I had a crisis too some years ago, when Windows 7 was the shit, I heard Windows 7 was very good (for Windows).
So I tried to dual boot Windows 7, goddam a load of crap!! I’ll never believe anyone claiming Windows is good again.
The structure of security is a bloody mess, providing worse security, while taking control away from the owner of the system.
And lack of package manager makes it ask for updates at the most inopportune moments. Just a tiny program like Adobe reader was super invasive, and was a major pain in the ass.

Windows is not in any way user friendly, it’s just what most people are used to.

What an absolutely moronic false equivalence.

She is either suicidal or very weird. I’d ask her if suicide is actually something she sometimes think about.
Problem is she will most likely brush it off if she is, so it’s a tough one.
It might be worth a lot to tell her you appreciate her.

Wikipedia is also backed by the engines of capitalism.

Stupid knee jerk “no you” response that doesn’t make the least bit of sense, where YouTube is obviously a major engine of capitalism, owned by one of the richest most capitalistic companies in the world, and everything in how YouTube operates is governed by their capitalistic principles.

How do you figure in any way the same is true for Wikipedia which is a non profit organization running on donations?!?!

Bullshit!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation

Revenue $185.4 million (2024)
Expenses $178.6 million (2024)
Employees 363 (2024)
Volunteers 277,000 (2024)

How did you ever convince yourself that the 10th most visited website, that doesn’t have any revenue other than donations is rolling in dough? That would be an extremely rare thing if they did.
Apart from smoothly running servers, and administrating almost 300000 volunteers, they need lawyers, both to ensure they stay within local laws in more than a 100 countries, but also to stave off idiotic lawsuits. Just the recent changes to UK law has been a major legal headache.
Without donations Wikipedia would quickly fall apart.

They don’t need donations they have lots of money,

Being a free service with no advertising, I’m guessing the only reason they have money is because people donate.
But for some reason your description quickly skips over the part about where the money comes from?

aggressively begging for donations again.

Aggressively? Showing a banner for about a week once or twice a year?? That’s aggressive???
How the fuck can anyone be so butthurt about a free service? I’m definitely NOT clicking your link to support something so stupid on YouTube.

PS:
We always donate a small amount kr 100 DKK ( about $15 USD ) when they are campaigning. Wikipedia is an amazing service we’d sorely miss if it disappeared.

You don’t write what market you are describing but:
The PC market has been dwindling for decades, the PC gaming market has also been dwindling with consoles taking bigger share, and the past 5-10 years due to high GPU prices that have been wildly unstable.
Lately prices have returned to more normal levels when accounting for inflation, which could explain a bump this year.
USA is an outlier because of tariffs.

Maybe you are right, but I think they did that because they thought that would help them remain competitive, keeping the profit share that would normally go to board vendors, allowing them to sell cheaper while still making money, and compete better against Nvidia.

Maybe I remember it wrong, but I think Voodoo was already dying with Voodoo 2.

IDK, I think it was because they couldn’t keep up with Nvidia, I bough the Voodoo 2 already at about half price.
After that it was basically lights out for Voodoo.

Intel has somewhat the same problem I think, because their GPU reasonably is good and for the customer it’s a competitive product.
But for intel, the GPU chip probably cost 3 times as much to make as for a comparable Nvidia or AMD, because Intel requires a twice as big GPU to be competitive!
That means that Intel is probably not making any profit from their GPU division.
Same with Voodoo, they simply couldn’t keep up to make a profit, they had to compete with Nvidia that quickly surpassed 3DFX, and since Nvidia were better Voodoo had to be cheaper, but they couldn’t make them cheap enough to make a profit from them.

It’s not that Voodoo got worse, because obviously they didn’t. But Nvidia had a development cycle that was unheard of at the time. It wasn’t just 3DFX that couldn’t keep up. It was also S3, Matrox and ATI. And ATI were by far the biggest GPU maker at the time. ATI however made a strong comeback as the only competitor to Nvidia mainstream performance desktop graphics and gaming, and then ATI was later bought by AMD.

3dfx had market dominance in 90s but then basically committed suicide.

As I remember it, it was Nvidia that killed 3DFX, Nvidia had an absolutely cutthroat development pace, and 3DFX simply couldn’t keep up, and they ended up being bought by Nvivia.
But oh boy Voodoo graphics were cool when they came out! An absolute revolution to PC gaming.

