Ferk

Since the day community tags were introduced on Steam I have been systematically adding tags like FOSS / Open Source / etc. to the FOSS games hoping to one day see one of them actually work as filter tags on the store, yet they never ever did. And yet tags like "Snooker" with only 11 games can be used as filter...

At this point I'm almost convinced that Valve has purposely blocklisted those terms from the allowed tags (it's known that they do have a blocklist). So I've resigned myself to depend on the curator system, to find which FOSS games are on Steam from within the store page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38475471-Libre-Open-Source-Games (and they are more than 11...)

Real programmers use C-x butterfly

Yes, but you know what I did? nothing, I just have the program exclusively accept lowercase doom.wad

This means it became annoying for the user. The problem shifted and now it's the end-user the one with the responsibility to read the manual and do the work. A lot of people just get a DOOM.WAD, put it there and are surprised it doesn't work.

And there are many many programs that are doing the same thing in many similar situations. In fact, in the Linux world, most software pushes this to the end user. So this is just as much of a problem for users as it is for programmers.

At the end of the day, the question should not be: is it more complexity for the user or for the programmer? ..the question should be: what's the end cause making it complex? is there a way it can be made simpler?

This is the same for every problem. Often user-friendliness is a tradeoff, most user-friendly software I've used keeps so much complexity within that it becomes annoyingly slow and inefficient. I'd rather use the terminal for file management than wait for the GUI file browser to finish loading my huge remote storage directories.

But then you are not getting rid of the complexity, you are just forcing programs to become more complex/inefficient.

I experienced this with the doom libretro core, which is meant to be portable and have minimal dependencies... so if I need it to automatically find DOOM.WAD/ doom.wad/Doom.WAD/etc in a directory I would either have to add a globbing library as dependency to handle this case and have it fetch [Dd][Oo][Oo][Mm].[Ww][Aa][Dd], manually check for each possible case, or list the entire directory (I hope you don't have a library of a million wads!) and compare each file (after upper/lower) just to find the one with the right name. And that could be a real pain for embedded devices with low I/O or if there's a remote storage layer behind.

I'm with you, and not just from a "human" perspective. Also when writing small programs meant to be relatively lean/simple it can be a problem when the user expects it to find a particular file regardless of its case (will it be DOOM.WAD or doom.wad? Doom.wad? Doom.WAD? ... guess it'll have to be [Dd][Oo][Oo][Mm].[Ww][Aa][Dd] and import some globbing library as extra dependency... that, or list the whole directory regardless its size and lower/upper every single filename until you find a matching one...)

I agree that we shouldn't worry (at least for the moment), but I think the main reason is the lack of locks, both when it comes to hardware (no locked bootloader) and software (getting root access is trivial, so you can uninstall whatever components you might not like and with updates not being mandatory you can keep it under your control).

With SteamOS, you already have an ecosystem, which is Steam. There is (at least for now) a clear distinction between Hardware manufacturer and software provider.

Currently, the only officially sanctioned version of SteamOS is the one that is shipped with Steam Deck (even though that might change soon), which is hardware sold by Valve (ie, the same company making the software). Meanwhile, most people using Android don't use Pixel / Nexus devices and thus their hardware is not being sold by Google.

So I'd say this depends entirely on how do the new manufacturers wanna go about it when it comes to offering their own custom versions of SteamOS. At the moment this is ok because Valve has been acting as a "benevolent dictator" and they have essentially had a monopoly on SteamOS 3 devices until now. Once that monopoly breaks (and if Valve actually allows third parties to ship their own customizations) we'll have to see what kind of control will their partners want to assert over it.

Awesome!

I assume it's storing the images and assets in base64 format, so it might get quite big. I always wished there was a standard way to package a website in a single compressed file. Sort of like an epub / ODF kind of format that keeps the website layout. But this is the next best thing.

And if looking for Rust alternatives, there's dua.

Particularly user friendly when called in interactive mode with dua i, you can navigate the tree immediately as it populates and calculates space progressively.