It's certainly annoying. If a customer needs to have a few different platforms installed, they won't really learn to use any of them. If they have one or two, they'll likely get more value out of them.
If everything was available on every packaging platform, then I'd say the user choice is valuable. However, if most apps only support one or two platforms, it becomes fragmented and you lose most of the benefits of user choice. I like having lots of Linux distributions because most apps work on most distributions. I don't like the current situation with Snap/Flatpack/etc because that's not the case.
You must be pretty behind the times. Most shops have stopped accepting bitcoin because of volatility and high transaction fees. Bitcoin thrives as virtual gold precisely because those two downsides make it useless as a currency.
That's the primary reason the Bitcoin Core / Bitcoin Cash split 2 years ago now was a difference in opinion about whether or not usage as a payment method mattered. Now you have two competing camps one is pushing the Bitcoin as egold and high fees while the other is pushing Bitcoin as a means of exchange with low fees.
The volatility was solved by the payment processors. In any case the big payment processors support both now. The higher than credit card fees though did kill the use of Bitcoin Core as a payment method in ordinary transactions.
Bitcoin was invented as a way to protect individuals from governments devaluing fiat currency. Payments have always been secondary to this goal. Read Satoshi's white paper.
Every cryptocurrency discussion is an Eternal September [0] that recycles the same, tired, 10-year-old arguments.
Pretty soon some smart guy will pop up to educate us on the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, how Bitcoin isn't "backed" by anything, or how the US dollar is "backed" by taxes and the military.
If you close the tabs and Firefox keeps using CPU, how's that Google's fault? Or are you suggesting that Google is exploiting some bug in Firefox to have it use CPU time even when the tab is closed?
15 years ago I considered switching to Linux. I depend on some Windows applications and, above all, I want to play games. Wine looked like it was almost there, so I intended to give it another try next year.
Year by year I've been trying Wine again and again. As of today, it's still almost there. So, maybe in 2030? By now, I'll stay using Windows.
For years, I've been reluctant to use Wine wrappers like PlayOnLinux, for no reason other than I don't like wrappers. I always ended up getting everything working with bare Wine, but at the cost of long hours (sometimes even days) of experiments.
I've started using Lutris a few months ago (I gave up on getting Wine and DXVK play well together) and, well, that's a life changing experience so far: everything works out of the box. I has taken all the fun out of Wine configuration for me ;)
If all your games are available in Steam, I see no advantage in using Lutris: in my experience, Proton works very well out of the box.
For games that aren't available in Steam, Proton is of little help AFAIK, and that's where Lutris shines.
Also, some people like having all their games in a single place, in which case Lutris may be a solution too, even for Steam games. As my “single place for games” is my shell, I usually skip Lutris and Steam GUIs to start games directly anyway, so…
12 years ago I considered using Windows. I liked some Windows applications and, above all, I wanted to play games. Windows looked like it was almost there, so I intended to give it another try next year. Then Vista happened.
As of present day I am a happy Linux and Wine user and don't plan on switching to anything else.
You keep changing the goalpost. Odds are if you were willing to live with the versions you were using 15 years ago you would find Wine works just fine. Probably even if you just stuck with the versions you were using 5 years ago.
If someone wants to use Windows applications to interact with other users, using a 15-year-old version is really not going to cut it. Office, Photoshop... all of those big ticket Windows apps have added a lot of things in 15 years. You could get that level of compatibility from Libre Office and GIMP.
Some even earlier directx games are damn near unplayable anywhere but real hardware, last time I checked. Heavily tied to a handful of video cards from a span of just a few years. Looking at you, Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries. I don't think VirtualBox even works in those cases.
