Short answer: Whales.

Long answer: Watch the South Park episode on the topic. They explain it in detail. It’s titled “Freemium Isn’t Free”.

Need to enshittify it enough to make the AI features feel like an improvement.

I would be very surprised if they wouldn’t fix all 50 filesystems.

In all projects I have worked on (which does not include the Linux kernel) submitting a merge request with changes that don’t compile is an absolute no-go. What happens there is, that the CI pipeline runs, fails, and instead of a code review the person submitting the MR gets a note that their CI run failed, and they should fix it before re-opening the MR.

That’s a very good point. I hadn’t considered potential lack of domain knowledge at all. In that case Rust might even help, because it’s easier to write interfaces that can’t be used wrong - so that even someone without the needed domain knowledge might be able to fix compile issues without breakage.

Behind all the negative tone there is a valid concern though.

If you don’t know Rust, and you want to change internal interfaces on the C side, then you have a problem. If you only change the C code, the Rust code will no longer build.

This now brings an interesting challenge to maintainers: How should they handle such merge requests? Should they accept breakage of the Rust code? If yes, who is then responsible for fixing it?

I personally would just decline such merge requests, but I can see how this might be perceived as a barrier - quite a big barrier if you add the learning cliff of Rust.

Points that I would gladly agree upon - but it seems the Wikipedia authors don’t.

I am not knowledgeable enough to draw a definite line what counts as functional and what doesn’t - so I chose to go with whatever Wikipedia says… Even though I dislike it.

I know, from a mathematics standpoint it does not make sense, but from how the term is used nowadays in programming it does: Those languages allow to compose functions, pass functions as parameters, return functions, etc.

Truth has been spoken.

Except that Kotlin is functional (just like Rust, C++, Visual Basic, JavaScript,…). It is, however, not Pure Functional (like Haskell or Lean4 would be - if you haven’t checked out Lean4, I can recommend it, great fun).

(Sauce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages_by_type#Functional_languages)

Oh, and just in the moment I hit send, I remembered another gem from the olden times:

Unreal World: Basically the survival game. 99% of today’s survival games are just a pale shadow of this. I mean, nowadays there are even “survival” games without hunger mechanics or proper simulation of wounds… No, this is not one of those easy mode survival games. This is Fantasy Finland, and it’s the Fantasy Iron Age. Available for free or, if you want updates faster, also for money on Steam.

If I weren’t currently at work and would have time to think about the answer, I could probably come up with more titles, but those are the top 2 that come to mind, if I ignore cRPGs (at least that’s how I read your “avoiding final fantasy-esque” requirement):

Settlers 2: It’s new enough to still look decent by today’s standards, and has amazing game design. Available at GoG.

Star Control 2: One of the best early open world games. The graphics have definitely aged by today’s standard, but the humour hasn’t. Or maybe it has, but just a bit. Available for free and open source.

Just look at the trailer. Of course there is still some animation jank, but the overall visuals are just stunning.

It’s so uncanny valley that I might feel bad for deleting the pool ladders (or whatever the equivalent of that is in inZOI).

I would like to answer Vagrus, as that is what I would want to play.

However, I spent way too much of my spare time playing Lean4, and that isn’t even supposed to be a game!

Almost all the rest of my gaming time goes into Palworld multiplayer with my wife. What left about 1 hour for Vagrus last week…

And for it to be a worthwhile saving in low memory or storage situations, further constraints need to be met too. For instance, you would need to compile your own standard library, or go fully no-std…

I wanted to play Baldurs Gate 3 multiplayer with my wife, but couldn’t convince her. She really doesn’t like turn-based combat, and the game has too much dialogue for her taste…

So, we are now playing Palworld instead. It’s a lot of fun in multiplayer, but still quite grindy.

Xbox Series X/S.

It isn’t even particularly bad by itself, but compared to its predesessors (Xbox One and Xbox 360) the Xbox Series X/S gamepad is a clear step back when it comest to build quality (just try pressing the D-Pad buttons without thinking “this is cheaply made”), and that comparison is what makes me hate it.

And what adds insult to injury is that the quite expensive Elite version of the controller is just as cheaply built as the regular model…

Technically I’m still playing “Vagrus - The Riven Realms”, but I didn’t play much lately, since I rediscovered my love for the Lean4 programming language and am now playing around with a formally validated heap again.

Not really that big of a deal, but Baldur’s Gate 3 can be launched with the --skip-launcher command line parameter to, well, skip the launcher.

I wanted to be a bit more productive in my spare time, but I have made a huge mistake:
I started playing Vagrus - The Riven Realms again.

The world building in Vagrus is excellent. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic fantasy Roman empire, and there is a massive amount of text that details the world, and the people living in it. There is so much to read, that the devs even thought it necessary (and rightfully so) to display a warning about the sheer amount of text on the game’s startup screen, with the suggestion to refund it if one doesn’t enjoy a lot of reading. Sooo, of course this is the perfect game for me - or would be if I had more spare time.

The game is a mixture of trading sim and role playing game. You play a vagrus (a caravan leader), and travel the land trading wares, transporting passengers, spreading gossip and doing missions for different factions, you also have a lot of story elements that you can (and should) follow. There is turn-based combat, and during story events there are plenty of skill checks.

The game is relatively difficult, due to its interwoven mechanics. You need to calculate relatively tightly in order to make a profit, but if you loose people in combat, not having reserves might lead into a morale-loss and hunger death spiral… Also, due to the game’s grim settings, the choices one faces are more often than not to either do what is right, or to survive.

Acquisitions felt kinda cool when Microsoft was dishing them out like nobody’s business prior to the pandemic.

No, it did not. Consolidation usually is bad for employees and customers, and anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the last 150 years has had plenty of opportunities to observe this.

I have been using Linux for more than 15 years and would consider myself a semi-advanced user, but that thing in the screenshot - it scares me.