. If the Democrats were to propose it in 2028 under president Gavin I would expect it to be a boondoggle. That doesn't change the fact that I want it to be done and done well.
Depends on the health of our institutions. In the US at least they're legally obligated not to by the highest law in the land. It gets ignored now, but it's a more promising path to privacy-preserving digital infrastructure than letting the private market handle it.
Unfortunately, the Constitution has been flagrantly ignored by the federal government for close to 100 years now, if not longer. Everything that FDR did was blatantly unconstitutional, but nobody stopped him, nor did they roll it back when he was gone. The Constitution has no real practical power to restrain the government if the people don't exercise their rights as voters to hold it accountable, and it is abundantly clear that the unconstitutional stuff the government gets up to is (largely) actually pretty popular.
bullshit, email exists outside of gmail, and email would continue to exist without it. many would have to get a new account somewhere, but that would be not a problem. there are shitloads of providers that would be quite happy
it's insane to frame anything a company like Google does as some kind of goodwill. rather than an amoral profit optimization. contrary to OP, what people often overlook about GMail is not their "plight". but the powerful brand awareness it creates
Yes it is remotely true. Name one thing they have shut off that a large number of people actually used and it was important. We all joke about Google dropping things and yes they have, but saying they can just drop Gmail is.. well, insane.
The reason people mention importance is because corps like Google don't just care about per-product profitability, they assess how one product affects the rest of their business.
Gmail is not now nor has it ever been free. Everyone pays for it. To your point many people use it and for businesses to contact their customers they have to pay into whitelists for high volume delivery. The costs are passed onto the customers, including those that have never used Gmail. Companies that do not pay into such lists and that have many customers using gmail have to set up careful rate limits which means the emails will not be delivered the same day.
Email marketing and campaign companies pay into these lists and they pass that cost onto their customers as well.
There has never been a email provider that accepts mass email delivery to millions of recipients for free.
It's a negotiated price signed under NDA, is why most people have not seen details. If you are friends with your CFO and you email millions of gmail users directly likely because you are B2B ask them for the line item. If using a email campaign provider they will not disclose how much they negotiated to pay. Most B2B companies end up going with email marketing and campaign providers as it is far more cost effective than doing it in house even if you have highly experience email postmasters which my team had it just was not our core business model and I could not justify the FTE's.
As just one example, sending high volume emails from Amazon requires using Amazon SES [1]. Some people here are familiar with sending from SES vs. trying to send high volumes directly from EC2 instances.
right, that comment reads as if they're victims for intentionally putting themselves in the position of holding and reading the maximum amount of information about everyone they can. bizarre
It also happens to be convenient for data mining, which happens to be the case for every single security measure that Google takes. It's almost as if Google is doing everything it can to undermine people's privacy, and the occasional security benefits are just side effects of that.
Do you have any idea of how much they can datamine from an email service? Just making a special parser for amazon emails can give google a realtime insight on the ecommerce space.
This is their entire MO though; they offer a free product to build a customer base then they figure out how to get to know them biblically in an attempt to extract a profit and it doesn't matter how underhanded or unsavory it is.
Maybe at some point in the mists of time, someone just wanted to offer people a good email service but at this point it's a pattern of behavior across every Google consumer product so I can't give them the benefit of the doubt.
Yeah, this often repeated narrative about poor Google being a charity losing tons of money is bonkers. They're a trillion dollar company for heaven's sake and no private entity amasses that much wealth by asking nicely. I can't roll my eyes any harder.
> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.
No way they are doing it for free.
Basically they tied Gmail 1:1 to Android accounts. I have a Gmail mailbox for a few reasons: 1) self-squatting my usual handle, because they are a large email provider 2) it's my Android account and it's where I get documents shared on Drive 3) maybe it's the way I login to Google cloud but I don't remember. I used to have a customer with servers in there but it's long gone.
Anyway, gmail is their way to manage a part of the Android infrastructure and it seems they like running Android.
>Basically they tied Gmail 1:1 to Android accounts.
>Anyway, gmail is their way to manage a part of the Android infrastructure and it seems they like running Android.
I've deleted my Gmail mailbox and Android works fine, any document share notifications go to the email address on the Google account.
If anything it's better without a Gmail mailbox because those notifications used to only go to my Gmail no matter what alternative email addresses I set, now they all go to my actual email address.
Only problem is I can never reopen the mailbox because the "Add Gmail to your Google account" screen has decided I've already used my mobile number before.
>They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.
Not for free. Being monopoly is a huge reward. It isn't possible today to have a small email provider. While probably not having that intention from the start, Gmail played a huge role here as its existence allowed everybody to just ignore/block small providers.
I get the difficulty of fighting spam, just wanted to say that Gmail is probably making them money too. It's still free to make an account, which means they have to be careful who they give it to.
