I don’t disagree, but today the blame lies with CrowdStrike, not Windows. As much as I hate defending Windows.

Yeah, that ship has sailed.

The only mistake Billy made is giving anything to AdBlock Plus, the people who have sided WITH the ads, instead of uBlock Origin, the true MVPs of the ad blocking world. I guess uBlock doesn’t accept donations unfortunately, but still, ABP is shady and I would not support them.

I would love to see gas stations putting in EV chargers, especially gas stations known for their food and snacks or travel stops that have restaurants because of the additional time taken to charge an EV vs. fill a gas car. Also it would be nice to see established companies run EV chargers that just let you pay with card at the “pump” like you do for gas rather than this app and account bullshit that all the mainstream networks have.

Hopefully this knocks down Tesla’s dominance in the charger ecosystem honestly, we need competition to take over that aren’t tied to a single vehicle manufacturer. Yes Tesla was going to open their network up to third party cars but they’re taking their sweet time in doing so. I hope competitors were able to swoop in and hire talent and take over broken contracts on abandoned charging station projects.

The domestic social media companies are at the whims of the billionaire class which I would argue is just as bad for voter influence. Neither side wants you to vote in your best interest.

As a user and not as a government agent, why should I care? If anything, having a foreign government hoard my data and spy on me is better than the government that actually has jurisdiction over me. If I were posting things critical of my own government I would rather have a foreign government hoard that data than my own government. There’s a lot more of a chance that US data hoarding leads to action against US citizens than Chinese data hoarding.

I don’t see how this benefits average Americans in any way. This helps the government and corporations.

Watched this the other day, great documentary! I played Oregon Trail 2 in school in the 90’s and we ended up getting it for our home PC. Nice to learn the history behind the game in such detail.

It’s not just 32 on 64 bit, new Macs use ARM64 processors so x86/x86_64 code is effectively obsolete on Mac. I would love to see Valve pour resources into a cross platform x86 on ARM64 emulation layer though, it would benefit Linux as well.

Cloud gaming is a plague. More fuel for the “you will own nothing and be happy” camp. Let it die. GeForce Now was at least one of the better options since you just use their servers to play games from your owned library, but the whole concept is a plague nonetheless. Let streaming nonsense die. Streaming from your own PC is the only streaming solution that doesn’t exist to weaken consumer ownership of their gaming experience.

I have Waydroid set up on my postmarketOS OnePlus 6T mainly so I can use the Discord app. Waydroid still needs some integration issues worked out (access to location, access to Bluetooth, access to calls/texts, ability to forward notifications to the Linux side) but otherwise it runs quite well. Performance feels pretty similar to native. I also have a OnePlus 6 running stock OS for my main phone tasks as pmOS doesn’t have VoLTE support for the 6T so is kinda useless as a phone right now.

Steam Deck is an open platform because you can run any OS, launcher, etc. on it. It’s just a handheld PC. Steam itself is a closed ecosystem but the Deck is very open.

I’m in the middle and I don’t always like it. 100% coverage is mandatory for the industry I work in though. I get that module testing is important but it can be such a chore to work on. I got pulled in to help write tests for another project this month and that is somewhere between watching grass grow and watching paint dry in terms of level of excitement.

Hacker’s Keyboard on Android and I created a custom Squeekboard layout for my Linux phone.

I make a point of using smartphone onscreen keyboards that have these keys. They are too useful!

git reflog, you can get your old commits back

First person shooter or third person game where aim is important, has to be keyboard and mouse. Pretty much anything involvong driving a vehicle, gamepad is better. In games like GTA I often use both, switching as necessary. Mostly I play FPS games though so KB+M is my most used input method. Some console-focused FPS games such as Halo I’ll play on controller if it’s all that is available, such as with the Steam Deck.

Sucks for the low level employees losing their jobs, but I can’t possibly feel bad about Epic losing money. Garbage company that needs to lose their grip on the industry after the shit they pulled with Epic Game Store and buying up games/studios just to delist their games from Steam, axe the Linux support, and make them exclusives on the worst platform in gaming.

Do it!

The problem is that they keep making stuff that was formerly a purchase (download, physical copy, run locally, etc) into unnecessary cloud services just to justify the transition to “X as a service”. I want to download it and keep it on my home server, not pay a recurring fee to access the same file over and over from a server.

EEE and enshittification are very related concepts. The extinguish phase of EEE usually goes hand in hand with enshittification as once you’ve extinguished the competition you’re free to cut costs and enjoy a monopoly. Cutting costs leads to enshittification.

This is the norm for the “X as a service” market. Since it’s a recurring revenue stream you can offer your “product” below cost to entice people since they’re going to have to keep paying up to continue using it. Then once you’ve hooked enough people you can dial up the pricing and dial down the costs/features. Fuck everything about this. I want to pay once and own for life.

Same. I’m happy to pay for Patreons or other donation methods to creators I really like, but no way I’m giving a cent to the big tech monstrosities that have monopolized the Internet. They deserve nothing.

By that logic pencils are banned since you can plagiarize copyrighted text with them. Can’t teach kids to write, because writing is a tool of piracy.

Agreed. Chromecast and Roku are just as bad as the shit built into the TV. Proprietary boxes of DRM and adware the lot of them. The only thing worth streaming from is a PC or maybe a rooted Android box.

