Yeah, the Linux community has done a shitload of work to bring Linux up to as good as windows (in the technical sense) and better than windows (regarding the often hostile user experience).

Microsoft is now helping with the marketing by making the windows experience even worse, driving more people to “take the plunge” only for them to realize there isn’t a place where the floor suddenly drops away and you’re left helpless, and that that actually is a better description for using windows outside of the rails MS wants.

If you use an AMD gpu, there’s actually fewer steps to go from empty disk to playing a game, assuming that game isn’t trying to do things with the kernel or is one of the rare games that aren’t compatible for reasons other than anti-cheat (I’ve seen one game like that so far, forget the name of it but a logistics game that needed some dotnet library or something and I ended up giving up and refunding it rather than troubleshooting it until it worked, though others on protondb did say they got it working).

The days where windows gives an easier or better experience are gone, even ignoring all the next level enshitification of win 11. I’ve been on Linux for about a year now but wish I had switched sooner.

Goo goo ga chu?

Seems to me like the bubble is getting even worse because of efforts to deny that it is a bubble in the first place.

Oh yeah, I understand the sentiment entirely. With so many dark patterns dominating the world we live in because we live in a society that decided to embrace greed instead of seeing it as a primary motivator of evil, I can’t blame anyone that looks at the state of things with suspicion anytime there are downsides. And while it isn’t realistic to expect as good audio from a built-in system as a separate dedicated audio system, I do think it’s ridiculous that the standard is so dysfunctional that you either can’t understand what people are saying or explosions are way too loud. Especially in this digital world where mixing separate audio channels isn’t a difficult task. Streaming services should just have a stereo and mono version of the audio that is mixed well for that format if it is actually a harder problem than I think it is.

Some of it is practicality, but I don’t doubt that greed also plays into it. I mean, even on the modularity side, I don’t have the option of easily finding a TV without any speakers at all, or a TV without smart features that a) aren’t as good as other options I have to access those features and b) were actually thrown in to spy on data, as your previous comment mentioned.

So yeah, I don’t blame you at all for being suspicious of the companies that absolutely are trying to fuck their users because their real customers are data buyers, even if I do prefer my soundbar.

I appreciate TVs not wasting resources on putting decent speakers in it that I’ll never use because I did buy a soundbar over a decade ago that has decent sound and has outlasted the TV I bought it for. Plus TVs are so thin these days that they probably can’t even drive decent bass, and the speakers they do have are rear facing, so they don’t even drive the sound towards you.

Modularity isn’t a bad thing IMO.

They tried to jump right into the “popular thing drives high demand for popular spaces in popular thing” and skip the whole “make thing popular” step, banking on their name and people thinking it’ll make them a ton of money.

Though tbh I can’t say that was necessarily the wrong move (at least not if their entire goal is maximizing gains), since it wasn’t going to get popular like they wanted in the first place, so skipping that step and going straight to fleecing those dumb enough to throw money at it might have made the most sense.

That said, I think they put more money into it than they got out of it, so I doubt that it was deliberate. Zuck probably just thought if he paid people to make it, users would just flock to it and it would be as popular as fictional VR worlds are, despite missing the tactile VR system they tend to use or the whole “VR world is popular (or the focus of everyone’s life)” being a plot point rather than the consequence of someone building the world and people choosing to spend their time and money there.

Also, I’m in the demographic that probably would have been the most interested (like as a user of VR, not someone looking to just make money from it), but their offering didn’t even raise enough curiosity for me to check out what they made. There is an anti-meta bias in play, but even if it had been offered by a separate entity, I still wouldn’t have been interested because it sounded enshitified from the moment of concept.

Lol I wonder if they’ll rename the company again to try to make it look like AI in general is them.

Poll: Should “I don’t know” be the most common answer to any survey?

