Comment by Night_Thastus
2 months ago
Given Microsoft's recent 'This is an Xbox' and 'Windows 11 will be the platform for gaming' messaging, and the demolishing of the Xbox division, this may be good timing.
Results like this may light a fire under MS to finally fix some deep problems in Windows' performance. At least, one can hope.
I hope Microsoft stays complacent and ultimately loses the gamer market. With gamers out and most other casual consumers going mobile, Microsoft will be ever more relegated to office environments, making them even less cool and hopefully starting a snowball effect that really hurts them.
They need to actually hire good devs again but then again they are a major part of why software as a career is dying in America.
This might not be an engineering problem. It just doesn’t feel like anyone at MS actually cares what their users care for. Doesn’t seem like they use the OS themselves.
3 replies →
Gonna be tough when they own literally all the gaming studios now
They just fired a lot of the gaming studios they used to own. (Tango, Arkane), and cancelled most of their major upcoming projects (Everwild, Perfect Dark, the new MMO, etc)
And - while there are rare examples otherwise (like iD software), many of their studios haven't made a well received game in over a decade.
It's not necessarily a great thing for the industry, but Microsoft leaving gaming entirely would not be that terribly tough. If anything, it would probably have the least amount of impact now, then it would have at any other time since 2001.
1 reply →
Not even close? Tencent and Sony likely have (indirectly) more game developers on their payroll, and even the top 3 (MS, Sony, Tencent) combined aren't that much of the market. Nobody seems to control even 10% of the 500 billion dollar video game market.[1] Also note that for MS and Sony this revenue may also contain sales of third-party games through their stores.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_video_game_com...
They own a bunch of AAA gaming studios, which have been producing flop after multimillion-dollar flop. All that while random indie darlings produce high quality cross-platform hits for a fraction of the budget.
1 reply →
Not any of the good ones though. The long-tail of game developers are where most PC gamers are at these days, the AAA slop have large numbers on a per-game basis, but aren't very large compared to the whole gaming market.
Most office environments seem to be using OSX for their client OS these days. It's just much more behaved OOTB. The only thing people really need Windows for now is the domain controllers and goofy legacy embedded stuff.
I wish this was true.
But, there's a lot of business software that's locked into the MS ecosystem with Active Directory.
Office365 is de rigeur.
Then there's everything built on SQL Server.
Excel is the "bicycle for the mind" for many types of professional.
Heaven forbid you ever have to work with an IE-only app from 2003, but those still exist in the wild.
I dream of a glorious shining day when all computing will be 100% POSIX-compliant.
That is definitely a silicon valley thing.
5 replies →
At this point, I've given up having hope for Windows to be actually a good experience for anything at all.
Development has been a pain over the last decade. MacOS has it's rough-edges, but it has become a pleasure to code on.
Normal everyday experience is just a pain with unintuitive settings pages, slow Files Explorer, and a horrendous start panel experience.
Gaming seems to be the last thread my Windows machine is around for anymore. Although I have not tried moving to Linux for this, the gaming community seems to be happy enough for more and more games every week.
> MacOS has it's rough-edges, but it has become a pleasure to code on
Except when Apple deprecates APIs but the replacement doesn't have close to the same functionality (looking at you screen capture kit).
Or when the documentation just doesn't explain anything and you have to reverse engineer the API to figure out what it does.
or how there's a bunch of hidden APIs only certain vendors are told about so you can't even compete on an even playing field.
And don't get me started on the C, C++, ObjectiveC and now Swift monstrosities. Having fun with your legacy project when the new APIs require swift, so you have to use the objectiveC bridge and the weird bugs that comes with it.
Also Apple undercutting your business by turning your app in an OS feature.
Or Apple deleting your app and account because of politics but they claim it's a policy violation. They just selectively enforce it.
Or apple allowing foreign governments back doors.
2 replies →
GP said that macOS is a pleasure to code on, you’re arguing that it is not a pleasure to code for. Both can be true at the same time!
macOS is great to code on, not to code for
I genuinely enjoy programming on windows. Perhaps because I don’t try to force windows to be linux, but PowerShell is genuinely good.
The only issues I face are when other developers do non-cross platform things. Like use bash for build scripts.
Anything touching disk, such as reading a bunch of source files is just so much slower on windows right now. From what I hear it improves a little if you actually go through the Linux subsystem, but it just can’t touch native Linux performance.
Just switching OS will seriously improve your DX because of the faster compiles.
1 reply →
> MacOS has it's rough-edges, but it has become a pleasure to code on.
I don’t know what kind of projects are you working on, but it couldn’t be further from truth for me. WSL2 is so much better than docker on macOS it isn’t even funny. (Haven’t tried orbstack, heard good things; though fundamentally the problem of developing for linux on not-Linux can only be solved by actually running Linux.)
> (Haven’t tried orbstack, heard good things; though fundamentally the problem of developing for linux on not-Linux can only be solved by actually running Linux.)
I really wish we could get back to true platform-agnostic development and away from shipping whole Linux-jungles containing the banana you actually want to ship. Effective hard-coupling isn’t a good thing isn’t my opinion, even when the platform being coupled to is FOSS.
1 reply →
Even without WSL, PowerShell is perfectly capable. I find that lots of people just rag about windows because it’s not unix and they’re trying to force it to be.
Docker on macOS also runs a Linux VM under the hood, just like WSL2 does, they're no different in that respect. WSL1 used the more exotic approach of translating Linux system calls to and from NT kernel system calls, but for various reasons (compatibility, performance, complexity) Microsoft abandoned that technique and adopted a Linux VM running under the Hyper-V hypervisor for WSL2.
3 replies →
My experience w/ WSL2 and Docker Desktop has been roughly equivalent: both a little fussy, but work just fine. What was it about either one that led you to such a strong preference?
1 reply →
The problem is the bullet point features that Microsoft is adding to Windows (AI, ads, Xbox bar, etc.). The fastest line of code possible is the line of code that doesn't exist (look, this technically isn't true when considering data structures, but it's a good baseline).
Microsoft would have to exercise discipline with Windows features, which is never going to happen: the very people pushing the garbage are using Macs and don't have to suffer it.
I'm not convinced those new features are adding any substantial overhead. From my understanding, most of the problems are at the low level - things like threading, kernel space operations, file writing, etc.
Very stripped-down versions of Windows perform pretty much identically from what I last saw.
I believe (speculating) that a big reason Windows underperforms in battery life is because of the "death by a thousand cuts" approach to network-connect background services.
Linux desktops have very little background services that make constant network calls. But on Windows, there's hundreds. Every team thinks they need a little bit of telemetry or they need to grab an icon or something stupid, so nobody thinks twice. Same thing goes for logging.
But when you add it all up, it ends up being expensive.