21–30 of 88 posts
Sort of off-topic, is there a reason Steam on windows is so unresponsive? Mac, too, but I think that's because it's a port. It seems to me that Steam is not written in native windows code and that's why it runs so sluggishly. Some say they have no idea what I'm talking about, while others agree. What does HN think?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, some people refuse to work if they aren't using photoshop/illustrator/autocad/etc. But yeah, I'm with you, I use gimp and inkscape but I'm no professional.
A perfect example are front-end developers. It can be tough for anyone to make a living in that line of work without being able to edit/open photoshop and illustrated without having to configure wine. I truly believe Adobe holding back their products is one of the largest roadblocks linux has to get widespread adoption amongst the design/developer community.
Sort of off-topic, is there a reason Steam on windows is so unresponsive? Mac, too, but I think that's because it's a port. It seems to me that Steam is not written in native windows code and that's why it runs so sluggishly. Some say they have no idea what I'm talking about, while others agree. What does HN think?
Edit: Just to be clear, I would consider the VGUI layer to be pretty lightweight. There is no virtual machine for any language runtimes. It is purely a layout engine, with some very basic styling defined mainly by the rendering of images and gradients.
Outside of rendering, from my own experience with using it, there's nothing in particular about it that makes it slow, except that it has no built-in asynchronous facilities in place for you to use. You have to make sure you never block the UI thread.
This is really just a guess of course, but I would pin the slowness on too much IO waiting (ie. poor thread design). To be fair though, Steam in most cases has stayed pretty responsive.
I've bought a number of games from steam when they have been on sale, games that have a Linux port available.
Of course I am unable to run them without buying the Linux copy separately at present but once this is implemented I will already be able to play a fair cross-section of my games on Windows and Linux.
Of course this could be a net negative for my productivity.
Sort of off-topic, is there a reason Steam on windows is so unresponsive? Mac, too, but I think that's because it's a port. It seems to me that Steam is not written in native windows code and that's why it runs so sluggishly. Some say they have no idea what I'm talking about, while others agree. What does HN think?
As far as I know, it uses Webkit for the entire UI--and possibly a rather old version of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, some people refuse to work if they aren't using photoshop/illustrator/autocad/etc. But yeah, I'm with you, I use gimp and inkscape but I'm no professional.
A perfect example are front-end developers. It can be tough for anyone to make a living in that line of work without being able to edit/open photoshop and illustrated without having to configure wine. I truly believe Adobe holding back their products is one of the largest roadblocks linux has to get widespread adoption amongst the design/developer community.
A lot of the more "arty" people I know would consider giving them a Windows computer to use as a personal insult and would probably be more open to switching to Linux than Windows.
Getting arty people to use desktop Linux could be a huge net positive if they decide to help "pretty" the place up a bit.
Sort of off-topic, is there a reason Steam on windows is so unresponsive? Mac, too, but I think that's because it's a port. It seems to me that Steam is not written in native windows code and that's why it runs so sluggishly. Some say they have no idea what I'm talking about, while others agree. What does HN think?
They desperately need to drop their reliance on flash.
Once they do that, I think it would vastly improve.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think presence of mainstream CAD software is very important as well. I have seen many people not willing or not being able to shift to Linux only because of CAD.
I think that you need to specify which type of CAD software you have in mind. CAD software for Semiconductor designers have an incredibly strong presence on Linux.