It's important to note that not every research area ends up being a surface-language, and oftentimes research projects remain in-progress for a long time. There does exist a freely available research implementation of a 1ML interpreter (though slightly behind the language's formalization) offered by the author:
The thing is that this is a research prototype, not a real compiler. It's not usable in the same degree as a language like SML or Haskell. There is a lot more work beyond a grammar that goes into creating a compiler for a high level language.
One thing that helps a lot is somewhat isolated compilation units.
That means that most of the rest of the project is largely irrelevant besides some basic type information.
If your parsing context is small enough, you may be able to run a mostly complete parsing pipeline on the current unit, and inject a "code completion" token, where you make predictions of what can come next at that point (any token behind it is usually irrelevant).
That way you could still do a mostly vanilla compiler with auto complete, but supporting larger operations require much more state for the project.
>the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC
More and more it seems people don't even find it necessary for that.
I'm "the Linux friend" for a lot of my friends, and over the last year-ish a surprising number of them have asked about advice for switching to Linux. I've helped four people attempt the switch, and three out of the four have stuck with Linux so far.
All the damn developers keep turning off online play for Linux users though... I play two games a lot currently, Apex Legends and Battlefield 6, both block Linux players from online play thanks to their shitty kernel rootkits not supporting Linux.
Apex Legends at least was running fine on Steam Deck prior to november 2024 when they instituted this change, and I can tell you from personal experience it had very little impact on cheaters, which was their excuse for the change (supposedly most cheaters were connecting via Linux clients).
> supposedly most cheaters were connecting via Linux clients
I always find this so hard to believe, mainly because the majority of players are on Windows, which means that the market for cheats is there and statistically most likely to happen there.
I just don’t play games by devs that snub Linux. There are many to choose from.
The thing with Linux cheats is that they were significantly easier to make(you didn't have to think about bypassing the anticheat at all, you could just read the game's memory or LD_PRELOAD your cheat in), and a lot more were publicly available(in true FOSS fashion, a lot of Linux cheats were open-source). A cheat that could cost $30-$60 a month on Windows could be free as in freedom(and free beer) on Linux.
I'm sure the number probably changed a bit, but I can tell you for a fact it isn't like cheaters disappeared overnight just because they banned Linux clients.
yup i am too, steamdeck helped convert me fully. this year my goal is to move my main gaming desktop to linux with tiny spare ssd for windows to run the odd anticheat game on.
cachyos has been nearly flawless for a non-steam deck (gpd win mini 2). Upgrades broke my tv being set to the primary display under gamemode but that was an easy fix.
The other game changer (heh) was going all in on amd: cpu, integrated gpu, and discrete gpu via oculink.
Nvidia may be the best overall performance for gaming and ai workloads, it still doesn't play nice with linux gaming
I can't even be bothered to dual boot into Windows to game anymore. Wiped my Windows drive over the weekend so that it could be used as a snapshot drive. If the game doesn't work on Steam on Linux I'm not interested - simple as that.
Gaming is a smaller thing for me than the Adobe creative apps, especially Lightroom.
Granted, I could get that on Macintosh. But while their fans like to claim that Apple's engineering is all about usability, that hasn't been true for quite some time. It's now become a status/elitism thing (see, e.g., yesterday's conversation about Tahoe icons). And their UX model is very contrary to my way of thinking about things.
Unless you need compatibility with Adobe file formats, Free editing software works fine too. I've been using Darktable for about a decade. People bash on GIMP for not being able to do what Photoshop can, but it's because GIMP is built with the intent of being extended by the user. It can be extended to do what people complain that it cannot do. Kdenlive is good at filling the needs met by Premiere. I think the hardest Adobe application for me to recommend a portable alternative to is After Effects. Maybe Blender can be coaxed into filling some AE uses.
I strongly disagree. Have you used Lightroom in the last, say, two years?
They've had a revolutionary upgrade in their masking tools. ML models power automated, smart mask creation. For example, on a landscape photo I can get, with just a couple of clicks, separate masks for sky, water, land, foliage, structures, and natural ground. The power that this gives me to edit my photos is amazing. To the best of my knowledge, Darktable and others have nothing approaching this.
By large agree, the most recent years in lightroom have been some of it's most transformational. A lot of tasks that used to require going into PS have been borderline automated. Their more recent denoise methods as well have been nothing short of excellent.
Not that its perfect when 100% automated but it takes a fraction the time to adjust things towards perfection, no one misses doing it by hand.