> But it's expensive, complicated and time-consuming to maintain - and both a source of and recipient of endless waves of spam and scams. It's an endless pile of data to hold onto, FOREVER, as well.
They should let others do email. The more email service providers we have the better it is for everyone
I am not sure the backslash would be big if Gmail said that a year from now you would have to pay $9.99 per month to use your Gmail ($12.99 ad-free). I mean people would complain, but would that actually give a backslash? Especially if they made it easy for people to move their account elsewhere? People are used to paying a lot more for things outside of tech.
I suspect what is really holding them back is the loss of data, and the loss of the assumption that ~everyone has a Google account that they are logged into, which means they can be traced around the web. Google also benefits from this, since its anti-bot tool will be more accurate and less fustrating to users.
> I am not sure the backslash would be big if Gmail said that a year from now you would have to pay $9.99 per month
I think approximately 95% of all Gmail users would leave. Regular people are accustomed to paying nothing for things like email. And if I have to pay for email, I am not paying Google for it, especially not twice the cost of Fastmail.
Their existing premium plans start at $17 per year. Even pushing people to that level would be a serious upset. $10-13 per month would make everyone hate them.
> Especially if they made it easy for people to move their account elsewhere?
Sounds mostly impossible.
> People are used to paying a lot more for things outside of tech.
> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.
You have a point, but if you've ever seen how a gmail account behaves for the ordinary person once it reaches 80-90% storage capacity used (15GB free, some cumulative total of all emails and google drive content, google photos content), all of these free services exist to sell a perpetual monthly recurring subscription to users. And many people do pay. The default gmail web interface starts to have a big banner across the top warning about storage reaching maximum capacity with a link to the payment page.
Look at the workflow for a standard out of box android phone now that defaults to backing up all your photos to 'the cloud', which will almost immediately fill the 15GB free. Once your 15GB is full, then you're run through the payment/checkout workflow to enter your card and set up monthly recurring billing for some premium google service.
In general having a gmail account is the initial stage in the pipeline of getting someone to be a monthly-paid google customer for life. Whether it's just for more storage to hold all their google drive and photo content, or google workspace individual, etc.
Additionally, tying a gmail account to the primary-user android on-device account on any android 4.x+ device means revenue from google play store paid app sales. And then all those 'free' apps that the user installs where the app developer has implemented embedded small ad banners for google's ad network? More venue.
the googles of the world are real-life analogs of lovecraftian gods, spending sympathy or defense on them is a category error. they do not know about you nor care about you, and would be just as happy dissolving you in their path as not.
While I get your point, I can't think of a free email service that wouldn't also be a gate to other products. Whether it's Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail etc. you always get an "account" as well, something that connects other services from the provider in an easily accessible place where the user actually gets monetized. The email is there just to make sure the user comes back.
This comment somohow makes it look like google is a non-profit charity organisation.
Isn't it the corporation which makes super-profits and gmail is just part of the equation?
I highly doubt that anyone would ever riot over loss of access to email, nor that it's some critical piece of infrastructure, there are dozens of other communication methods online today.
Google syphons all your email data and uses it for their very profitable ad targeting business. The cost of providing email service is miniscule, especially nowadays. Ad profits are at record highs. They've done their math for sure. Saying that they somehow got roped into subsidizing a public service is not even close to reality.
Google isn't doing this out of kindness. Sure charging for mail would give some bad press but Google can handle it in many different ways and they have in the past. They provide the service because it's valuable to the business. They know that the void will be filled by another service. And that's bad for Google.
You can't legitimately believe Google is a charity and maintains 'huge chunks of the internet' with nothing to show for it. Is it for free if they get non-monetary benefits? Like, my employer doesn't give me "free" money either; they get something out of the arrangement
I have no issue with firms making money, and I am sympathetic to the people who work on these problems.
Not for one second, am I sympathetic to the firm, because it is simply a business acting on its incentives to minimize costs and maximize profits.
Google keeps it running because they make money off of it. Tech firms have profit margins unlike any prior industry; maybe feudal kings come close.
They make money off of it because they (like all tech) avoid investing in human heavy services like customer support / trust and safety. I have had google safety members vent about how they can’t get engineer attention. That when they do get it, engineers don’t want to help the moderators or the moderation software. Their incentives drive them to find a way to obviate the moderation process entirely.
People working to fix things and make it better for users are great. The firm? Heck no.
> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free
My tears started flowing when I saw this. Shouldn't we pay Google for using _our_ data that it shameless steals ? And I also think that 3 letter agencies do not get the data for free.
> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.
yeah ok, google maps is free, youtube also...
And you know why? Because every single one of their product is either a data harvesting tool or an ad delivery mechanism, sometimes both. Let's not pretend they do it for free, it's their entire business model lmao
The highest comment in the thread is somebody defending Google, a trillion dollar company that profits hundreds of billions of dollars per year, with a wide-ranging monopoly on tech services, as being a victim providing a free service for the public good. While stating that holding onto data is a liability. As though the data was not the point. As though the data was not the payment.
