I was curious what the Linux people think about Microsoft and any bad practices that most people should know about already?

  •  jsomae   ( @jsomae@lemmy.ml ) 
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    6 months ago

    Oh they’re very good controllers! The problem is that they took Nintendo’s button names (ABXY) and transposed their positions. It’s utter chaos, and very hard for me at least to remember that A is B and B is A.

    Playstation, by contrast, came up with entirely new button symbols, so it’s much less confusing that O -> A.

    The APIs for gamepad interfacing are a total mess now, with some based on button names and some on position (south/east/west/north).

    • I’m from the 80s and totally understand what you mean. That’s a valid point, yes, its a total mess, especially for emulation where the button names collide. This was actually an “objectively” bad choice by Microsoft.

    • Ironically, they were probably afraid of the very explicit litigiousness of Nintendo.

      Two solutions:

      • different names ( like Sony )
      • different positions ( like Microsoft )

      Third solution:

      • get sued by Nintendo

      Maybe they did some early testing and got feedback that people liked the button names being the same as Nintendo. Or maybe they read criticism about Sony using different names.

      Maybe they were originally the same and then the legal dept depended a swap too late to change the actual names.

      Maybe none of this stuff.

      As you can see, I find the legal system to be a bigger threat and generally more frustrating than Microsoft.