(sorry for the long answer)

Besides the vendor-lock-in and “enshitification” things (which are also a direct consequence of capitalism) just compare the Microsoft Office Suite against LibreOffice. It’s not even close.

Don’t get me wrong it works good enough for typical use-cases but the difference in depth, quality and polish is huge. Same with Photoshop vs Gimp, After Effects and other Adobe stuff.

Tons of software doesn’t even have proper Open Source equivalents because they are so nieche (compared to office software or VLC for example).

Unity (vs Godot), IDA Pro (vs Ghidra), EnCase, SolidWorks, etc.

Check out how Mozilla Firefox makes its money. They are over 80% funded by Google and make all kinds of shitty decision. Not because they are bad people but somebody has to pay development because good software doesn’t just happen because a hand full of junior devs have some free time.

Look at the shitty Ubuntu decisions, also done because somebody needs to pay for development.

Look at audacity, redis, FluentAssertions, OpenOffice, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, MySql, IdentityServer4 and many more OpenSource projects that went commercial or changed their license because it was unsustainable.

You can of course always fork, but the forked project than has the same issues. Development works as long there are skilled people motivated to practically donate their free time in exchange for nothing. That already greatly limits the people that even can work on open source and if their situation changes history repeats.

It’s not even OpenSource only. Look at YouTube creators especially science educators. A lot of them with great content and talent explaining various topics. But also trying to sell you stuff like squarespace, Brilliant and NordVPN because it would be unsustainable otherwise.

So yes great (by that I mean big polished good quality “unenshitified”) FOSS won’t happen under capitalism because writing software is time-consuming.

Why do you think people pirate commercial software like AutoCAD, Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, MS Office, SketchUp, SolidWorks, etc.? Because they are polished in a way no open source project could be, because hundreds of engineers worked for decades on those.

All that said, FOSS is great. I use and rely on a tons of OpenSource software, self-host a lot of services, regularly contribute to quite a few projects and also am the maintainer of some libraries other people use (even commercially) and I still stand by what I wrote before:

Open Source can’t be as polished and high quality as big commercial software because it doesn’t have the funds to do that. Five motivated people are not enough to write an After Effects competitor.

Probably won’t happen under capitalism. It’s way too expensive (time consuming) to write good software/make good products.

Stop using timezones? So every day would actually be two weekdays because at some random point in time it would switch date during the day. Let’s meet next Monday wouldn’t even specify a single day anymore in most countries. And there is no real benefit to stop using timezones, just downsides. Yes you’d know which time it is anywhere but you still wouldn’t know of they are awake or not and have to either look it up or remember it - the same you have to do now.

Floating point numbers and arithmetic is not inaccurate. They are actually very accurate but a lot of developers have inaccurate assumptions about them. They can’t exactly represent base 10 decimals. That’s the only inaccuracy. If you have two floating point numbers and you let’s say add or multiply them the result is always the closest floating point representation of the real result.

The list of misconceptions wouldn’t reasonably fit in a comment, but if you are really interested and have a few minutes you could give that a read: https://zeta.one/floats-are-not-inaccurate/

Wow that flag is ugly. But now I’m wondering if it’s possible to combine the flags in a way that looks nice.

Ok I also try it one last time 🤣

Go to Google images and search for “Desktop”. What you see is Desktop machines amd setups and how I and the vast majority of the world use the word “Desktop”.

Now search for “handheld game console”. It’s very likely that one of the first few results is literally a SteamDeck.

Now back to the stats. As I already said. SteamDeck will be tracked as a Desktop because stat tracking sites just use Browser User Agents and try to detect what the device actually is, but that’s very hard if not right out impossible because clients (including the SteamDeck) intentionally (for privacy and compatibility reasons) lie about what they are all the time!

If you take your mobile browser and enable “Desktop site” or “Desktop mode” it will lie(!) and make the server think it’s a Desktop - even though it is really not. A smartphone doesn’t magically become a Desktop PC. If I browse the web with my typical mobile browser - every site will track my activity as smartphone. If I switch to Desktop mode most sites will track me as a Linux Desktop Machine. But my device has not changed.

So you are right that the SteamDeck is tracked as a Desktop PC. But that’s because the Server has has either no better category for the device or can’t determine what the device really is because it lies about what it is.

https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

Stat tracking always had (and will have) two big issues (which can’t really be fixed).

Devices which lie about what they are (see link above) and the problem that they have to come up with some categories and there will always be some devices which fall between the categories (Think fridge, microwaves, sex toys, etc.).

If your SteamDeck is currently actually connected to a monitor a mouse and a keyboard than you are actually using it as a Desktop PC. But if you use it like most people - even though the SteamDeck lies about it - it’s not a Desktop, because the word “Desktop” really is about the form factor - it’s not just my definition. Give any of your friends a piece of paper and a pencil and ask them to draw a Desktop PC - I would actually be amazed if anybody in the world (even you! outside the context of this discussion) would draw anything even remotely resembling a Steam Deck.

👋

Desktop is a form factor not “software” and there are microwaves and refrigerators with “PC hardware” (in quotes, because it’s actually a pretty ill-defined term), but they still are not “Desktops” even is you install Fedora on your fridge.

The names are pretty clear and are about form factor. Desktop is something on top of a desk. Laptop is something on top of your lap. Hand-held is something you hold in your hand.

The steam deck is a hand-held game console - doesn’t matter what OS is it uses. It’s true that most stat tracking sites count it as “desktop” but not because it’s a desktop computer but because the user agent looks similar to desktop user agents.

If I install Android on a tower PC it doesn’t randomly become a smartphone even though all browser trackers would register it as a smartphone.

And Valve using a “typical desktop OS” on their handheld console doesn’t magically turn it into a desktop PC.

I could install a full fat kde on the entertainment system of a car - still wouldn’t call it a desktop PC.

So your definition for “desktop” is if it’s an x86 compatible architecture? Seems pretty random to me. Btw, there are x86 android device. IMO a desktop is something on the top of a desk to do typical “office work”. PCs, Macs, Laptops, etc. but calling a SteamDeck game console “Desktop” is pretty dishonest I think.

I’m not sure that’s really a good argument. I can connect an android smartphone to a monitor, keyboard and mouse and call it Desktop. It’s also just an arm64 or x64 based PC just handheld.

A Desktop PC IMHO is a device that is used for everyday “office” work and neither android smartphones nor steamdecks are that - but laptops for example are (IMHO)

But that’s not really a Desktop is it? If we’d count mobile device we’d also have to include Android and then the situation would look completely different.

I think they did that in castles, because it’s generally pretty hard to build castles. If the enemy is inside the walls you are practically done anyway.

Sounds like an urban legend. Who do you mean anyway? James Couzens? Harry Bennett? Charles Sorensen? His son Edsel? They all died of natural causes.

Not if you payed for an “apple” but got compost. But of that’s your thing you could try to eat it 🤣

There are a lot of YouTubers just playing with them, but I think Jim Browning is the only one actually taking them down.

Assassination Classroom (2015) ?

So finally they have a bot that closes everything because “duplicate” or “opinion”

There is a leading space in the string itself, so OP is either a top tier troll or put in no effort at at and either way deserves the hate 😄

There is very likely some step to sit on 🤣. To empty the water you just need a hose and do the same trick people use to steal gasoline (or a pump if you want to be fast and fancy).