Rapidraw does try to compete some having ML based masking but I gotta agree most the open source solutions have been lagging behind bigtime.
Users of creative apps are rarely also programmers capable of creating the extensions you mention. If the goal is getting people to switch to your application, open source or not, you need to provide a level of minimal functionality. What is minimal functionality varies from person to person and may include the way you interact with said functionality.
While Gimp and Krita are very useful and even usable for a lot of people... that doesn't mean it's a suitable replacement for the Adobe products. Some will get Affinity running with Wine... frankly it would be nice if there was an "easy gutton" to doing a lot of this. I'm not sure about the legalities of copying actual MS dll's from Windows for use with Wine even... even if yoou have a license, as I'm not a lawyer, which can impact the ability to make it easier to do/use.
It would be nice if more software at least got tested to run on Wine/Proton with closer to first party support. Bridging the gap between a full Linux version, and something that can at least run in Linux.
I get the joke, but I disagree. It mixed hardware with software in a weird way.
Macs are as much about the hardware than the software, and the OS is just another Unix variant. Much closer to Linux/BSD than Windows.
I like tech (no fear, I've been coding for 41 years at this point), but I don't like configuration, I'm a programmer, not IT, and also I heavily lean to getting shit done, so I prefer tools that don't get too much in my way.
I abandoned Linux on the desktop after I lost a battle with Linux audio. I can't freaking believe there's not a single thing that unifies everything, it's such a pain in the ass to setup right.
On notebooks it's a lost battle due to issues with power management that require way more fiddling that I'm willing to invest into.
I’m not sure what distro you used or how long ago this was - but I’ve been using Pop!_os as my general OS + dev env (and more recently switched off Windows to Bazzite for gaming) - and I’ve never once had to battle with audio or weird twiddling with settings to get stuff to work. In my experience - both have had the kind of out-of-the-box experience I’ve come to expect from Windows. If anything - Windows has required a lot more fiddling with settings and hunting down drivers as of late.
Try using a Bluetooth headset in online meetings. That's only the tip of the iceberg... Another is when you're trying to mix multiple inputs/outputs in Linux across various pro audio accessories, which only Mac seems to get right.
Work laptop on Ubuntu 20.04 with pipewire, I've used several bluetooth headsets over the years from all different brands and haven't had any issues across Google Meet, Zoom, or Teams.
Coworkers with wired headphones (also on Ubuntu, but I don't know if they switched to pipewire) tend to have problems regularly.
Usually PipeWire handles these situations better than PulseAudio, which is still the default audio daemon in many/most distributions.
To properly support Pro Audio you have to completely switch the audio stack to JACK - which I also used in MacOS a few years ago because Apple's audio stack wasn't up to the task as well.
It's more that Mac and Windows do better at auto-switching to mono+mic mode vs stereo audio mode than Linux in practice. If I don't manually switch in the audio settings it's problematic... I usually just use my webcam mic and keep my headset on stereo despite the reduced quality for others hearing me.
I use my Bluetooth headset on discord, slack, and google meet without any problems on Pop and Bazzite ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Funny enough - I have less problems with audio on Pop/Bazzite than my Mac (where my headset mic can be muted by flipping up - but is unable to unmute without power cycling the headset) or Windows (which cannot ever remember which device I want to use for which app).
I held off on switching to desktop Linux because of horror stories on places like HN. But it’s seriously not been my lived experience. I can only think that maybe these were problems 5+ years ago - or it’s folks that went with super customized Arch installs or something.
TBF, it's not as bad as it used to be.. the main issue is that unless I manually switch to mono mode before going into meetings, then back to stereo to listen to music after, I tend to have issues.
I mostly just use my webcam's mic, despite my headphones being better so I can leave my headset on bluetooth/stereo.
I do exactly the same as you. I wish that I didn't need windows for gaming, and things are getting better on that front, but my favorite game (AoE 2) works significantly better on windows than on wine :(
Valve saw exactly this scenario, because you're right: Windows isn't good for stability any more. Windows isn't good for driver compatibility anymore. Windows isn't good for being easy to do your own thing. It's only good for gaming...
> the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC
even this has gone away for me, exited first with Bazzite and am now on CachyOS. Still got a debloated Windows11 on a different SSD for when friends want to play games with kernel-level anticheat or other bs.
feels good to be free of Microsoft. work on a Mac, game on Linux, phones run Android.
