That falls under being ignored. Most people will only realise it’s a big deal if enough noise is made about it. Sony would maybe lose 10% sales from people quietly quitting, but still profit from the decision long-term. Right now the news article was only written, and we’re only talking talking about it, because enough people made a fuss. That’s how protests work; they’re not convenient or polite.

I don’t buy their games or consoles, personally. But I also don’t call Sony to complain, so I’m very much an outsider’s perspective on this.

I always thought this stance to be interesting, because it reminds me of soldiers in a conflict. The arguments are that the enemy rank and file are just doing their jobs, they have a family, the actual evil bigwig is out of reach, etc.

But also, are you just going to do nothing and let them steamroll you? They’re choosing to continue to work at that business, and are the only “frontline” that you can interact with. The fact that the business made a policy specifically addressing this common complaint, means it actually reached the ears of someone in power.

I’m not encouraging violence or anything of course. But, by design, there’s nobody else to voice your displeasure to. The only other option is to quietly accept their changes and be ignored.

If they didn’t want angry people calling, maybe they shouldn’t make terrible decisions?

Note: The images in this piece are dithered to reduce bandwidth

Wow, someone else who still does this! 15KB PNG images, in 2026!

TL;DR they configured uBlock to block almost everything, which breaks most websites, then only allowed the bare minimum to get things working again

What do you say after running them over?

By that I mean you have to be careful which libraries you use. There’s a good chance that a System.* or random NuGet package will either completely fail to run on Linux, or be horribly buggy if you force it to work via build flags. In fact, they’ve completely removed the build flag in .NET 7+, System.Drawing.EnableUnixSupport. It used to be supported via libgdiplus.

I would expect .Net to be fully compatible with Linux out of the box. Especially system libraries. You can’t say that you support cross-compatibility, and then deprecate cross-compatibility of system libraries; that’s just insane.

I don’t remember the exact details because it’s been several years, but it was far more than just System.Drawing.Common that broke on Linux after updating to .Net 6. Some breaking changes were undocumented, only appearing later in GitHub issues. Some were buried in sub pages or individual library documentation.

In the patch notes they even had the gall the claim that our business use case doesn’t statistically exist, and we can just drop in replace SkiaSharp; which was absolutely not the case. It was an unmitigated fucking disaster, even accounting for rolling back to .Net 3.1 for a few months while we sort it out and wait for critical 3rd party libraries to accommodate the change. Before anyone says it, yes we actually paid handsomely for our critical third party libraries; we didn’t mooch off open source and whinge about it. Even so, it never really worked right after that change. A hundred small things, like differences in how SkiaSharp draws differently and handles edge cases. In an enterprise application, it was a big problem.

More reading: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/compatibility/core-libraries/6.0/system-drawing-common-windows-only

Firefox does only exist because Google pays for it. Google is Mozilla’s single greatest financial contributor. They’re essentially keeping a competitor on life support to avoid breaching antitrust laws. Essentially, the argument is that as long as Firefox exists, Google isn’t a monopoly.

However, at any time, Google could simply stop paying, and Firefox would quickly die. Laws change.

Yeah… I didn’t want to include 430MB of bloat in my bundle to each end user though for one feature, so I did it the hard way instead: Manually editing document files using XPATH. Maybe I’m too old school, if everyone’s shipping 1GB+ apps like it’s nothing nowadays.

Looks like it’s some kind of dependency… seems very odd though, why is this included? Are they using it to handle .docx, .xlsx, etc files? I remember being tempted to do that once years ago when I ran into one of those Really Hard Problems that would take weeks to solve. I spent the weeks instead

The duality of Lem

Ideally, yes; but cross-platform drawing libraries are like unicorns nowadays. SkiaSharp would probably work, but it functions completely differently and would require a rewrite of the entire program, which is a big ask.

25% inaccuracy is crazy. Might as well use one of those online tools to guess it

People trading their Stablecoin for Bitcoin

Latest version of Paint.Net is 5.1.12. Pinta got forked from 3.36. Would be cool if Pinta could just pull down 2 major versions’ worth of features. Instead, Paint.Net’s author resorted to vibe coding 180k unsupervised lines of code as a dodgy semi functional compatibility layer

From the article:

Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it’s clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET’s use. And I can’t just “disable” the use of Direct2D. So, instead, Paint.NET now has an internal, from-scratch, clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D that it uses on WINE.

This was written by our good friend Claude. […] Most of this code is, as they say, “vibe coded.” By that I mean that it has not been thoroughly reviewed, it’s more “trust me bro” style. I cannot possibly review 180,000 lines of code, it’s just way way way too much.

If you don’t like AI, if you hate AI, if you refuse to run any software that AI touches, if your favorite pejorative is now “slop” … fine. Whatever. I’m not going to try and convince you otherwise. You’re entitled to your own opinion, I don’t care. But keep that talk out of here. You don’t have to use this. It’s clearly not for you.

So basically they hallucinated up a replacement for the Direct2D as a Linux compatibility layer.

.Net hasn’t been Linux-friendly for quite a while. Especially since 2023 or so there’s been a major shift away from cross-compatibility, which was a very strange decision to me. .Net is no longer a Linux friendly or cross-platform development environment; which to me was it’s biggest strength. So I’m honestly not surprised that there’s more components that are just straight up completely incompatible with Linux. Non-Windows platforms are now “second class citizens” in .Net land.

I remember vividly the moment when I upgraded a project from .Net 3.1 to .Net 6. Buried at the bottom of the patch notes, was a brief mention that some libraries (actually, a huge number of libraries) like System.Drawing are no longer supported on Linux. It was a catastrophe, causing so many random bugs and took literal months to recover from. For example, generating a PDF causing an entire web server to hang and use 100% resources. Entity Framework database connection quirks causing data loss and availability issues. Etc.

Yeah, this is one of the huge benefits of open source. Someone can just fork Paint.Net and make it Linux-compatible; zero work from the original developer, and everyone benefits. Instead, it’s a walled garden because that kind of behaviour was considered “stealing”; and then they have the nerve to complain about the workload after shutting everyone out. Like, yeah, that’s what happens if you try and do everything internally; it means you actually have to do everything yourself.

A lot of “reasonable consumers” got a nasty shock when Sony revoked their licences to content that they “purchased”. That’s really the true problem here. Nobody hates Steam for using a similar system, because they never revoke licences. I can even still re-download and play games that have been de-listed or taken down. Disappearing purchases is a big problem, it’s completely lost value for the consumer and free money for the business. One step removed from a scam.

There is some overlap. Can’t have privacy problems if everything’s encrypted and they have no access to your data in the first place

What about stranded on a deserted island a’la Cast Away?