> not much preventing your game engine from having a pluggable system where you could have the various different patches of the game engine ship with every subsequent release of the game
Starcraft 2 does that. It's still quite an achievement.
I would suggest that’s an availability bias, those who do it for free are more likely to blog about it.
There is a common distinction between professional and amateur with the former getting paid for their work. In general there is an understanding that someone getting paid can focus and do it full time and are expected to be better than someone who does it as a hobby.
Perhaps coding is an unusual space where the best coders are often misfits who have a hard time holding down a job.
> In general there is an understanding that someone getting paid can focus and do it full time and are expected to be better than someone who does it as a hobby.
For something like flying airplanes, I think this is obviously true: nobody can afford to spend the required hours doing it unless somebody else is paying for the airplane, and the only way that happens is if that person is your employer. A lot of things are like that.
But programming is very different, it requires almost no resources to practice except your time. You can sit at home in your pajamas with $1K worth of hardware and keep yourself busy for a lifetime through open source. Of course, you can also spend a lifetime building useless sandcastles while telling yourself you're a genius: you have to find ways to hold yourself accountable to grow.
I've been fortunate to get paid to work on some interesting things... but the work I do for fun is, on average, ~100x more challenging and interesting than the work I'm paid to do. I would be a much much less capable programmer if I'd only done work I was paid to do for the past decade.
I wouldn't go so far as to say "amateurs are better than professionals", but I think the skill level of the two groups is much more blurred in programming than in most other things.
Your example is obviously false; there are 500K GA pilots in the US alone varying from
my friend who had a Cessna 172
and flew it regularly (until joining CAP) to John Travolta flying his own 737.
And how would John Travolta at roughly 5K lifetime hours compare to the best of the comercial pilots at 1K hours per year? Also John Travolta has a commercial licence and has been paid to fly.
This argument seems absurd to me.
I get that in software quite often time is wasted by poor management that otherwise would not be wasted if working unpaid. Well managed research orgs can work at elite levels but they are few and far between.
Airline pilots rack up a lot of hours but get very little "stick time", and what they do get is extremely sedate flying to not scare the passengers / spill their drinks. Their primary skills are pushing buttons on the autopilot and talking in the radio and transcribing clearances.
A military pilot gets more effective stick time. But aerobatic pilots, ag pilots (but I repeat myself), and glider pilots gain a LOT more experience and skill per hour flown than an airline pilot.
I was working with the example given which was weak on two points, John Travolta gets paid and while his hours are impressive they nowhere near full time professional hours.
Military pilots are also professionals, and of the glider pilots how many of the best are trainers. Ag pilots are professionals, as are helicopter mustering pilots who are incredibly skilled. The majority of acrobatic pilots are also professional pilots. I’m not suggesting that great amateurs don’t exist just that a great amateur who has gone pro can often beat one that hasn’t.
I understand the sentiment, on one hand if I was rich I would be able to devote my time into constant improvement, but then maybe I wouldn’t have the same drive to succeed as having my livelihood dependent on the outcome. There is institutional knowledge gained by working in a research org that would be hard to replicate as an independent scientist.
I've been a gliding instructor, sometimes doing up to ten flights a day, all summer (e.g. when I was unemployed for a time). In the NZ/Aus/UK style clubs you don't get paid for it, but then it doesn't cost you anything either.
I have a pilot's license, that's why I choose that example. What I'm saying is that I cannot possibly fly enough for fun in my remaining life to have comparable skill to a professional pilot who flys full time for the military or for an airline.
Somebody wealthy enough can afford to just pay to fly that much, I guess, but that's so few people it's not even worth mentioning as a possibility.
should i repeat my comment and link the free document i doubt you read, again? modern software infrastructure runs on "folks that do it for the pleasure"
Unless you need some windows-only software, using windows at this point is masochism.
I was never a fan of Linux, but the Microsoft driven enshitification is so strong that Linux is now a better option. To win, all Linux had to do is stand still, and that's exactly what it did! Ubuntu in 2026 is pretty much the same as Ubuntu from 2006.