Love cachyos. Such a great OS. Wanted to love bazzite, but it's got too many opinionated takes and rpm-ostree is a PITA. pacman does have its pitfalls, but aside from upgrades, it's been appliance-level stable for a 100% gaming laptop docked to my tv
yup...at first i thought, "at work i have to manage rpm-ostree servers, so why not use the same tech at home?", well, because the tech is freaking buggy, annoying and deprecated already (imagemode/bootc).
Bazzite also had strange issues with the XBOX controllers i use, those issues went away with CachyOS. in the end it doesn't matter that much, on both i use(d) KDE Plasma. GF also uses the PC with her own useraccount to play her games. overall very satisfied, can't complain.
don't lynch me, decided to go for the pretty standard instead of Sway or Hyprland, as i feared that this would bring more issues with gaming. maybe that's an irrational fear, who knows.
Bazzite is built using imagemode/bootc; is it not?
I'm trying to understand the "deprecated already" in your first paragraph. (All I know about rpm-ostree is from using and adminning a distro that relies on rpm-ostree. I.e., I don't know much.)
Here is my guess as to what you mean: Bazzite could continue to use imagemode and bootc while replacing rpm-ostree with something better, and maybe you'll give Bazzite another look after that happens.
Fedora Atomic and RHEL used to ship with rpm-ostree, new versions are now using bootc. the base philosophy is still to ship the OS as an image, but bootc goes more into layering like docker-images, so that you can deploy changes a bit more easily/dynamically.
they're different technologies with bootc being the new kid. bootc means "bootable containers". rpm-ostree has not much to do with containers and is more like managing your OS with git-logic.
forget about "imagemode", that's the marketing-term RedHat uses for bootc.
i imagine bazzite will migrate to bootc sooner or later, but of course that requires a new way to build and ship it.
The first paragraph of the home page of https://universal-blue.org/ ends with "We produce a diverse set of continuously delivered operating system images using bootc."
Another author explains: "Bazzite utilizes bootc to manage the base image for your system, pin specific versions, and perform rollbacks when needed. For systems with customized software via layered packages, rpm-ostree becomes essential for installing, upgrading, and managing those additions."
"Why do this? Each tool is chosen for its strengths: bootc offers robust control over base images, ensuring that your core system remains unchanged unless you explicitly update it, while rpm-ostree provides flexibility for managing additional software without compromising the integrity of the atomic base. This separation helps maintain stability and security. Bazzite uses bootc for managing system images and rpm-ostree for adding layered packages."
Of course, nothing I wrote contradicts your assertion that rpm-ostree "is freaking buggy, annoying", but it does cast doubt in my mind on your belief that bootc can by itself completely replace rpm-ostree.
I get ~weekly crashes using an Nvidia card with arch/hyprland, but honestly it's less problematic for me to deal with than windows updates. I can format and rebuild my machine from scratch in less time than windows takes to download and perform an update.
Flawless experience on non-nvidia hardware though.
That's why I keep using Gentoo and X11 to handle my three GPU setup. An Intel iGPU, an AMD dGPU on the same package as the Intel CPU and a RTX 4060 Ti eGPU connected through Thunderbolt.
Only have issues with it on my machine with an Nvidia card. Understand that it can be unstable and accept that when it happens - but with AMD/integrated graphics I don't have the same problem.
Either way, only serves to further the point that Linux is in a pretty good place and the experience should only be better on more stable options.
I don't have that problem with Arch+COSMIC, which has the tiling you get with Hyprland but without the overly complex configuration. You can also switch to floating windows with one button if needed.
I mean, macOS is not a serious OS either. It has worse error management/reporting than Windows - Microsoft at least give you the courtesy of pretending they're trying to help you resolve the issue with an indecipherable hex code and badly localised error message, that you may, if you're very lucky, be able to Google.
Apple give you a middle finger with a "Something went wrong" or just spins forever. No information whatsoever on what the problem is and how you could possibly debug it. Compete lack of tooling to help with that too.
Probably my favourite example was when it was giving me an error message of "A device is using too much power, try unplugging and replugging it". Which device? Which port? What is "too much"? HA, FUCK YOU. I spent hours trying to debug this (so there is a tool that can give you power use per USB device, but it's a point in time one). In the end rewired everything because it was just impossible to discover what the hell was its problem. Another fun one was trying to extend my macOS screen to an iPad, where the button just wasn't there. Why? What was I missing? Who knows.
