What you’re saying is “inevitable” hasn’t happened for the entire 20+ years of Steam. I’m going to guess Valve is going to continue being a private company and doing whatever the fuck they want, without investor pressure towards enshittification.

Steam’s monopoly is actually what’s holding PC gaming together. Other types of digital distribution services are so fucked up by exclusivity deals that any “competition” is always going to mean “megacorporation uses existing wealth to deny competition”.

Epic is trying really hard to bring the exclusivity nightmare over to PC gaming as well, but so far Valve still holds.

Qtox should work? It’s not a very good chat software and a bit cumbersome, but it allows direct file transfers.

I do wonder if it’s going to be HC viable as well.

Sad to see 'cause it feels like we need Pirate Parties more than ever.

“Record result” doesn’t even begin to describe how hard they shattered their previous number. They went from 7% last election to 17%. Left Alliance has never seen numbers like this as far as I know.

I’m glad there’s finally some real backlash for this shit.

I really only wanted mods to fix the horrible 2011 Xbox 360 UI and to remove the dynamic enemy level scaling, but for the latter no manual install guides were provided and it seems you must use one of these mod organizing softwares for whatever fucking reason.

For mod organizer no install instructions were provided for a Linux/GOG combination so I just gave up trying to mod Skyrim. I just wanted two goddamn mods and I failed.

The same old, tired and stupid control layout and no trackpads. How do you even begin to make a PC handheld and not offer any mouse cursor controls? All the Steam Competitors do is up the specs to stupid numbers and appeal to familiarity. It’s both disappointing and something should’ve expected.

I remember watching V for Vendetta when Obama was president and I actually can’t believe the US went from the Obama era to being on the brink of becoming a christofascist nation.

What I’m saying is the timing on these memes about past European imperialism make them look absurd with what’s happening in Europe right now. All the countries listed in the meme are helping a country fight back an imperialist, expansionist warmongerer.

There’s a lot of newly found natural resources in southern and eastern Ukraine. It’s funny how the same “imperialists” are always the butt of the joke while there’s an actual, massive imperialist war of conquest happening right now. E: testing if editing federates this.

Even if we choose to ignore how unethical and self-centered this argument is (for any country), a lot of US influence, affluence and indeed global stability right now hinges on the US military might being there to reliably challenge authoritarian aggression on its allies and partners. The second US starts showing cracks in that reliability (with the extremist MAGA wing and all), authoritarian leaders start seeing opportunities to test the waters, literally as well.

This notion somehow assumes that the US achieved and can continue its status disconnected from the rest of the world’s security and it’s bonkers. Even the otherwise sound argument for increased defense spending in Europe is made moot by the Russo-Ukrainian war as it’ll obviously increase spending in Europe. Spending that could be largely funneled in to the US military-industrial complex, recouping from what gets sent if they signal their commitment and keep sending their late cold-war era kit to grind down one of their two most serious threats. Without a single US troop on the ground.

It’s hard to think of a bigger foreign policy W for the US with its otherwise controversial bloated military and more fitting use for what’s already built for this exact purpose, but it doesn’t seem important to the extremist wing.

The Finnish populist right wing has generally been very critical of Russia, especially the leading figure Jussi Halla-Aho. Even though I think some of them have sympathised with the “conservative values” that the Russian leaders like to represent.

The topic of continuing Ukraine support didn’t even come up in any debates during elections 'cause everyone’s on the same page anyway.

167h of Stardew on the Deck here so far and probably wouldn’t even play it if Deck didn’t make playing games so comfy.

Aside from the bigger battery, the APU got a die shrink (7nm to 6nm). With the same performance target it directly translates to better efficiency.

Apparently “highly limited quantities” is about the Limited Edition model and not all of the OLED models.

I don’t think it’ll ever happen, but I’d love to see the right side trackpad and thumbstick swap places. I use the trackpad 95% of the time and I keep wishing it was in the better spot.

Steam Deck does feel like a superset of Switch. It offers almost all of what Switch offers in a bit heavier and a lot more comfortable package. You get absolute freedom to do what you want with the device (I buy almost all my games from GOG), the trackpads become pretty much mandatory once you get used to them. You have the option of playing AAA titles with shorter battery life, but don’t actually compare that badly agaist a Switch if you play games that Switch can run. You gain access to a lot more games, a lot cheaper games.

People convince eachother that the two devices somehow serve different functions and audiences, but that just feels like unwarranted courtesy towards Switch. I don’t have a Switch, to be clear, but it does seem like an obvious upgrade from what I can tell.

I specifically phrased it “could be” as people tend to believe there are 3 preferences, Mac, Linux and Windows. Linux is not one user experience, it could work exactly like your favorite OS. In the face of SteamOS already being a viable option for the average gamer as Valve is basically strong arming it to be, on Steam Deck you’re not exactly doing PC gaming any good deliberately installing Windows on it. SteamOS just works.

I also think you’re very misguided in thinking it won’t have any return to Valve. Microsoft has to be looking at Google Play Store and whatever the Apple Store is called with a lot of envy with how they’ve managed to lock the entire ecosystem under their stores. This is the end result for Windows as well and its likely anti-competetive clauses are a very bad sign for a company like Valve. Looking back I’m actually impressed just how far back Valve saw this happening. Decoupling PC gaming in its entirety from Microsoft’s vendor lock-ins is in the best interest of all of the companies in the gaming industry, but it takes a rich private company like Valve to start doing the hard work for long term benefits instead of always chasing the short term profits.

Even if tomorrow Microsoft launched something that pulled ahead of SteamOS, it would still be in the gamers’ best interest to stick with the open platform. With a consistent, large userbase on an open platform it will eventually eclipse anything Microsoft could ever muster.

For the future of PC gaming I sure as hell hope so. People stick to and defend Windows as their go-to 'till the bitter end, likely not realizing Linux could be everything their Windows machine is and there is a real industry player with a lot of money making this reality right now. If we just let it.

If we would just give Linux the critical mass, we could free the last locked aspect of PC gaming, the OS itself. That way we would no longer be at the whims of Microsoft’s decisions because let’s face it, even Windows users hate the shit they do.