I think any movement is gradual and for it to be significant it would need to be sustained, people love dramatic sudden changes but it's going up against decades of momentum. As you mentioned mobiles, that took a long time to transition and that was with a starting point where a large proportion already had a non-smart phone along with the decisions they made about replacing aging devices.
The point about "fighting the last war" is interesting as there's a lot of uncertainty right now about how personal computing with a PC is going to look in the next few years. The angle I've been wondering about with the pressures on consumer hardware pricing/availability is if manufacturers can use it as an opportunity to establish new standards if/when it's easier to buy new again (eg, a major ATX revision/rethink) or if they keep following the same template. Over on the software side, what could a non-stagnant OS offer that would be attractive to consumers, what can consumer/desktop linux do that isn't following windows/macos, what would create a need for a mirror image of WINE as linux is leading with new features first?
The Linux community needs to embrace being something for the enthusiast.
If you look at things that have got people interested in Linux. It wasn't just that Windows 11 is awful, because a lot of people just install Windows 11 LTSC and call it a day.
Hyprland was/is something that excites people. There was a lot of hype around Omarchy (I don't care about the guys' politics, and please don't bring it up; I find the discussion tedious, and it goes nowhere). Ricing your desktop and terminal can be fun and everyone done it when the first started mucking about with stuff and broke their whole install. "I use Arch BTW" became a meme, much like "The Glorious PC Master race". While I think projects like Debian, Mint, etc., are great at bringing users a boring but stable desktop, you need hype to gain people's attention.
A tangent to this which annoys me is not specifically windows, but the way the ecosystem has evolved over the years, by guidance/enforcement or lack thereof from MS. Unless you're very careful about what applications you install and how you manage/monitor them, you can end up with a lot of background applications loaded each boot, each doing some combination of non-centralized updating itself or applications it manages, preloading, quick launch, etc.
I'm pretty sure some versions of DOS had a defrag tool, or at least windows 9x had a DOS mode equivalent where you could see the block map getting moved around.
And there's an example of one of the contradictions of modern PC gaming, for as much as it'll get hyped as a mostly open platform with a lot of freedom (in comparison to consoles), there's an awful lot that has coalesced on a small number of services over the years where an awful lot of value can vanish instantly if someone makes a decision you don't agree with or a service gets disrupted/closed.
We still have the ability to use a different platform though. It's entirely up to the users to choose which services and programs to use to accomplish their goal. With consoles, you just get what you get, and have the privilege of paying a monthly subscription just to play multiplayer. When the demand for an alternative gets high enough, one will appear, because we have that ability.
Depends what they're used for, if it's for lightweight-demands mobile communications and simple tasks then I'd definitely agree. However the phone has become the personal computer for many and covers a broad range of tasks, let alone before you consider demanding users.
If you've got one device for all your computing then you want something more capable, I think there's more scope for variation is when it's in conjunction with another device, mobile plus your choice of watch/tablet/laptop/desktop/etc. that doesn't necessarily have to be on your person or quickly accessible, task dependent.
For people who use the phone for everything, this is great. But I hope we will start to see at least some smaller options return to the market for those who just want a simple communication device / have small hands.
I recently booted up an old Samsung S10, and the size is just chef's kiss.
Wow this is amazing. I can't believe shoutcast still exists too!! I have fond memories of hosting a shoutcast stream at very low bandwidth over dialup!
There seems to be a few decent apps in F-droid and lots of stations with no ads and very specific genres like just depressive black metal!
I'd add the gold rush for hardware to mine crypto coins, depending what component you're looking at.
What stands out to me is that you can't rely on pricing acting predictably any more, it used to be that when a new product/generation released there would be a few weeks of high demand/short supply, but when that was satisfied it would be a nice graceful decline over its lifespan until the next generation was nearly ready to come out and take its place in the market. You can look at old PCPartPicker trends graphs via archive.org to see this over and over. Now it feels like trying to catch a falling knife and it really raises the threshold for whether I actually need an upgrade versus other areas of my life where I could spend.
One challenge I see is that to work well and stand above 'easy' implementations the game would need to provide a rich context for the AI to exist in and interact with. Skyrim is a richly detailed world with an engine that allows that level of interaction, especially as it builds upon earlier elder scrolls games. Then there's the factor of whether commercial studios with the capacity to make that world in the first place (which has been a major draw for players) will invest further budget into AI to add more value, and if they have options to see a return on that investment via the main purchase price or additional costs.
On the bottom [0], youtuber/cooling specialist/tuner der8auer did an interview with an intel engineer a few years ago. One of the points they bring up is that it's not a pure gain to have less silicon between the logic and the next interface to another material conducting heat away as the silicon itself acts as a conductor/spreader, i.e. sideways as well as upwards, so there's a balance.
The Bethesda Morrowind-onward RPGs had their engine roots in Gamebyro, which was fairly widely used by other developers as well. That said I think there's a question about where the value comes from, as their customization to it 25+ years ago and what it enables their game/toolkit to do has clearly given them a 'special sauce' that hasn't been replicated.
Also upthread Source was mentioned which has id's Quakeworld/Q2 engine as an ancestor, via HL1 GoldSrc.
The point about "fighting the last war" is interesting as there's a lot of uncertainty right now about how personal computing with a PC is going to look in the next few years. The angle I've been wondering about with the pressures on consumer hardware pricing/availability is if manufacturers can use it as an opportunity to establish new standards if/when it's easier to buy new again (eg, a major ATX revision/rethink) or if they keep following the same template. Over on the software side, what could a non-stagnant OS offer that would be attractive to consumers, what can consumer/desktop linux do that isn't following windows/macos, what would create a need for a mirror image of WINE as linux is leading with new features first?
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