Let's Praise the Software!

Mezo40 · July 27, 2020

Hello LTT Folks,

Throughout the course of tech reviews, there is little to no attention for how powerful and capable the software that supports the components.

It amazes me how Windows scales up to support the edge cases that are reviewed on LTT, like the 16K display for example. We take software flexibility and scalability for granted although it is a great deal. Software is what makes the hardware breaths but gets near to no attention, and all the praise is devoted to how capable the hardware is.

We saw how Windows -for example- accommodates itself to very low resources on cheap hardware, and scales up perfectly to powerful machines. The slightest example is how the default Windows background is high resolution enough to scale!

As a software developer and architect, how the software performs under edge cases grabs my attention and amazes me. The software, e.g. Windows, drivers, games. etc... doesn't scale if the developers didn't put this in their minds, it is a hard work from these people to provide us with stable applications that works under severe circumstances without we give that a second thought.

Me seeing how these software luxuries are taken for granted without being praised encouraged me to join LTT forums and raise the attention for how good and scalable the software we use is.

I hope this quick post lit a lamp for you

LogicalDrm · July 29, 2020

They do quite a lot content about how Linux has improved for gaming and consumers. Plus improvements on Android and iOS. Or NAS and media server software. So I don't really see why you think software is taken for granted.

The issue with software is same as with hardware. Without competition, there's no push for improvements. You praise Windows a lot here. In reality Microsoft is failing hard with Windows and only thing keeping them floating is the lead on market shares. Which they have had for 30 years.

So maybe we should praise software, but not those who are in lead. But those who are challenging and forcing for improvement.