The death if the tower/server/workstation/supercomputer/etc. is a pretty bad take. Computers have been getting better for over half a century and these big machines still exist. As computing power grows, so do software demands. If we make a phone with the power of today’s gaming PC we could make a gaming PC with the same technology many times more powerful, and games will take advantage of that. A modern smartphone of today can run PC games of the 2000’s and maybe early 2010’s with proper emulation. The Steam Deck can run most games released today. That doesn’t mean demand for high end systems disappears.

But not in an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” sort of way. Not in the slightest.

Of course, it was a bait tactic to get subscriber count up. Subscription services are cancer, they use cheap tactics to grow rapidly and then cut them off once enough people are hooked. This was an inevitability.

Linux phones should allow for much higher longetivity than Android or iOS devices as Linux phone OSes update more like desktop OSes than mobile, in that the device-specific parts are relatively small instead of having the entire OS image be custom made for a specific device. As long as your device has mainline Linux support it will continue to receive updates pretty much forever, or until Linux drops the architecture (unlikely any time soon for ARM, especially ARM64).

People praise Apple for 6 years of updates but my 2010 desktop build runs Windows 10 flawlessly still and will run fine with updates until 2025. Windows 11 arbitrarily ends support officially, but it would still work fine. Linux works flawlessly too and will continue to do so. 6 years is shit, but the entire mobile industry is even shittier on average so 6 years ends up looking decent.

If the next iPhone has an unlockable bootloader, a USBC port, and a removable battery then I may just buy my very first iPhone (to run Linux on of course). With the work Asahi is doing for Mac hardware, an unlocked Apple Silicon iPhone could be an amazing Linux phone.

If they do this, they better realize that they’re siding with corporate greed and betraying those who supported them and bought their games up to that point. Selling out to a greed factory is betrayal, plain and simple. Trading your integrity for greed.

Now they need to just not sell out to a soulless greed factory to beat BioWare at their own game. If EA comes knocking the only correct answer is to tell them to fuck off.

Paladins doesn’t, the anti-cheat kicks you out if you play anything other than the tutorial.

They already refuse to fix their EAC so that the game can run on Linux so I can’t not play their game any more than I already do. I played Paladins briefly when Overwatch was having its China drama and enjoyed it, but I’m done booting Windows to play games.

Especially when the CFO is his wife

I wasn’t referring to piracy, I was referring to unofficial releases. Think Wisdom Tree and their line of Bible Games for the NES/SNES (these are pretty well covered by YouTube creators which is why I mention them as an example). Also, some of the early consoles did have non-gaming uses. I believe there was a version of BASIC for the Atari 2600. There were several planned online communication systems for various early consoles. There was the “Work Boy” accessory for the Game Boy that turned it into a digital assistant/organizer. There were officially licensed cooking “games” for the Nintendo DS that were more of recipe collections than actual games. And you touched on media, which was another thing consoles did outside of gaming since CD drives became used on consoles. Wii Fit was more of a fitness accessory than it was a game.

Pretty much the only thing that separates PC from console in your definition is whether you can run your own code on it. I don’t disagree that being able to run your own code on a machine is a huge benefit, but do you consider the iPhone a console? What about the Amazon Echo Show? Smart fridge? These have the locked down ecosystems of consoles but aren’t gaming-first. I would say no, they are not consoles and I’m sure you would agree.

I feel like this is a modernized definition of “console”. The earliest consoles distinguished themselves from the computers of the time by being gaming-first, not by being restrictive and closed off. Things that defined a console were not coming with a keyboard or mouse, connecting primarily to a television rather than a monitor, and using a joystick or gamepad for input.

There were a lot of instances of third party published games for consoles in the past, whether officially licensed or unofficial, approved or unapproved. The online service definition ignores half of the console generations in video gaming history. There were a lot of unlicensed/3rd party games published for the 8-bit and 16-bit era consoles (and yes, some of those had to bypass security chips, but I don’t think all of them did).

I think in some ways the Steam Deck is a return to form of these earlier machines, but in a modern way (and handheld). Valve’s openness isn’t a good reason to not consider the Steam Deck a console. I fully agree that it is a PC, but I feel like it fits both definitions in the best way possible.

I really bought the ROG Ally to experiment with Linux on it. I think it is getting there. I have Arch Linux with chimera kernel on mine as well as gamescope-session which allows it to function very similarly to the Steam Deck, but at the moment it seems TDP control isn’t working so games don’t run as well as they should. I also can’t get the ROG button to work as a Steam button even though that should be working according to ChimeraOS. I wanted Arch because it allows for dual booting vs. Chimera which does not, as well as for development purposes. I think the hardware of the Ally is solid, though I still hold that the Deck’s controls are much better. Once the Ally is better supported on Linux I think it would be a better option, as I refuse to use Windows anymore except for testing/reverse engineering purposes.

I played it all weekend on my Steam Deck with no issues. I played it handheld for a while and docked on my TV for a while.

The Steam Deck really blurs the lines between PC and console. Modern consoles use AMD64/Radeon hardware and at least the Xbox consoles use a modified Windows OS. The Steam Deck uses AMD64/Radeon hardware and a modified Linux OS. Both feature a controller-focused user interface centered around gaming.

If you exclude the Steam Deck from the definition of “console” then a console is defined by its restrictive nature and limited selection of games.

If you include the Steam Deck in the definition of “console” then a console is defined by its controller-friendly and gaming-first design (as opposed to a general purpose PC).

I feel both definitions have merit.