I hate Google when they pull anti-consumer crap. I believe they're too big, too unaccountable, and something needs to be done about them. Their power rivals that of a country and that shouldn't be considered acceptable.
But man, I would hate to be the one dealing with Gmail. It's a nightmare for the reasons I listed above.
Someone can in fact hold both of those opinions.
I was also actively telling people to de-Google and go elsewhere for a mail service.
Gmail is a nightmare for everyone else to deal with. Gmail is anti-consumer crap, through and through. A big part of why everyone uses Gmail is because using Gmail is the way you get your e-mails delivered to people who use Gmail. Google arbitrarily blocks e-mails from people using other domains, so together with Microsoft they've created a monopoly on e-mail that forces people into using big tech e-mail domains if they don't want their e-mails to get eaten. And the reason they do this is even more anti-consumer -- because they are farming a massive trove of data from your e-mails.
It's bizarre how you make up a sob story about how Gmail is just so hard for Google to deal with. They aren't maintaining it for charity. I'm sure, if I had no ethics, I could manage the burden of dealing with a software system that harvests the data of >1 billion people as part of my corporation's business plan that nets hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The reasons you listed for why it would suck to be Google -- it's "free" for users, expensive for Google, and oh god, you have to hold on to the data... are not reasons at all, because Google profits from it and Google wants the data. The data is the point. You belabour how Google has the burden of controlling a huge chunk of the internet's infrastructure, as if gaining control of a huge chunk of the internet's infrastructure is not literally their anti-consumer goal.
The comment is defending them on the basis that they got "roped into" it, which is nonsense. They intentionally went out of their way to make it enticing and got an absurdly large market share because of it. Doing something successfully isn't getting "roped into" it even if you change your mind later.
> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.
Google did it intentionally and pushed to make it happen. It killed whole lot of businesses who were selling email hosting in the process.
Free? They serve ads on their clients. The best solution that solved this terrible issue was Inbox, which they purchased and then destroyed. Google also makes monthly cloud storage fees for anyone who has large files or photos. Also, it keeps people in Googles ecosystem. It’s a beneficial monopoly for Google.
There are plenty of e-mail providers out there. None of them have even come close to toppling gmail. Gmail is free and good enough for most people. Gmail is to e-mail what kleenex is to tissue. It's almost synonymous.
> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.
In exchange, Google gets to surveil half of the world's population, extract personal information from their email, and resell that information to governments and ad companies.
They charge for google workspace and many companies use workspace and expand on the services they use provided by workspace. The trojon was gmail and gmail interface / app on android and iphone.
Just watch when they squeezed everything out of the users they are going to slap a fee on them and tell them to fuck off otherwise. It's the same pattern repeated over and over with big tech.
They could always just pause all new registrations for non-paying users. They set themselves up for this failure by merging YouTube into everything gmail and Google.
>They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.
Google used to literally have a counter inside Gmail showing how your account had a super huge and always increasing amount of storage. The courted their current market position. This isnt "Oh how did we get here with our big bleeding hearts" its just enshittification.
> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.
Lol, what? One of the biggest company on Earth is being pictured as a victim for creating services that siphon data out of half the planet's people? Don't take it personally but I can't fathom how you think this is FREE. It's literally the most lucrative business there is and it's only going to get worse—and not for them.
> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.
Don't bullshit to us here, please.
Google scan billions people's emails (including very sensitive ones like medical record letters) to then show relevant ads AND sell the data to some partners (hundreds of them).
It's not called "public infra for free". It's the serious for-profit business. The surveillance capitalism on the march.
You think goole is the victim here? Poor google, owning gmail.
You know, if it's such a bad deal they can stop owning it any time they want. They already lied about it - I was told I would never have to delete email, and turns out I had to.
I don't care either way, I moved to tuta last year.
Huh? I don't like google or any megacorp, I do not defend or fanboy them, and I highly doubt there's anything in my history that would suggest as much.
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
I played the CN flash games so much as a kid. Between that and Armor Games, Nitrome, Crazy Monkey Games, etc - I was spoiled for content. It does make me sad to see so much of it lost to time - though I also understand flash was bad and really did have to die.
I tried to go the Costco route, but somehow it didn't click for me. The portion sizes were too large.
As a household of 1, it just doesn't make sense to buy that much of most things, unless I'm sure they're almost entirely non-perishable. Maybe it would be fine for my cereal or something, but not a lot of what I buy. And, by design, they limit their SKUs a fair amount.
So ultimately I end up in a situation where I can buy a couple things at Costco, but then still need to do regular grocery trips.
Now I need to drive to 2 separate stores, which is extra trips there and back.
The math just didn't work out. If I could truly do 100% of my grocery shopping there I would.
reply