What is stopping you from playing Minecraft itself on Linux?

I haven’t played it in a while, but it did work perfectly fine last time I tried it. It is written in Java, after all.

This is so fucking stupid, I can’t even.

For your mental health, have some reasonable arguments about Rust: https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Entwicklung-Warum-Rust-die-Antwort-auf-miese-Software-und-Programmierfehler-ist-4879795.html

Since it’s in German, here are the key points of the article (written from memory - the article is quite old, so I might misremember - best read the article yourself):

• Software development is stuck in a vicious cycle regarding project budgets.
  • Some competitors don’t know better and just budget the “happy path”, that assumes that everything during development goes right.
    • The author uses a term for this which I like a lot: “Hybris of the programmer”
  • Other competitors know better, but still have to lie in order to remain competitive when it comes to prices
  • Therefore almost all software projects end up with a way too low budget
    • So we get buggy software
• Rust might be a way out of this misery, because
  • it is understood that it takes longer to develop something with Rust
  • but on the flip-side the safety-guarantees rule out a lot of bugs
  • so customers who choose to have their project implemented using Rust are fully aware of the higher costs, but also the higher quality
  • and developers have a well known argument for the higher costs, and also have data that shows how this higher investment will yield a better quality product.

While I am not aware of any way to run custom software on the Steam Deck while it is on standby, you can drastically reduce the power drain if you shut it down fully instead of leaving it on standby. You can either use the “Power” menu after pressing the steam key, or long-press the power button to get the option to do so.

I would not say “lazy”.

There are a lot of bold promises in Unreal Engine 5 advertisements, that get taken up by publishers and producers - and then end up in the game budgets…

And then, near the end of the project, when it turns out that performance isn’t good because the advertisement promises have been a bit too bold, there is no money for optimization left…

Also, if I am allowed to do some absolutely shameless self promotion: Bus Simulator 21 is verified, and 18 is playable.

The “it’s hard” claim is also a bit of a misconception imho. Rust for sure has a high entry barrier, but it isn’t particularly difficult, at least in comparison with C++, which I’d consider its biggest competitor. While it’s easy to start working with C++, it’s a horribly complex language with hard to use features, lots of weird edge cases, and tons of missing pieces, that one has little chance of ever learning properly, because it’s just so much to keep in mind at all times… Oh, and don’t get me started on how error prone memory management is without a Borrow Checker…

Sorry for the rant, back on topic: I agree that it’s not the right tool for many domains. That’s what I was thinking about when I wrote that people might misunderstand what niche it tries to fill. If one needs a low level language that is very explicit about performance costs, and offers memory safety and (some) abstraction at zero runtime cost, then Rust is definitely worth a look. If performance is not a key concern, then higher level languages might be a better choice, because one can build things faster, and focus more on the problem at hand instead of low-level details.

We are at work in a similar situation, as we would like to add another programming language besides C++ to our projects, and Rust is currently the top candidate. However, one of our goals is to use abstractions that are common in functional programming, and that’s where I think Rust is a suboptimal choice. I’ve been playing around with such abstractions in Rust recently (I’ve written blog posts about Free Monads and Reader/State Monads in Rust), and my conclusion is that Rust isn’t the right tool if one wants to use those. (Or, rather, those abstractions are not suited for the domain of systems programming.)

We are using Unreal Engine, so C++ is the obvious choice for performance critical code. Rust would then fill the same niche, and while it obviously would be much more convenient to use than C++, we would still need to train people, and set up FFI bindings. If we, however, are already willing to do that, we could also go all the way and introduce a higher level pure functional language. That way we would actually get a tool that covers a different domain and is suitable for abstractions coming from functional programming. We could then choose, based on a system’s requirements, if we need to focus on performance (-> C++), or if we can trade a bit of performance for much easier to write/maintain code (-> whatever high level functional language we pick).

That’s why, as it stands now, I also won’t push towards the adoption of Rust at work.

Controversial opinion: There are only 2 kinds of people that think Rust will not become a widely used language:

• Those who don’t bother to learn it, and only argue about it without any hands-on experience, and
• those who don’t understand which niche Rust tries to fill.

For me it was funny, btw. I started out as basically a Rust fanboy, back when the “First Edition of The Rust Book” was still just called “The Book”…

Then I learned a bit of Haskell, and was immediately disappointed that Rust doesn’t offer the same convenience when it comes to working with Traits (cough Higher Kinded Types cough). So, while I never considered myself part of the first group, I definitely was part of the second for some time.

However, the more I’ve been trying to abuse Rust for stuff that would be better done in a higher level language (like Haskell), the better I understood why Rust doesn’t offer those abstractions: They often can’t be zero-cost, and using them in a language that tries to be very explicit about performance costs becomes very verbose… In other words, I learned the hard way what “systems programming” means in the case of Rust, and which languages it competes with, and which it doesn’t.