Whether or not the exclusivity deal is between the publisher and the store or just the publisher doesn’t make a difference for the consumer. There’s no functional difference between Counter Strike 2 requiring Steam and Fortnite requiring the Epic launcher except that gamers are used to Steam.
No exclusivity for games
Valve doesn’t need to pay for exclusivity because it already dominates the market. There are many games that are effectively Steam exclusives because they are not available through other methods on PC. Half-Life 2 received a lot of criticism at launch for requiring Steam.
They purposefully made SteamOS open source so that other companies can easily release portable PC gaming products
SteamOS is open source, but you need a license to use the Steam brand, and Valve doesn’t allow that. One company tried to make a handheld console with SteamOS, but it can’t be legally bundled with the hardware: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/10/24033161/ayaneo-next-lite-steam-deck-competitor-steamos
That said, who knows what happens when he dies?
Yes, that’s the point of the article. If you need one specific person to stay alive for something to continue functioning well, you don’t have a business, you have the British monarchy.
Valve has avoided many of the same anti-consumer moves as other tech and gaming giants, likely due to its smaller size, status as a non-public company, and the long-time leadership of Gabe Newell and other executives. Valve won’t stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism, and there are already examples of anti-consumer behavior.
Valve is not immune to enshittification, and it has already happened on some level with minimal current Mac support, facilitating gambling through item trades, etc.
I mean, even those old iPhones have better software support than a lot of low-end/budget Android phones. The iPhone 11 still has iOS 17 and will probably get security patches for another year or two (assuming it gets dropped with iOS 18, maybe Apple will try pushing it another year).
I would like to see more collective action, but it’s also incredibly difficult to put your housing situation on the line when the US (and most states) does not give you a functional backup. As you said, it’s capitalism at work.
I mentioned in the article that 5G home internet is not a solution for everyone. The reliability varies significantly by location and network quality—some people have no issues, for others it’s unusable. It’s not a perfect solution that will fix the US’ infrastructure problems, but in the meantime it is making a difference for some people.
I mean, yeah, just leaving it at “china bad” is still xenophobia. Tech companies in the US and other countries can be just as shady.
What safety plan? We can already get shot at Walmart.
GIMP is not a Photoshop replacement except for pretty basic stuff. There’s no content aware fill, fewer non-destructive edit options, wonky compatibility with PSD files, etc.
Darktable also isn’t a real replacement for a lot of use cases. Lightroom (the non-Classic version) has pretty great cloud syncing and multi-platform apps, so you can do some work on a desktop and then move to a tablet/smartphone or vice-versa. Darktable doesn’t have that kind of flexibility.
Those aren’t drop-in replacements. GIMP for example doesn’t have anything close to Photoshop’s content-aware fill capabilities, I don’t think Krita does either.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but last I checked the Creative Cloud manager/installer for Adobe apps doesn’t work on Wine, because it uses the windows system webview that Wine hasn’t fully replicated. Only pirated copies or installations copied from a Windows machine work.
Photoshop and Lightroom.
I have 2FA through Authy on my Microsoft account.
When you’re in Chrome or another browser, there’s an install option in the main overflow (three dots) menu.
I made a PWA that can quickly remove tracking variables called Link Cleaner. If you install it through Chrome or another Chromium browser on Android, it shows up as a share target, so you can share links to Link Cleaner and then share again to the intended target.
Or just an RSS reader, every channel has an RSS feed
I did say the element zapper was missing. uBO Lite is using the same default filterlists as uBO, which includes some trackers: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets
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