No but I think the point being made is that people that have been clinging to Win 10 as a refuge from the crapfest that Win 11 is are going to start running into significant problems soon. Increasingly you’re not going to be able to get software for Windows 10. A lot of people are opting to migrate to Linux rather than going from Win 10 to Win 11, and as the holdouts on 10 are increasingly corned some amount of them will make the same decision.
Ah cool, thanks for looking all that up. I knew Proton pre-dated Steam Deck, I just wasn’t sure exactly where in the timeline it fit between the original Steam Machine launch and the release of the Steam Deck.
It’s kind of a shame that Steam Machine failed, but in many ways it was a little too ahead of its time and its failure brought us to the Steam Deck which is a much more sensible approach.
Ultimately none of this would have existed without Wine and ironically the Microsoft app store (or whatever they’re calling it these days). The threat of MS getting a stranglehold on program distribution on Windows the way Apple does on OS X and iOS was enough to spur Valve into putting significant effort into making Linux a viable gaming platform, something we’re all benefitting from greatly.
People seem to be downplaying somewhat how significant an achievement this is for Linux. The thing is, for most programs you can find alternatives because the point isn’t the program it’s what you do with it. People don’t use Photoshop because they enjoy Photoshop, they do it because they want to create something, which means if you can create that same thing using a different program then you don’t need Photoshop. On the other hand games are an experience. The point is the game. Sure you can play a different game, but that’s not an Apples to Apples thing as the experience however similar isn’t the same. That means games are uniquely placed as a roadblock for migrating away from a platform, something consoles with their exclusive releases have known for a long time. Giving people the option to play the exact same game under Linux as they can under Windows is massive because there really isn’t any other way to solve that problem.
Couple technical nitpicks.
First it’s debatable if Proton existed long before Steam Deck. I’m not sure the exact timeline but I think it was created as part of the Steam Box effort which wasn’t all that long ago. On the other hand though Wine which Proton is built on top of most certainly has existed for a very long time before either the Steam Deck or even Proton (I have fond memories of LAN gaming with it back when Diablo 2 was new).
Second Proton doesn’t enable ARM (at least by itself) so that claim is a little misleading. There is a project to realtime translate x86 instructions into ARM but that project (Box86) although it fulfills a similar role and could be used in conjunction with Proton isn’t actually Proton. Using Proton by itself will not enable you to play x86/Windows games on ARM.
Lastly Proton is kind of irrelevant to the whole Linux vs BSD thing. Technically what enables that is that both implement POSIX standards plus use mostly the same libraries, frameworks (like Vulkan), and applications. Yes running Proton on BSD will let you game on BSD but that isn’t really a result of Proton doing the work so much as it’s a side effect of the fact you can run Proton on BSD in the first place. Additionally while there are technical and philosophical reasons why the distinction between Linux and BSD is important, practically speaking they’re the same thing these days. OpenBSD isn’t that much more different from a Linux distro as one Linux distro is from another.
For the network MITM just using encryption makes it significantly harder. For the PCIe card they blacklist the drivers and/or flag your account if they detect the hardware. It’s not 100% proof you’re cheating if you have one of those cards, there are legitimate uses for them, particularly for dev work, but game companies can be absurd with their demands as we’ve seen and refusing to run on particular hardware isn’t anything new for them.
There’s still ways to do things like snoop on system buses and such that can’t be detected, but you’re not dealing with off the shelf hardware at that point and the technical knowhow is extreme, so it’s a vanishingly small number of people with the skills to do that. When you consider the venn diagram of people with those skills, and people that want to cheat at games there’s pretty much no overlap.
It’s been a solved problem for a while now. High end cheating systems run in a way that’s 100% transparent to the primary computer. A second computer is used to either MITM the network traffic, or else it uses a PCIe card to grab the systems memory. From there keyboard and mouse inputs are first sent to the cheat system then relayed via USB to the primary. Video output is composited using a video mixer to draw overlays on the monitor. It’s expensive to set up, but there’s almost nothing that anti-cheat can do about it.
Yes, but actually no. In the strictest sense that is true in that it isn’t “officially” settled typically for a day or two. However, the reason why businesses are willing to accept credit card transactions is that there’s a soft approval that happens pretty much instantly and weeds out nearly every non-fraud instance of non-payment. Once that soft approval comes back (which remember happens within a second or two) the retailer can be confident that the card is tied to a valid account, that has a large enough balance to cover the transaction, and barring fraud dispute it will go through and they’ll get paid. If something were to go wrong in that process there’s also banks and the CC processor that the business could go after in court to get their money.