> Probably my favourite example was when it was giving me an error message of "A device is using too much power, try unplugging and replugging it". Which device? Which port? What is "too much"?
Another fun one: “Updates are available. Do you want to install them?” What updates? What software is getting updates? What do they fix? No information, just a notification asking you whether you want to install vague updates.
I mostly agree with you. Now with proton/steamos, the only games that need windows are multiplayer games with kernel-level anticheat mechanisms (e.g., destiny 2).
For me the last one was Blade and Soul, and in the end, I dropped it rather than put up with it.
Even live-service games are less of a hassle than they used to be. BDO works well, Genshin works with occasionally having to update Proton, and the new shiny Where Winds Meet worked for me from the first day (never even tried it on Windows :P)
I think in the last 6 months, I've dual-booted for pretty much these things:
* To install a new motherboard's RGB-tweak utility because it doesn't work right in OpenRGB yet. Ran it once to pick settings, then it seemed to write to NVRAM since it's been stuck that way now.
* To use ham radio programming software that was clearly written by a single hobbyist and I didn't expect to work on anything but happy-path Windows systems.
* To try a weird specialty keyboard with a nonstandard card-reader (most of them just appear as normal HID keyboards, this one was a custom USB endpoint which apparently emulated a serial device with the right software. In the end, it didn't work well in Windows either-- the software was apparently mostly Win7-and-below.
* To deal with an old scanner that the vendor provides a Linux software package for, but only as a binary .deb that didn't seem to work well on Void. (Problem solved by picking up a used scanner explicitly supported by SANE for $10 at the Goodwill)
Battlefield, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, PUBG, Rainbow 6 Siege, Fortnite, Valorant, League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, GTA5 online (and likely gta6 online).
Personally, only TFT is a blocker for me, and you can get an inferior version working on linux, but it only takes you playing one of those games for it to be a blocker.
Games "often not working under windows" is cope linux advocates tell themselves to convince themselves there is no reason for anyone to have windows installed. Its more the exception rather than then norm, and is usually the older games where their wine setup could be used on windows for the same effect.
It's not the "can't" necessarily, it's about friction, I could get it working on linux, but then I'd probably be just fiddling with settings way longer than I do today.
Current Windows gaming experience is almost like a console, just play and forget, (if you just use your machine for that).
Another potential issue is that I have games in all the major launchers (and a GamePass subscription), and the only one that works reasonably well on Linux is Steam.
I installed Bazzite just last month, it's set-and-forget. Zero hardware / driver issues, everything autoconfigured.
Didn't even need to download steam.
Absolutely shocked me how smooth the out-of-box experience was compared to even Windows 10.
To my further surprise, I found my game library's compatibility on Bazzite was stronger than Windows 10 somehow. (Some old games like Moonbase Commander don't launch on Windows 10)
Agreed - Bazzite is the kind of set-and-forget level of quality I expect for a gaming appliance. I haven’t needed to twiddle with a single setting to get any games I’ve been playing (Stalker 2, Kingdom Come 2, Doom The Dark Ages, Arc Raiders, Helldivers, etc).
FWIW - GOG and Epic games play just fine via the Heroic app on Bazzite. I’ve only played a few games from those platforms so far - but it’s been as seamless as playing games off steam in my experience.
Ah I see, people don't remember the time where most games just released on console, because it was the biggest target group. This time will come back. Like it or not. People won't buy a pc for 2k.
Information work has always been weird (software, writing, composing music, etc.)
Software is not a thing in the same sense a chair is a thing, making copies cost nothing and that has two effects: you can build much more complex things, copies are dirt cheap.
It's the old discussion in the 90s of bits vs atoms. When you copy a bit, the original bit stays there, nothing is lost, so we implement artificial scarcity (in the form of copyrights) to encourage production.
Copying bits is easy, almost effort free, once you make one of the thing, making millions is cheap and easy, no matter how hard it was to make the first one.
It's not the same with a chair, making the first is marginally harder than making the second, but the difficulty of making copies doesn't radically diminish after you made the first one.
Integrated circuits, 3D printed stuff, and so on, are in the middle, they're atoms, but behave much closer to bits.
Once you make the first one, making more is relatively cheap and easy.
If you think of complexity, the easier something is to copy and tweak, the faster the complexity increases, that is a side effect of sharing, where more minds can improve on the thing.
