Man the distro breakdown is an even bigger mess than normal:
Feb 2026:
31.58% Other
23.83% SteamOS Holo 64 bit
9.07% ArchLinux 64 bit
8.59% CachyOS 64 bit
6.62% Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit
5.79% Bazzite 64 bit
5.26% Freedesktop SDK 25.08
3.82% Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit
2.83% Ubuntu 24.04.03 LTS 64 bit
2.59% Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit
March 2026:
25.64% Other
24.48% SteamOS Holo 64 bit
17.60% 0 64 bit
8.78% Arch Linux 64 bit
8.01% 64 bit
6.90% Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit
3.58% Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit
1.90% Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit
1.67% Ubuntu 25.10 64 bit
1.45% Manjoro Linux 64 bit
I'm guessing that "0 64 bit" and "64 bit" are CachyOS and Bazzite, as I would be surprised to see either of those fall off the list given their current popularity. It is also interesting to see the flatpack installs (Freedesktop SDK) fall off the list.
I really wish that Valve would increase the number of distros they report, or stop breaking out individual versions. The purpose of having multiple versions is to see how quickly people are upgrading and when to stop supporting older ones, but the current presentation doesn't actually let you do that since there is so much churn in which releases make the top 10 cut.
No, the growth in Linux in the Steam Hardware survey over the last two years has little to do with the Steam Deck. When the deck was first released it had a big impact, topping out at 45% of all Linux installs in May 2024, but since then the growth has been due to other Linux distros, bringing Steam OS down to 25% of Linux installs today.
If you plotted it from zero, then a horrible service and a great service would be indistinguishable. Their SLA for enterprise customers is 99.9%. The low end of that chart is 5x that amount downtime. It is a reasonable scale for the range people are concerned about and it looks bad because it is bad.
SLS is required to get Orion to the moon, but there are other options for LEO tests. Exploration Flight Test-1 was performed on a Delta IV Heavy, and Falcon Heavy is also capable of launching Orion to LEO (and now New Glenn, although that wouldn't have been an option at the time NASA needed to start work on another Orion test).
The Ninth Circuit court of appeals understood correctly what the primary use of Betamax would be, but they believed that personal home recording was not fair use, and was thus copyright infringement. They interpreted the law as only allowing libraries to record TV or radio broadcasts.
The Supreme Court ruling for this case found that time-shifting was fair use, but only by a narrow 5-4 margin. Fair use could have gone in a completely different direction over the last 40 years if just one judge had voted differently on Betamax.
We have to remember that at the time of the decision, there really wasn't any source of things to copy with a Betamax recording device besides commercial broadcast TV and other copyrighted materials.
Camcorders and such devices where you could make your own content were very rare, if available at all.
This speaks to first principles. I don't want judges making law - and any good judge doesn't want to make law. Laws are from elected legislatures. Of course this is all wishful thinking.
If a judge had ruled differently in the Betamax case, we'd still have the ability to vote in representatives who'd enact a law that explicitly gave us the right to record for personal use. Judges should only have power to decide what a law means in situations where it's not already clear how or if the law applies.
Isn't "judges making law" a key feature of common law systems? IANAL, obviously, I would know the answer to such a basic question if I were. But this is my understanding, and given that this case is in the US and the US is based on common law, I'm genuinely curious if you're advocating the US change to civil law?
Special interest groups throwing their money at suitable cases of random people to further their interests is not a key feature of common law, it's a very unfortunate side effect.
Judge's rulings set precedence. So as a judge you can point to another judge, usually up the chain, and say "this is what those laws mean". Legislators write laws that are very broad and ill defined. Almost on purpose. Then the judges have to figure it out. I don't like that. It is an ill defined spec and we dump the details onto a judge who may or may not have any idea of what is going on.
As it happens, natural language is "ill defined". This is an important piece of the argument for teleological justice, where the law is framed and interpreted according to the intent of the sovereign rather than some linguistic literalism.
By the involved professionals laws are commonly understood as norms, i.e. what is established through judgement in court when the instructions from the sovereign (and sometimes sources like common sense) are interpreted and applied to so called facts presented to the court during proceedings.
In this sense, what the politicians have their minions type down into some document isn't actually the law. Common law systems give judges more leeway in how to frame and interpret the sources of law than e.g. the swedish system, where politicians apply a process that produces a series of documents that explain and teleologically ground the text that parliament then votes on. This gives the sovereign a larger degree of influence over the instructions that judges use when creating law through their judgements.
As I understand it, this leeway in common law systems is thought to balance the latent tyranny of the sovereign, and function similar to constitutional courts in that judges can take the view of the people into account to a larger extent.
Not that I'd trust US jurisdictions in anything but certain business law settings, but some clever people thought and deliberated a lot when designing what they have over there.
So what is the difference between "setting precedence" and "making the law" in your view? Essentially there isn't one? I think legislators write vague laws not almost on purpose, but absolutely with purpose: to leave it up to the judge to interpret. But then, you don't like that judges exercise judgement, which is frankly really quite puzzling to me. That is explicitly their job, it's right there in the name. But why don't you like that? Oftentimes, someone has to figure it out. Why not someone who is used to exercising good judgement? You're absolutely right that it's an ill-defined spec, but we're not gathering requirements to develop some application, we're talking about law?
This feels unavoidable when you have a new circumstance turning up in court? There's no "decline to have an opinion" option, the ruling has to go one way or the other.
How does this work in Civil Law jurisdictions? Do you get the opposite of precedent, similar cases having different outcomes until the legislature resolves it?
(it is something of a problem for the US that most of its really big important freedoms come from courts against more repressive legislatures, though)
That's much better, but it is still a free VPN that bypasses network security measures. I can even imagine a threat actor deploying firefox for their command and control infra.
It isn't recording surreptitiously. The data was collected as part of an optional feature which is a very intentional process where you start a scan and then move around the object being scanned to get data from multiple angles, and then click to upload the data to Niantic. The uploading is called out specifically as a separate step (at least early on it was common for uploads to fail, so it had the option to save the scan to upload later when you had better signal). There is nothing secret about the fact that Niantic is collecting this data.
The lack of transparency is about how Niantic is using the data, selling it to third parties for purposes unrelated to the game. And I agree with the parent that this is a fair trade for a free game, especially since that part is optional, but more transparency would be better.
It is not at all clear that the mapping is for purposes other than the AR features in the game itself though. In fact Niantic advertised the scanning field research as helping them make richer experience at PokeStops (which they did).
Niantic was much more upfront about this with Ingress, so people who know the company's history will likely guess that Pokemon Go is serving the same purpose, but for someone coming into the game without that background, there is nothing in the game itself that indicates that data is being collected for other commercial purpose.
Right, but it sounds like the data collection itself was pretty well communicated. So nobody should be surprised it gets used for some other (legal) purpose than was originally intended.
Feb 2026:
March 2026: I'm guessing that "0 64 bit" and "64 bit" are CachyOS and Bazzite, as I would be surprised to see either of those fall off the list given their current popularity. It is also interesting to see the flatpack installs (Freedesktop SDK) fall off the list.I really wish that Valve would increase the number of distros they report, or stop breaking out individual versions. The purpose of having multiple versions is to see how quickly people are upgrading and when to stop supporting older ones, but the current presentation doesn't actually let you do that since there is so much churn in which releases make the top 10 cut.
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