"App distribution costs" is laughable as an incentive. Any business that makes an app where you can and will spend dollars would gladly let you download it directly from their website in exchange for not giving up 30% of the in-app payments. App distribution costs nothing.
These apps are streaming massive amounts of data from epic's servers constantly. The incremental cost of downloading the actual app code is the tiniest of considerations. The app is a couple static files that would be served from a CDN. Now compare this minuscule cost to giving away 30% of their in app purchases. There is simply no comparison.
And it is also rarely if ever measured in petabytes. Commercially percentile based (in terms of speed) billing is the norm, but that only applies to businesses that act as downstream customers of ISPs
Apple has global IX presences and generally maintains open peering policies, which means it only costs a few bucks monthly to maintain any given PNI (e.g. 10Gbit), and they are also available on those open routing server ports. IX presence is dirt cheap.
As far as I am aware what gets downloaded from the app store is little more than the launcher, which then downloads the actual game files from epics server.
Why shouldn't Apple compete on pricing against others then? Drop the arbitrary %, charge for actual usage. If they're so good and cheap then everyone will stay with Apple distribution.
I started with Linux installing it from floppy disks in about 1996.
In 1995, I was back on Windows 95 within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2000, I was back on Windows 2000 within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2005, I was back on Windows XP within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2012, I was back on Windows 7 within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2015, I was back on macOS within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2020, I worked out I'm wasting my time on this.
I watch my colleagues and friend struggling with it. Lots of small papercuts. Lots of weirdness. Lots of regressions. Plus many years of server-side experience says to me "I should probably just use FreeBSD" in that space.
So couple of issues there. Never upgrade windows. Fresh install only. Never had a good day upgrading it.
Secondly, there isn't always a solution in Linux. I've got one now where something is utterly broken and it's 5 layers of maintainers down and no one gives a shit.
My experience is the opposite. Epgot a hold of a bunch of floppies in 1991. Dual booted so I could play Diablo. Some time around '98/99 got tired of dual booting.
Steam getting proton was a godsend, all those years of games became playable so now I have a huge back catalog.
No Linux desktop delivers what the user wants, needs or expect. Only what the developers think they need and find interesting to fix. It's more fun reinventing wheels badly than fixing shit generally. Some people are lucky this aligns with their needs, but for most it doesn't. It's jarring and unproductive.
It needs corporate (or government!) drive behind it or that won't change. I'm not talking about Redhat either who appears to just be a holding pen for the above.
There are considerable formatting issues when you're working collaboratively on documents with other people who use MS office when you are using MS office too.
We gave up for large documents, assigned an editor and just send them chunks of text.
It goes really fast if you turn off the connected experiences like linked in, the AI crap, the splash screen, all the cloud shit and crack it with massgrave.
I was going to ask: How much faster would it be if it didn't have to communicate with Microsoft servers over the internet on start up.
It makes no sense that modern Office won't start faster than Office 97. Sure it has more features, it's bigger in any way, but it's also not running of a spinning hard drive and 32Mb of RAM.
Can Office even start up without an Internet connection, or does it just take even longer?
Got one of them. I ignore him most of the time. This has generated more ROI than his initiatives would have. Evidenced by the teams who do them generating a loss every fucking time.
His nickname, which he wasn't worked out, is the first half of a sexual lubricant brand because he's such a wanker.
Oh wait neuroscientists, explains it all. A statisticians favourite target for being unable to interpret data correctly.