Software is at one end of the complexity spectrum, and chairs are at the other.
Seriously? UX in Linux is awful, there's no single desktop metaphor. You have hundreds of distros each with their quirks. There is no "Linux" other than the kernel.
There's a lot more consistency in the Apple ecosystem.
Don't get me started on the other crap with Linux distros: power management doesn't work, audio barely works, heck even though both Linux and MacOS use CUPS for printing, in MacOS it works way better.
But Linux is getting better each year (seriously, KDE is amazing, Gnome works well if you like it), made by hundreds of independent people, while Mac is getting worse, made by one focused company.
I've had no problem whatsoever with 2 laptops regarding power management or audio.
Get a major distro and major software if you don't want to wander into problems.
Judging from this article, Linux seems to have more consistency between the thousands of applications all built by different people with no guidelines than MacOS right now.
At least half of those complaints on the article have standard, close to universally agreed icons.
Your experiences are not universal. I'm sorry that happened to you, but I've personally never had a power management, audio, or printing problems with Linux in 17 years of using it.
Having no single desktop is a huge bonus. If you don't like one distro, you might like another. "Consistency" is a poor way to restate, "Windows or MacOS might be bad, but at least someone can unilaterally make it worse against your will."
I'd rather choose a drink from a soda fountain than get a more consistent flavor from a urinal. But to each their own.
It looks like an old comment from 5 years ago. I bet you haven't tried Linux lately. Yes there are many flavors of this OS, and that's alright. Everyone will find what it needs. As for the other crap that doesn't work: again, install and use any popular distro. You'll see for yourself. Most recent hardware is perfectly supported and things just work™.
The other way is true too. I’m reading for about 20 years quite often that Linux is perfect at last, no issues exist at all, and it improved immensely the year before, because “back then” (ie one year before) it was terrible. And of course if you mention a problem under an article mentioning problems, you obviously just somebody who doesn’t know anything. You just need to “configure” it bro, because a famously unreliable thing cannot be unreliable, because it worked for them in a completely different setup. And probably I will read these in 5 years too.
CUPS has "just worked" on Ubuntu for me for like, as long as I can remember. If you use only GTK apps and either gnome or cinnamon, things are a lot more consistent than Windows (like, windows itself, not even 3rd party stuff)
Whereas on my laptop and my distro it works. And a lot of other people probably feel the same way. I use Linux at work and have never had issues with it in the last 6 years. Prior to that, yes.
The word "stable" literally does not appear in the comment to which I was responding.
Maybe I'm just scarred from laboring much too hard in the 90s and aughts to get desktop and laptop Linux working, but here is my current take:
- Yes there is fragmentation. Perhaps there are not hundreds of Linux distros but, off the top of my head: Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Rocky, Alma, Arch, Manjaro, openSUSE, Kali, PopOS, elementary OS, Zorin, Gentoo, Alpine, NixOS are all viable options. Next, pick a desktop: GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXQt, Cinnamon, MATE, Budgie, Pantheon, Deepin, Enlightenment. Each has different UX conventions, configuration systems, and integration quality. There is no single Linux desktop and its bewildering.
- Power management now "works" in the sense that, when you close your laptop lid and re-open it, yay! the machine (mostly) comes back to life instead of just crashing. It took us at least 15 years to get to that point. However, PM does not work in the sense that battery like on my M4 Macbook Air is literally 2x what I would get from a comparably priced Linux laptop. Part of that is better hardware, but _a lot_ of that is better power management.
- Audio now mostly works without glitching, just like it did in OS X circa 2002. But God help you if you're not using a well-supported setup and find yourself manually having to dick around with kernel drivers, ALSA, Pulseaudio. (Just typing these words gives me PTSD.) Here is a typical "solution" from *within the past year* for audio troubles in Linux: https://www.linux.org/threads/troubleshooting-audio-problems.... There are thousands more threads like this to be found online. For typical, 99%-of-the-time use cases, experiences of this sort are rarely if ever encountered on Mac.
- Printing is arguably the closest because, as previously noted, they are both using the same underlying system. But printing, thanks to AirPrint, is still smoother and more pain-free on Mac than on Linux.
- Don't even get me started on Bluetooth.
It's not that I'm anti-Linux, I wanted sooo bad for Linux on the desktop and laptop to succeed, for a variety of reasons. But Steve J came along 25-30 years and completely pulled that rug out from under us.
It doesn't have to be production grade, just as a communication tool.
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