In contrast crypto takes several minutes to go through if not significantly longer, and if something goes wrong in that process there’s no legal recourse of any kind. If a business were to allow product to leave their store prior to that minute+ approval process and it fails, they’re screwed, they just have to eat that cost.
Look into the Privacy app (kind of a terrible name honestly). It’s effectively a Paypal type system but one that issues CC numbers for each vendor or transaction and allows you to easily audit and manage them. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than Paypal.
The fundamental flaw with all current crypto is that it’s far too volatile to use as a currency. The only reasonable use for it at the moment is as a high risk commodity which is the vast overwhelming majority of what we see. Any so called “currency” that regularly sees price swings of multiple percentage points in a day isn’t actually a currency and is unsuitable to be used as one.
Adding to this is the problem of transaction times. Actual payment systems typically have transaction times of less than a second, occasionally a second or two. Bitcoin in contrast can take multiple minutes, sometimes hours or even days to confirm a transaction. There’s no way for Valve to accept and then immediately convert Crypto to USD. The process would inherently involve at least two transactions, one to transfer the crypto to Valves wallet, then a second to transfer from Valves wallet to the exchanges wallet, and only then could Valve attempt to sell that crypto. The financial uncertainty involved in all of that is entirely unacceptable for a business.
At this moment there is only one potentially viable way of approaching this and it’s government regulation of some kind. Either government needs to regulate that payment processors get no say in the contents of customers business, or else they need to regulate the adoption of a neutral digital payment system. One possible example of what that could look like would be the GNU Taler system which might eventually become a payment system in Switzerland but isn’t yet.
Get the LibRedirect extension. It can send you to alternate mirrors of the same info not just for reddit but a bunch of other corporate data harvesting operations pretending to be websites.
In terms of the open source community Microsoft has been significantly less sketchy than usual for about a decade now. For those of us that are old enough to remember the halloween files it’s hard to let go of that paranoia, particularly with the sketchy shit MS has been doing with their proprietary stuff lately, but near as I can tell they’ve been above board on their open source stuff.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say blindly trust them at this point, but I wouldn’t just assume with no evidence at all that there has to be something nefarious going on either.
Chicken is not beef. Pork is not beef. Fish is certainly not beef. I hate chicken. Pork isn’t bad but can be hit or miss. The only meat I hate more than chicken is fish. So no, I can’t just eat other meats. Even if that wasn’t the case there are also people who are allergic to chicken. We had one of our friends over recently and we have to make sure nothing we serve has chicken in it because of their allergy.
You’re also missing the point entirely. I neither need nor want AI. Nobody needs AI. 90% of what AI is used for now could be done without AI using half the power and just as quickly. It’s a solution in search of a problem and that’s fundamentally the wrong way to do things. All this AI crap is purely being driven by marketing departments that are just frothing at the mouth to find some way to justify slapping “AI” into their ads.
The problem is all those other things are useful, unlike AI. AI is a gimmick and a distraction. It wasn’t so bad when it was a novelty being experimented with, but now that corporations have decided it’s the hot new thing and are racing each other to find the most pointless places to cram it in it’s out of hand. It’s approached fundamentally wrong, instead of looking at a problem and asking “could AI help with this?” companies are starting with AI and then asking “now what problems can we invent to justify using this?”. The result is a bunch of power gets wasted solving problems that aren’t actually problems or could have been solved much more efficiently in traditional ways, and yes that’s bad for the environment.
Valves statement also matches with the claims of Itch.io, Stripe, and what Collective Shout themselves have claimed. So we’ve got two different claims, on one side are Visa and Mastercard, and on the other we’ve got literally everyone else. I feel pretty confident about which one is a load of bullshit.
It’s also worth noting that Visa and Mastercard are playing semantic games with their statements. Nobody ever claimed they were “refusing legal transactions”, rather what they’re doing is threatening to stop working with any business that doesn’t implement censorship that they’re happy with. It’s a subtle but important difference and they’ve never denied that’s what they’re doing.
Edit: rereading Mastercards statement they are claiming they don’t restrict how businesses operate (although they do weasel around a little bit about illegal content), although Visa still hasn’t denied that. They may also be playing games with that statement because porn is illegal in some countries that Mastercard operates in so they may be trying to claim porn is an illegal transaction despite businesses not selling it in the countries it’s illegal in.
Edit 2: It just occurred to me this could also be about the UK and some US states new (and horrible) porn ID laws. I’m not aware of Valve doing anything to implement the strict age verification those laws are requiring for sites that distribute porn, and Visa/Mastercard could be trying to argue that without that in place any porn games Valve sells are “illegal transactions”. In theory Steam does have age gating, but it’s the same “are you over 18?” easily bypassed check that porn sites have always used.
Guarantee that the next guy rips that gaudy shit out day one.