Be crazier and huge boost to FOSS game development tools to open source the latest version of Source 2 but it’s probably full of proprietary middleware that would have to be replaced to make usable in an open source state

Along with the desktop store, it’s like epic and Tim specifically try to do as little as they can and then get mad at the lack of user adoption. I hope O3DE and Godot keep developing and gain in adoption to topple unreal engine and more games come out and eat away at Fortnite. If their cash cows went into decline maybe they’d start doing more than what they think people should accept as the minimal viable product to spend their money on

For anyone that hasn’t tried it, the EGS store with 3rd party games for Android released back in January. Since then they still haven’t added a library/purchased view. You just scroll up and down to find where the games you own among games you don’t own. If it helps a company that makes a better store/game platform popular, sweet. If it’s just EGS and most other stores like on PC, it’ll be a nothing burger. If no one tries to actually improve on Google Play for customers, these stores are going to be glorified game launchers/advertisers

I see the modern internet as sometime in the early 2010s when YouTube shifted heavily towards monetisation and changing up the UI for that, Facebook started to shift from VC money to monetizing the platform culminating in its post-IPO super monetization. Facebook buying Instagram and then eventually monetizing it heavy with advertisements

Facebook IPO, YouTube profitability push from Google, Instagram profitability push from Facebook. That all came together to birth the modern online influencer. An incredibly fast rapid shift from a short decade of body acceptance and mild movements against over consumption to now 6th graders have skincare routines and therapy shopping seems bigger than it has ever been

I read the article and it just sounds like they’re praising ChromeOS for being web browser centric. Need office, open Google docs/drive. Pretty much a Linux distro but by default come with a bunch of progressive web apps installed for common applications?

Consumer expectations. On Linux you can just use the web browser just like most people already do on ChromeOS and I assume windows and mac’s. But on regular Linux, Mac, and Windows people expect more. So I guess a distro that brands itself and markets to users to just use the web browser for everything and maybe a store of progressive web apps/preinstalled ones

Also out of the box support. ChromeOS is Google backed. Laptop makers sell mainstream ChromeOS boxes. Linux doesn’t have major mainstream device support. It’d be far less fussy if hardware vendors were releasing plenty of Linux out the box hardware. Right now it’s some workstation centric hardware from Lenovo and Dell and smaller companies like System76

On that note I’d place my hopes with System76 since they’re currently focused on consumer experience. Cosmic DE is still not prime-time ready but maybe a couple more years. 26.04 release use as the default for their new hardware and it still effectively be early adopter phase for Cosmic DE. Then 28.04 ready for primetime. Keep trying to break into being a mainstream hardware brand. Other is what happens with KDE Plasma with Valve and SteamOS, Plasma Mobile, and maybe the TV interface. A bunch of consumer centric use cases driving development in KDE land. Maybe they’ll come up with a way to get flatpak permissions work in a way that alerts users on need and makes it easy to do like on Android/iOS

Games from half a decade ago

Pretty sure Brood War and Counter Strike never stopped working. In the past on PC, developers released the files needed to host your own servers for online games. Ubisoft has been gleefully trying to kill offline single player games for over a decade though. The best we can hope for is that Ubisoft fades go irrelevance or even fully close shop so money can flow to better gaming companies

I think that’ll still be the problem with it being in the storefront at all. Some parents org makes large enough fuss about porn games on Steam and payment processors demand stronger moderation rather than have their brands associated with Steam and whatever may be released on it

I don’t think there’s a way for Valve to avoid this. Like I don’t think it would be enough to mark games as only available for purchase without support from the major payment processors/rails. Like disable those and add crypto payment support and only use those for those games. Those games being on the store that major payment processors support, they’ll not want those on a store they support

This is a case where probably should be another store that doesn’t use major payment processors but until alternative payment rails became popular, it’d be a low sales volume store. I know cryptocurrency has negative connotations because of the community, but I think those currencies are the only long term solution for people making porn games or whatever type of content that may have rich/powerful groups wanting to suppress

ARM and x86 are both proprietary but ARM licenses ARM out willy nilly while x86 is Intel, AMD, and watever VIA does these days with their license.

Steam as an ARM store just means Valve built a version of Steam that runs on modern Mac machines which are all ARM processor based. So any game that releases natively for Steam on Mac now means the developer has support for building ARM versions of their video games

ARM companies. Qualcomm, Mediatek, Samsung, Xiaomi, Nvidia, Amazon, Alibaba, Broadcom, …, a bunch of companies

Budget PCs? Maybe. There’s a lot more ARM CPU vendors out there. Just if they decide it’s worth targeting the desktop/laptop/handheld PC market with proper software support. Your TV probably has an ARM chip in it.

I am interested in ARM handheld PCs to see what they can manage in the sub 10w TDP range. Past that I’m even more interested in RISC-V devices. It’ll be many years for solid support though. ARM for Linux has been around for decades and ARM for Windows since at least Windows 8. It’s been a slow grind for high end ARM on desktop/portable PCs. My impression is on Linux box64/86 and FEX are pretty good and the MS one for Windows seems solid. Linux Qualcomm said they’d be fast on support and they’re definitely not AMD/Intel/Nvidia fast to support Linux machines

I’m sure RISC-V vendors will be better with Linux. ARM ones, Qualcomm has been mediocre. Mediatek+Nvidia, at least Nvidia is well experienced with Linux deliverables for hardware drivers.

