Web Excursions 2021-11-15
Microsoft and the Metaverse
The Metaverse already exists, it just happens to be called the Internet.
What makes “The Metaverse” unique is that it is the Internet best experienced in virtual reality.
The entire reason the Internet is as open and interoperable as it is
is because it was built in a world without commercial imperative or political oversight;
all future efforts will be led by companies seeking profits and regulated by governments seeking control,
both of which result in centralization and lock-in.
Tech innovation wasn’t over, it was only beginning,
but everything in the future would happen on top of the current paradigm.
What makes the phone the ultimate expression of a “personal computer”
is that it is with us everywhere,
from home to work to every moment in-between.
for well over a year a huge portion of people’s lives was primarily digital.
There have been two conventional pieces of wisdom about virtual reality
that I used to agree with,
but now I think both were off-base.
virtual reality’s first and most important market will be gaming.
[but a counterargument is that] there simply isn’t a big enough market of people with headsets
to justify investment from game makers.
augmented reality would be a larger and more compelling market than virtual reality
over the last two years in-person meetings were transformed into a link on a calendar invite that opened a video-conferencing call.
This is the demotion of the physical
there really is a tangible sense of being in the same room as everyone else
new products like Facebook’s Horizon Workrooms and Microsoft’s Mesh for Microsoft Teams make it possible to hold meetings in virtual reality.
At the same time, it’s not an experience that you would want to use all of the time.
For one, the tech isn’t quite good enough;
The bigger problem, though, is that putting on the headset for a call is a bit of a pain
What, though, if you already had the headset on?
people already had and wanted mobile phones;
selling a device that you were going to carry anyway,
but which happened to be infinitely more capable for only a few hundred more dollars, was a recipe for success in the consumer market.
Like PCs, the first major use case will be knowledge workers using devices bought for them by their employer,
eager to increase collaboration in a remote work world, and as quality increases, offer a superior working environment.
Some number of those employees will be interested in using virtual reality for non-work activities as well,
increasing the market for non-work applications.
This means that the company that is, in my opinion, the most well-placed to capitalize on the Metaverse opportunity is Microsoft.
So many Silicon Valley enterprise companies miss this critical point:
they obsess over the user experience of their individual application,
without considering how that app fits in the context of a company
for whom their app is a means to an end.
Microsoft’s success will require creating an opportunity for OEMs similar to the opportunity that was created by the PC.
Meta is spending billions of dollars on not just software but also hardware,
and while Workrooms is obviously an enterprise application,
Meta has to date been very much a consumer company
Facebook needed to change its name: no one wants to use a consumer social network for work.
I am bearish on Apple’s prospects in this space for three reasons:
rumors suggest that Apple is focusing on augmented reality, not virtual reality
Apple’s iPhone-centricity could be a liability
It is very hard to fully embrace a new paradigm if the biggest part of your businesses is rooted in another
The importance of developers will likely be more important than in the case of the phone.
People bought iPhones first, and developers followed;
Apple may have trouble if the chicken-and-egg problem runs in the opposite direction.
Apple (AAPL) and Meta (FB) Working on VR, AR Headsets, Watches and Home Devices - Bloomberg
Apple plans to launch asimilarly high-end mixed reality headset next year, perhaps within a few months of the Meta device.
Apple’s offering will probably be in the $2,000 range,
whereas I expect Meta’s to bequite a bit cheaper.
Still, the two products will be direct challengers for users looking tojump into the metaverse.
Meta plans to enter Apple’s world of smartwatches.
Meta has explored the idea of fitness tracking in its virtual reality products.
Eventually,that probably will expand to the wrist.
Likewise, don’t be surprised if Apple eventually launches a version of its Fitness+ workout service that people can use to exercise while wearing its own headset.
The company has been testing at least two new home gadgets:
a device that combines a speaker and TV set-top boxwith a camera,
as well as a smart speaker with a screen that’s more similar to a Portal orAmazon Echo Show.
Questions and answers: An overview of LXDE, LXQt, and Xfce
Xfce
While Xfce describes itself as being lightweight, most people would probably refer to Xfce as being a middle-weight desktop environment.
The desktop typically consumes less than 500MB of memory and practically idles the CPU. Xfce has a well deserved reputation for being relatively small (compared to KDE Plasma, GNOME, Cinnamon, Budgie, and Deepin) while offering most of the key features and options people want to see in a modern desktop environment.
Xfce includes its own capable settings panel, the top-notch Thunar file manager, a bulk file renaming tool, screenshot utility, virtual terminal, and a number of other small tools which fill out the desktop experience.
The Xfce desktop is built with the GTK+3 toolkit and tends to evolve slowly and steadily. The project has a reputation for taking its time implementing changes, giving users a slowly evolving desktop experience (in contrast to GNOME and Plasma which make rapid, breaking changes).
Xfce has its own, highly capable window manager, Xfwm, which performs well and has very little overhead.
LXDE
The LXDE project is the most lightweight of the three desktops
LXDE is built using the depreciated GTK+2 toolkit and typically uses the third-party Openbox window manager.
LXDE, in comparison with other Linux desktops, has a tendency to be viewed less as a unified, complete desktop, and more as a collection of desktop tools running on top of Openbox.
The LXDE components, like the panel and file manager, tend to be updated independently rather than as a whole.
Unfortunately, LXDE is mostly unmaintained these days. The LXDE project has shifted focus to working on LXQt
LXQt
The LXQt desktop started as a merger of the LXDE-Qt and Razor-qt desktop projects.
It strives to provide approximately the same look and experience as LXDE, with two key differences.
LXQt uses the Qt toolkit as its base (opposed to GTK+ which is used by LXDE and Xfce).
LXQt is actively maintained and continues to put out regular releases.
The desktop components of LXQt offer most of the same functionality and minimal approach of LXDE, but have a distinct Qt style to them that will look familiar to people who have run KDE Plasma.
LXQt might be viewed as a sort of minimal cousin of the KDE Plasma desktop with many applications and options removed.
LXQt, in my tests, is smaller than Xfce, but requires about 50% more memory than LXDE while offering approximately the same features as its sibling.
Conclusion
Xfce is a desktop for people who want a full-featured desktop environment,
but who don't want the overhead of all the widgets and visual effects that comes with KDE Plasma and GNOME.
LXDE is a super-light desktop that manages to run on older, less capable hardware
The LXQt project fills in a middle ground.