What's happened in software / computing in the last 20 years that's good? Imo it could be argued that overall the user experience has gotten worse. Dead internet theory, enshittification.
* The web is pretty much dead. Time Berners Lee's ideals certainly are.
* Computing is dominated by completely evil megacorps.
* They are making a concerted effort to make people as tech-illiterate as possible and also make universal computing illegal.
* Theres been years where GPU's were being price gouged, 1st by crypto bros, then NFT bros, now LLM bros.
* Cant even buy RAM now.
* They put e-fuses into hardware now, comes right out of the factory as ready made e-waste that cant be repurposed.
* The biggest platforms, Android and iOS, are walled garden, locked down, corporate nightmare worlds. And there is practically no alternative.
* Social media is making people depressed and also very easy to manipulate en-masse by anyone willing to pay.
* Moore's law stopped and software bloat overtook performance gains.
* VR might have been cool but it was pre-enshittified in its nascent stages. Freakin' facebook bought Oculus before they had released a single headset.
There's a lot of bleak things for sure.
Linux has come a long way Valve's efforts with Proton/Linux Gaming
Yeah that is good, there are some good things, but I think on average the computer user experience is worse.. In the 80's and 90's with the rise of microcomputers and the net and the web and Linux, things were so utopian, things just seemed to keep getting cooler and computing was empowering people.
That was the cool part of "the cycle". We are defo in the shit part now. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8201080-the-master-switc...