Linux Gamers Finally Clear Three Percent Hurdle
Also Massive Bond Sales and Forgotten 1980s Clock Chips

The Q3 Report on Desktop Diversity Finally Shows Green

The great OS wars of the last two decades have been officially paused to celebrate a minor internal victory. According to Valve's latest numbers, the population of Linux gamers on Steam has finally crept past the 3 percent adoption mark. This is an incredible achievement given that most departments only get excited if the numbers are north of 50 percent, but in the world of desktop operating systems, three percent is apparently what constitutes a successful migration project.

Management can finally stop hassling the developers about this particular Key Performance Indicator, having crossed the threshold after what feels like a geological epoch. The official party line is that this milestone proves the ecosystem is "maturing" which is standard corporate speak for "it mostly stopped crashing." The comment threads on this story read exactly like a two day meeting about package dependencies, where everyone agrees on the problem but not the solution. Meanwhile, the rest of the IT floor continues to operate on Windows, which is apparently fine.

R&D Overspends Again; Finance Secures Bridging Loan

Meta, the parent company run by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is preparing a 25 billion dollar bond sale as soaring artificial intelligence costs continue to eat through the budget. The whole thing reads like a classic internal memo about the AI division's budget request being approved, followed immediately by the subsequent panic when the finance team realizes the sheer volume of server racks and high-end graphics cards required.

The stock sell-off is a predictable side effect; nobody likes watching the R&D department purchase what appears to be a small country's annual power supply just to train a chatbot that can explain why your avatar's legs look weird. It is benevolent incompetence at its finest; Meta is not trying to crash the global economy; it is just trying very hard to build the future and keeps accidentally buying more power than it can pay for.

The New Assistant AI Is Ready To "Rival" the Senior Staff

Tongyi DeepResearch, a new open source 30 billion parameter model, has been introduced with the immediate corporate swagger of "rivaling" OpenAI DeepResearch. It is the age old story of the enthusiastic new hire who insists their quick and dirty script is going to replace the legacy monolith that took twenty years to build. Tongyi, which is backed by Alibaba, is claiming its Mixture of Experts, or MoE, architecture is somehow more efficient at the important task of making the AI sound smart when answering questions.

The industry’s habit of simply naming models after the specific senior developer they intend to replace continues, forcing the rest of us to remember which AI is called "DeepResearch" and which is "DeepResearch but newer." This competitive naming scheme is a passive aggressive corporate maneuver designed to force the rest of us to refer to two distinct products using nearly identical names.

Briefs

• Legacy Hardware Update: X.org released a security advisory to address multiple issues in the X server and Xwayland. It is always reassuring to know the operating system foundation from the 1980s still needs mandatory patching.
• Post Mortem: One engineer went through the trouble of reproducing the AWS outage race condition using a model checker. We all appreciate the detailed internal document explaining exactly which tiny, inconsequential variable caused the cascading, global failure.
• The ICQ Guy: Alleged Jabber Zeus Coder, a gentleman known only as 'MrICQ', has been taken into U.S. Custody. This is a nice piece of corporate housekeeping; another bad actor is finally off the network.