I think 90+% marketshare is technically considered a monopoly in many places.
But the existence of AMD still makes a huge difference IMO, you do have an alternative option, and Nvidia doesn’t control the market completely.
Also personally I use AMD because I’m on Linux, and I don’t want the proprietary Nvidia driver to fuck up my system.
So AFAIK on Linux, the majority actually run AMD.

You are not mistaken.

In the early days of the PC, there were lot’s of GPU options, as in literally dozens. So the first part of the question is why did they almost all disappear? The answer to that is that it became a much more complicated market with Windows, with way higher demands on the software side, and many hardware vendors suck at making software. So over time the best combo of hardware and driver beat out other high end manufacturers so we ended up with just 2, and the on-board / on-chip GPU made every low end 3rd party GPU next to irrelevant, with very little possibility of making a profit.

The low end chips were no-longer needed, as they can now be had cheaper and more efficiently as part of the CPU for both AMD and Intel. And since these are the only 2 CPU options for X86, Now that VIA has discontinued their X86 line acquired from Cyrix, there is no low end entry point in the PC market for a new maker of GPU.
The natural evolution is to start from a lower end, and if successful work up. This is not possible in the PC market, and makes entry to the market near impossible, except with enormous investments that may never pay off, especially since PC is a dwindling market.

As you mention Intel is dipping their toes, but despite doing a pretty good and big effort, and investing a lot to develop a better GPU, and actually delivering a good product at a reasonable price, that should be absolutely competitive on paper, their marketshare is absolutely minuscule, because Nvidia and AMD together dominate and already fill the needs for the mid to higher end market, and have brand recognition for graphics.

It’s not that there aren’t technologies that possibly could compete if scaled for PC, because those are actually pretty numerous on phones and tablets. But you can’t port these cheaply to PC, because there is no market segment for them to slide in to easily.
It would require major investments to make them actually hardware performance competitive at higher scales, and investments in making good drivers. Intel had a big head start in these aspects, already making on-chip graphics that had drivers already. And still they are struggling, despite delivering a good product, and people have been screaming for a third option,because of high GPU prices.

This may not be the entire explanation, but I think it’s a very significant part of it.
The better question IMO is why Intel never became more popular, considering how much people have raved that more competition in the GPU market is required.

And the explanation for that is:

but let’s be real, AMD and nVidia are the only options

Except Intel actually presented a good alternative, but was never seriously considered by most people for whatever reason.

Personally I didn’t consider Intel, because I remember earlier attempts by Intel, where Intel quickly left the market again. And I didn’t want a GPU where I’m left without driver support a year after I purchased it.
So in my case it was lack of trust in Intel to stay the course. But every other maker would have that exact same issue.
There have been a few attempts in the past from other makers, but they all had performance or driver issues or both, and left the market quickly . Intel delivered a stellar product by comparison. And if Intel drops out of GPU again, I think there’s a pretty big risk it may be our last chance for a third significant mid-high end GPU maker on PC.

TLDR:

1. All the old competitors couldn’t cut it on either the hardware or software side, and so they died out.
2. It’s an insanely expensive market to enter and to stay in, with high risk of never making a profit.

That’s mostly true, except memes are ideas, more specifically ideas that spread by being repeated or imitated.
I know the definition very well both reading and hearing Richard Dawkins who coined and defined the term, explaining what a meme really is. And the idea is that memes can spread and evolve a bit like genes, which could be said to have been the case here if the meme had been changed to use the drawing u/Appoxo made.

Edit:
Funny why I’m downvoted for describing what a meme actually is???
God people are either stupid or vengeful here!!

Cool drawing. 👍
Except part of the issue was the naked part.
He should wear a shirt, or other form of typical office clothing.

The same way I handled being 36 and 38, and every other age.
It’s only a crisis if you make it a crisis. If you have a nice life be happy about it.
Don’t overthink shit that doesn’t matter.

Maybe, but I seriously doubt most office people find a ribbed extreme muscle guy representative of office workers. And especially not the women.

Except it’s not really malicious compliance, it’s just compliance.

And? Does that make it better or worse? Personally I don’t give a shit that he is a meme guy I knew that, but he is not the right meme guy for this sort of meme IMO.

Somehow I find the photo of a muscle guy with no clothes insulting for an “office” story.
It is just so disconnected from each other?

And I seriously doubt most office workers find a ribbed extreme muscle guy representative of office workers. And especially not the women.

It’s not lie a huge issue, it’s just a meme, sorry for pointing out I found the guy misplaced,
You all go ahead and have fun without much thought.

And Dr. Mengele was the best personal doctor EVER!