• Yes
• I don’t know
• No

Can’t say I’m surprised by any of this, everything about the guy screamed to me that it would be a shitty experience. They are using purely business things to attract users: paying big for exclusive titles (eg mini monopolies that force interested users to their platform) and giving games away for free. Neither of those require a decent experience, so no shit they cheaped out on that. Those who are just in it for the money are far more likely to end up at a “ah fuck it, it works good enough, ship it” point than someone who wants to build something good, knowing people will come if it’s good enough.

It also makes it obvious that they’ll lean right into the enshitification as soon as they think they have that marketshare captured. So personally, I hope they don’t fix that shit, because it won’t indicate that they are becoming better but just that their strategy and tactics have improved while the end goal remains the same.

And tbf, that end goal might be about control instead of money, so only approved video games can be played. Oh right, they already did that with UT because it might compete with their fortnite cash cow.

Step 3. Think of riddles that can’t be solved with a hammer.

African or Europe-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan?!

It’s very difficult for a set of volunteers to combat people being paid to manipulate their platform, so I’m happy with this platform remaining small enough to not be worth spending money on to manipulate.

I’d keep getting screwed because in RL, you need to build supports before the building they support, not as an afterthought to make it look more realistic.

“Need a bridge? Zoop mode, aaaaand it’s done!” Longest part of building a bridge comes from finding or fighting things on the way.

Yeah if the movie industry got their hands on it, Jack Black would be the engineer and the machines would talk (or act like animals that perfectly understand him and communicate effectively via body language) and the psychologist would end up an unlikely love interest that ends up remaining with him and his wacky machines at the end of the movie.

And after the conclusion, there will be a shot of his love interest looking at something in horror and saying, “ew, bugs!”, setting up the sequel that never gets made because the people who would like it aren’t drawn to Factorio, and those who are drawn to Factorio are disappointed that the only thing it has to do with Factorio is that it has machines. The execs played the game for 5 minutes and came up with a building system that involves him quickly building things by hand and Harvey Cavil quit production two weeks in, once it was clear they didn’t care about the actual lore.

For where they are today, they got rid of UT so it wouldn’t compete with fornite. So I don’t even give them any positive thoughts for that legacy.

Also iirc it was one of the few games that targetted linux compatibility back in the day, but epic has more recently taken a “fuck linux” stance and from what I understand deliberately prevents it running on linux via proton (“from what I understand” because it might just be the kernel level anti-cheat bs, but iirc he’s said things like all linux users are just trying to cheat). So he can keep his free games and while I would like to see someone actually compete with Valve, I hope some fortnite players wake up and stop spending money on dumb mtx shit so epic goes under.

Seeing all the horror stories in here makes me glad that I recoiled in horror the first time MS offered the idea of me putting my files on their computers instead of mine.

Same reason why you continue living in this dying world.

This has similar energy to people who think someone showing talent is a personal insult to them and their lack of talent (or drive to find what they are talented in).

Just because you can’t do or aren’t doing something doesn’t mean anyone who does is trying to flex on you.

I recently noticed that when a user gets banned, all of their posts and associated threads also get removed but with no notice.

I’ve also seen entire discussions removed because they included some heated words, despite also including useful discussion or even one sided rebuttals. While I’m under no illusion that things can get solved here, it’s annoying to see shit get deleted just because someone got upset. Even if there isn’t anything useful in comments, it breaks up the discussion because any replies have lost context.

IMO if it’s a disruptive user, ban them, but leave the evidence of their disruption up, unless it was spam or the kind of illegal shit that can get anyone who sees it in trouble.

Personally, I like my PS5 because I don’t really gaf what any games do with my PS5’s kernel. It’s my way to play games that I’d never touch on my PC (even before switching to Linux, kernel anti-cheat/DRM was a dealbreaker).

Actually kinda ironic because Sony is the company that made me not trust shit companies install on PCs for security purposes after their rootkit (also stopped using autoplay because of that). But between the three console options, Sony is the least shitty today.

That said, I’m not sure I’ll be ever getting another console because I still do most of my gaming on my PC while those games collect dust.