YouTube launched in 2005 and was bought by Google in 2006. It has been a Google service for 95% of its existence. I’m pretty sure Google did other stuff in that 18 years than “put in more ads.”

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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.

Also, every game launcher on Windows still puts games in the start menu.

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.

Every other major application and service on Mac has ARM-native builds now, there’s not really an excuse for Valve. It’s especially silly when much of Steam is running through a Chromium engine, not machine code or anything else that might be difficult to port.

There’s a difference between Valve deciding to not make Mac games anymore and Valve leaving the Mac Steam client a slow and laggy mess on newer Macs. The former only affects people who want to play Valve games, the latter affects a lot more people.

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 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.

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.

The latest versions through GOG and (I think) Steam run pretty well, there’s no more GFWL or other stuff that broke a long time ago.

I’m okay with Threads federating because there are a some people I know who won’t use Mastodon but will use Threads, and I would like to talk to them without downloading Threads. That’s probably true for most of the people supporting it, or they just think it should be up to individuals instead of the admin making unilateral decisions about who you’re allowed to talk with.

Threads joining would also introduce a far wider group of people to Fedi that isn’t just “nerds who like Linux and/or programming”, which is the bulk of people using Mastodon (and Lemmy, for that matter) right now. I’m not really concerned about EEE because there will always be a huge chunk of people using the FOSS platforms.

If I am on Mastodon, there is nothing that Threads can collect from me that they can not get already. My posts are public, Meta or anyone else doesn’t need permission to look at them.

The only risk is if I am sending direct messages to someone on Threads from Mastodon, then obviously Meta has a copy. ActivityPub is not E2E encrypted, you shouldn’t be using it for private communication at all, the threat model is the same between Threads and any other Mastodon server.

Public Mastodon posts are already indexed by search engines.