Linux has 2.6% on the Steam Hardware Survey.

I can’t explain the exact reasons why, but let me provide some examples.

In Cities: Skylines (which is natively supported on Linux), I had two mods installed that had different behaviour depending on whether Steam was installed through a Flatpak or whether it was installed as a native package. One of them needed to access a system installation of Mono and call it (which sounds like virus behaviour, I know), and this functionality would be blocked by Flatpak’s containerisation. The second mod was a map-drawing mod which would create maps of the in-game city and put them in a specified folder in your home directory. On the native package Steam, it would put the files in the default folder, but crashes if you tried to change the directory. Otherwise, it worked as expected. On the Flatpak Steam, it would allow you to select the directory, but no files would actually be written there. It’s easy to just blame bad code written by amateur developers, but clearly it’s a case of the same code resulting in different behaviour depending on variables like Steam’s installation method.

Also, the Sims 4, which is not native and runs through Proton, worked pretty reliably on X11 but occasionally crashes mid-game using Wayland. It was not perfectly stable in either case, but it crashed far less frequently on X11 compared to Wayland.

This is not a game, but Firefox supports touchpad gestures on my laptop on Wayland, but not on X11.

That’s what they did, though, except the only distro on that list is Steam OS. And now people complain.

The Steam Deck comes in essentially one hardware configuration with one operating system complying to one set of standards. Linux users have a higher-than-average tendency to do weird, nonstandard shit on their computers and then complain when it breaks something. On Windows, Steam OS, and Mac, if you test it on maybe 5 different configurations, you’re done. With Linux, you have to test at least four different distros (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch), two different packaging formats for Steam (Flatpak, native package), and two windowing systems (X.org, Wayland). Plus the proprietary NVIDIA drivers along with open-source drivers. That’s already 32 combinations for 2% market share.

I took a screenshot of this page

(Screenshot removed because it takes forever to load and is not interesting enough to waste bandwidth on)

I am connected to a 4K monitor and this picture is also at 3775 × 2119. The total file size:

12.1 MB

I have never had a screenshot exceeding 40 MB. That is humongous.

There are eight genders: null, undefined, false, NaN, 0, “0”, {}, and “”.

Did any distro give concrete reasons for why they have actively chosen not to package it, or perhaps they just haven’t given it much thought yet?

This is not what I would consider a “political reason”. A political reason would be something like refusing to package it because of what political party Howard supports.

There is plenty of software you’ll find in these repositories that aren’t under the GPL. CMake uses BSD, the Apache web server uses the eponymous Apache license, LibreOffice and Firefox use MPL, Godot and Bitcoin Core use the MIT license, and I’m sure there are plenty of other software licenses that I haven’t thought of yet.

If the set of all strings of composite length is a regular language, you can use that to prove the set of all strings of prime length are also a regular language.

But it’s also easy to prove that the set of language of strings of prime length is not regular, and thus the language of strings of composite length also can’t be regular.

A more formal proof.

You got downvoted here but you’re absolutely right. It’s easy to prove that the set of strings with prime length is not a regular language using the pumping lemma for regular languages. And in typical StackExchange fashion, someone’s already done it.

Here’s their proof.

Claim 1: The language consisting of the character 1 repeated a prime number of times is not regular.

A further argument to justify your claim—

Claim 2: If the language described in Claim 1 is not regular, then the language consisting of the character 1 repeated a composite number of times is not regular.

Proof: Suppose the language described in Claim 2 is regular if the language described in Claim 1 is not. Then there must exist a finite-state automaton A that recognises it. If we create a new finite-state automaton B which (1) checks whether the string has length 1 and rejects it, and (2) then passes the string to automaton A and rejects when automaton A accepts and accepts when automaton A rejects, then we can see that automaton B accepts the set of all strings of non-composite length that are not of length 1, i.e. the set of all strings of prime length. But since the language consisting of all strings of prime length is non-regular, there cannot exist such an automaton. Therefore, the assumption that the language described in Claim 2 being regular is false.

Average Matt Parker code

“at least 2 characters repeated [at least] twice” implies the string’s length is divisible by a number greater than 1.

Yeah but it’s just so tempting… It validates so many inputs so easily…

They said—

A line with exactly 0 or 1 characters, or a line with a sequence of 1 or 3 or more characters, repeated at least twice

Note—

…or a line with a sequence of 1 or 3 or more characters, repeated at least twice

It should be—

…or a line with a sequence of 2 or more characters, repeated at least twice

The regex in the post will match “abab”. Their original description (line 2 of this comment) will not match “abab”.

It’s a line with a sequence of two or more characters repeated at least twice.

Maybe someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Wayland’s security model intentionally prevent this type of “tampering” with another application’s display?

No, what I said is true if you use zero-based numbering. But when communicating with others in English, the label “first” refers to the element with the smallest index. In zero-based numbering, the label “zeroth” refers to the element with the lowest index. It’s just not the default in English, but you can definitely use zero-based numbering in English if you’re willing to edit the configuration files.

That’s because you use English, a language where ordinals traditionally begin at one.

My argument is purely pedantic. Pedantry is the lifeblood of programmer “humour”.

I’m not arguing that we should adopt zero-based numberingin real-life human applications. I am arguing that in zero-based numbering, the label “zeroth” refers to the same ordinal as “first” in one-based numbering. I am poking fun at the conversion between human one-based numbering and computers’ zero-based numbering. That is why I am saying it should be called zeroth(); because human language should adapt to match the zero-based numbering their tools use. Whether I actually mean what I say—well, I leave that up to you.

It does not matter why indexes start from zero in computing. The memory offset argument is only salient if you are using it as an argument for why computers should use zero-based numbering. It is not an argument against the properties of zero-based numbering itself.