Excellent. The umbrella of KDE is home to a bunch of my favorite applications. Kdenlive, Krita, Digikam. I’ve been hotly anticipating the day I get a phone running Plasma Mobile

This may be better eventually than Plasma Mobile for what I imagined as an ideal gaming frontend that isn’t just Steam Big Picture

Maybe someday Waydroid and Android Translation Layer will make Linux as a HTPC+gaming great

They’ll streamline better over time. These open source WINE frontends/orchestrators may as well have 2 eras, before and after Proton. Before Proton they had little developer interest so development was slow. After Proton, influx of users and more developers interest in working on open source Linux gaming tools and Lutris rapidly got better and Heroic popped up. PlayOnLinux got left to historic obscurity in the history of Linux gaming

So I’m not concerned about Steam reliance. Everything outside of Steam is so much easier because of Valves open source contribution and the growth of the community. Pretty much because of Valve, Lutris/Heroic/etc became better at a faster pace and will continue getting because of what Steam did for Linux gaming in the past decade

Last game was mediocre but over 20 years they’ve been very consistent. I wonder how stable Playground Games have been with Fable reboot. I wonder if they’ve managed being a 2 game pipeline studio or it’s all hands on deck for Fable. If it’s all hands on deck for Fable and no Forza Horizon game on the horizon as a studio silver lining regardless of Fable performance, the pressure there after the last couple of years of MS Xbox slashing must be heavy

Forza Motorsport being cut when it has been a pillar for 20 years is insane.State of Decay 3 so far dodging bad news year after year while being publicly absent

Not weird. It’s the main reason to play. For me it wasn’t even really about the main plot line, ended up not caring for the Wild Hunt or the White Frost at all but every tidbit about the conjunction of spheres, Heart of Stone, and the various non-Wild Hunt factions and quests were pretty captivating to me. The small quest lines were usually interesting. The Crones were a lot more interesting than the Wild Hunt

Cyberpunk is edgy mature. Even more so than the Witcher series. I’m not saying that disapprovingly. I like both but I don’t think they’re a far cry from the previous 15 years of mature video game stories. They’re still stories that need direct physical violence to work. They have a grand scale.

Some standouts I remember, of course all violent, from the past would be KOTOR 2, GTAIV, Eternal Sonata, Xenogears, StarCraft 1/Brood War, Persona series has been consistently interesting, Yakuza games and that reminded me of Shenmue, Dragon Age Origins, Dragon Age 2 is cool with the timespan of story in a single city, Bioshock games, the first 2 Fallout games, Planetscape Torment. There’s a lot. What makes Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk standout to me is primarily graphics and scale. A bunch of interesting questlines in single games. They’re all a bunch of violent games though.

Eternal Sonata I think was the most memorably unique of the games I listed and maybe across all the games I could remember that had high production values for the time. I wish that got a PC release/remaster

The reaction of diehards wasn’t close to golden. You had the lore-aficionados that found the game as whitewashed, the shippers thought every relationship was shallow and role players thinking it jumped the shark even more than previous games with anachronism. The game was stable. Not buggy. That is its elevator pitch for why it’s good

Where they may lag behind is powervr graphics and the accompanying drivers though that will mostly be a problem for those interested in running windows software through the developing software and whatever comes of the Debian VM progressing

Canceling NordVPN was a pain. It took numerous emails across numerous days for them to cancel and remove my credit card info. Lesson learned, I only pay with PayPal where I can revoke permission for recurring payments or pay with crypto. Went expressvpn to the cheaper nordvpn then to proton unlimited

Good to see. LibreOffice is solid today. Was passable back in like 2012. Now it’s pretty excellent, at least for most people. Ribbon interface like 5 years ago was pretty rough. Now I think it’s pretty close to great. I thought OnlyOffice and WPS Office had a substantial visual edge but that was me comparing it to like 2020 LibreOffice. 2025 LibreOffice looks pretty good now that I wouldn’t feel worries about newcomers looking at it as a relic of 2003 visual design

Some years ago there was a documentary called Mayor about the mayor of the de facto capital of Palestine. I remember they had mediators from like Germany in the negotiation for the Palestinians to build a cemetery and the Israeli negotiator and German mediators telling the mayor that he needs to compromise and satisfy the Israeli demands. Some compromise.

The gist is that there wasn’t really a compromise to be made. The Palestinians wanted to build a cemetery in their city so people could have a place to bury loved ones and the Israeli military that say these people are free and independent are saying no to the people to build a cemetery for non-specific reasons.

There wasn’t anything the Mayor and the people of the city could do to be able to build a cemetery and not be attacked by the Israeli military that had in years past invaded and we’re occupying. It was more like they didn’t want anything built for the local population at all. They were effectively living in captivity with no real self-governance. Freedom could only be had in lands away from their home and that very well may have been the purpose. Before this direct genocide, the method in cool periods was to make life miserable for the native people’s to push them out for Israeli colonizers