Personally, the last holdover is Ableton. Last time this came up, bunch of people pointed me to https://github.com/BEEFY-JOE/AbletonLiveOnLinux which has since then been marked as archived, and I'm still unable to run Ableton 12 properly on Linux via WINE, even though I've probably spent too many man-hours on getting it to work...
I'm still eagerly awaiting the day though, any day now surely.
> To win, all Linux had to do is stand still, and that's exactly what it did!
It is moving? Red Hat has been investing in containised apps and image based distros for years, Valve single handedly made Linux gaming viable. HDR development is mostly driven by Valve and Red Hat customers.
And no Linux isn't good enough yet. UX is all over the place.
> And no Linux isn't good enough yet. UX is all over the place.
Sure, the UX for Linux desktop is all over the place, and a lot of software is messy and untidy. But Windows isn't any better in that sense. It doesn't have a clear, cohesive design style either. Its selling point used to be that users were familiar with the UI, but it seems to change so much that users can't really leverage that much either.
> And no Linux isn't good enough yet. UX is all over the place.
Of course you'd think the UX is messy if you only look at the kernel ;)
It's up to the distributions and desktop/window managers to handle the UX, and the experience varies as much as there are desktop/window managers. Some of them are fairly internally consistent, like KDE and Gnome, and at least they're currently more internally consistent than Windows and macOS. I use macOS, Windows and Gnome daily, and the only one that doesn't give me daily grief in some manner, is Gnome.
In many cases even if you do though, its possible to run it on WINE pretty well these days. It's insane how good it's become in the last few years (partly thanks to proton and Valves investment in it all really)
"Pretty well" is doing a lot of work. I have no horse in the race. I just run native on MacOS or Linux. Haven't run any Windows in a number of years. (I don't really game much and would just use my Xbox if I really wanted to--though that mostly functions as a DVD player these days.)
But if "pretty well" causes the random administrative person to have issues with doing their job or increases IT support costs, it will be off the menu pretty quickly. We'll see. A lot of things are different from the last round of we're going to Linux in Europe.
As I say no dog in hunt and don't actually have a Linux laptop any longer since I had to send it back to my company--from whence I'm sure it went straight to recycling. Maybe I'll buy an older refurb Thinkpad at some point.
> See Windows games running faster on Linux through Wine.
Let’s not leave out all the ones that don’t. Which is in fact, the majority of them. Strange how that’s always left out, we wouldn’t want to mislead people now would we?
I’ve done the testing myself, and the testing has been done by others. The vast majority of titles, especially modern titles still work better on windows. Linux only users got excited and make the claim otherwise based off a handful of cherry picked and poorly performed benchmarks and now repeat this claim endlessly despite in every sense of the word it being entirely false.
Is the situation improved? Vastly. Viable for many? Completely. I’m not saying more games dont run better on today on Linux than they used too, but this idea the majority now run better on Linux is a complete fallacy and that’s before getting into things like perhaps daring to want to use the ray tracing features you may enjoy or you in fact may not want to deal with compatibility issues which in fact very much still exist outside of kernel level anti cheat and denuvo.
From your very own link:
> There are different degrees of compatibility gamers must consider when checking if their favorite Windows games work on Linux distros like Mint, Zorin, Bazzite, or even SteamOS.
This != The majority of games now run better on Linux, it only equals that they will run in some capacity.
We've come a long way in the last 2 years. We're at a point where MOST Windows software works flawlessly. I said "pretty well" as theres no doubt a few that don't and it'd be a bit disingenuous for me to suggest otherwise.
I certainly wouldn't come into this with knowledge on wine older than 2 years and make a snap decision though as its a totally different landscape - no weird quirkiness and tweaking needed for the vast majority of applications anymore.
MacOS is the same sort of walled garden as Windows though. It has plenty of dark patterns in stuff like iCloud too, I imagine with some more years of enshittification it will be in a similar state to Windows today.
And corporate customers like the French government will want their users to be within strictly controlled environments - walled gardens. That's why they've used Microsoft for so long. MacOS isn't as good for this scenario from what I understand, but is Linux?
reply