Comment by eptcyka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eptcyka | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

- Fund Linux devs or take a lower cut from Linux releases I believe Valve is already employing people to work on Linux and it's ecosystem directly.

- Convince Adobe to release their suite on Linux! Push for/fund official Unity and Unreal Engine Linux versions Maybe they should just convince Microsoft to port over win32 and all the other APIs to linux? Whilst they're at it, they could also convince your most hated political figure to be more like your most loved political figure. With the convincing powers like these, Valve could just convince the world to no longer suffer from hunger.

The only incentives that work would be of the financial kind, however, paying for support is not sustainable. Console vendors can pay for first party or exclusive support from game devs because they are fairly sure this will increase revenue in the long term. Valve gains no more money if they incentivize developers to support Linux. I also don't really want for things to be supported exclusively on Linux unless if there are good technical reasons - I use Linux because of the freedom it provides me, I wouldn't advocate for people to be forced to use it. FWIW, Unity and Unreal run on linux, but a lot of developers elect to use windows-only Unity plugins. The developers don't care.

What Linux really needs is non-shit drivers and a mainstream desktop environment that takes into account input latency when developing it's window manager - Wayland on Gnome is really bad in this regard, yet Gnome is the target desktop environment for Steam OS (at least last time I checked). They should maybe make sure that their games run just as fast on Linux as they do on other platforms - currently this is not the case. I believe that solving these issues will be hard and may require a unilateral effort across various entities in the ecosystem - something which is incredibly hard to do, especially when it comes to Gnome. Then there's things like drivers - yes, performance wise Intel and Nvidia drivers might be OK, but they are not feature complete especially when it comes to power management. I don't believe there is a single problem that has to be fixed to make gaming on linux a massive success - there isn't even a shortlist of 10 incredulous tasks. It has to be a long-term effort and the open source community has to take part in it.

> Convince Adobe to release their suite on Linux!

I used to toot this horn, but I'd rather see the Affinity line up released, at this point. Aside from professional designers, and people who use it daily, the costs are beyond prohibitive.

I worked as a designer for about 15 years before landing a job in programming. So, my uses for Photoshop or Illustrator have dwindled down to once a month at most. A subscription makes no sense for someone in my shoes.

I understand why they did it, and how piracy was out of control for their apps. But $50 a month for something I'm rarely going to use is nuts. Which, is a real shame considering the amount of hours I spend learning these apps.

> Valve could just convince the world to no longer suffer from hunger.

You meant it as a joke but by far and large hunger is a problem of the past. Massive famines have not occurred in years, and where they do it's because of political disorders like conflicts or civil wars.

Oh, this is quite interesting. Are we talking only famine, or general world hunger?

Even hunger at large is a disappearing problem. Not completely done with, but the trend is positive everywhere (apart from conflict zones):

https://footprint.globalance-bank.com/_Resources/Persistent/...

If you want to help get it to zero there's a UN program: https://wfp.org

You could look at that and say "It seems to be a problem that's being solved so I should do something else" or you could say "Wow, interventions in this area have been really effective so this must be a good use of my charity dollars!" There are different problems where one or the other of these views are actually correct based on the marginal utility of an extra dollar directed towards a problem and you really need careful research to distinguish them. More than you can do yourself, so look at places like Givewell[1] or 80,000 Hours[2].

[1] https://www.givewell.org/

[2] https://80000hours.org/

Well, about that: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/sep/15/a...

There's also increasing problems inside first world countries: https://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/blog/2014/06/uk-hunger-...

It's also possible that hunger is a leading indicator of conflicts. I've heard this cited as a cause of the Arab Spring, and water conflict is a factor in the war in Yemen.

Even in the UK, a supposedly rich Western democracy, people are regularly going hungry. I think you're overstretching by a long way.

The capacity for ending hunger is here.

Probably UK companies throw out enough food to feed all those who're hungry in their locality [1]. But hunger is still a big problem. It's going to get worse here too. The recession brought food prices up significantly, Brexit will do so to.

[1] high-street companies used to sell off perishable goods cheaply at the end of the day. Now they lock them in bins. Because poor people would buy them to save money, poorer people would "steal" then from the bins.

A) one could (and many do) make the argument that most famines through human history have been at least partially because of political disorders, usually exacerbated by or exacerbating weather conditions.

B) There's currently at least one massive famine going on RIGHT NOW in Yemen that gets pretty much no attention. Yes, it' due to a conflict, but that doesn't mean it isn't happening.

It has to be a long-term effort and the open source community has to take part in it.

That statement is not fair to the people who do this every single day. We're only where we are because the open source community took part of it and took us there, give some credit where it's due.

edit: don't mean to sound ungrateful, point is OSS is dramatically underfunded, we need big corps to do more

> If Valve or others really cared about this, they could do more, but it is not a priority.

Valve has only something like 300 employees last time I checked, so you can't expect them to do a lot more unless they massively hire a lot more people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com