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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 7th, 2023

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  • I’m thinking this comes from the consideration of taking imagery at the root of people’s brains when they hear Linux. Reiterating elements of the Windows or Mac UI over the decades, even if they had small visual changes, enable a significantly large population of the world to imagine the desktop even just while mentioned in a passing. Anyone that doesn’t use either of these OSes at least can have a basic imagery popping up about it due to constant advertising of the desktop via direct ads, support pages, tech websites using generic desktop images, screen shares, etc.

    Linux is wild west in this regard. Everyone knows how Windows or MacOS looks like thanks to their abundant copies of descriptive bounty posters, but only other Linux users are familiar with other Linux desktops and that is usually as the names of fellow bounty hunters.









  • In practicality, and this life-and-death is a matter of practicality rather than preference, betrayal beats zealous genocide support.

    Even as someone from outside, I can say the U.S.’ best bet is Biden again. His international politics are no different than most U.S. presidents that came to office in the last century, but at least U.S. citizens are getting a nice end of the mostly shit-ended sticks for a change. And that goes for all the current immigrant peoples in the U.S., too, although for many the reason for leaving their homes can be traced back to deep-rooted U.S. foreign policy.

    What do they have with Trump? Persecution during immigration while their home countries will be kept bombed to hell or stripped and exploited by the ongoing U.S. policy.


  • I’m not porposing or defending any approach here, where do you draw the line between the decision to address the underlying issues and catering to creating isolated environments to shelter the marginalized groups, tho?

    I get that taking a breather in a safe environment to help with self-esteem and love is critical so as not to sink below that threshold of constantly feeling overwhelmed that is different for everyone, and I’m in no way seeing a one-day thing as anything else, but as public coordination events, how do you draw the line between the two I mentioned above? First example of going beyond giving breathing room to making a segregation comes to mind as the “pink buses” in which only women are allowed to be feel safe from men that some right-wing politicians bring up from time to time as a similar topic on addressing the cause vs treating the symptom or even causing different problems under such intention.





  • They may be overcharging, they are most likely overcharging if it can make a billionaire among them. Is it anti-consumer? In the context of current capitalist economy and comparable, even rival companies present? And if you have reading comprehension, you’ll notice that there is a paragraph in all of my comments to you mentioning Gaben’s yatches being obscene and shouldn’t be. Anyway, skip to the part below, ending it there:

    I never had a dream of becoming a billionaire, or dreaming about those yatches. Or being aspired to and been jealous of through riches. As you have noted, I’m from Turkey and we don’t have the fucking American Dream here, dude. But what we had is: Cheapest gaming PC game purchases thanks to Steam for all the goddamn years. Even when we had quite a competitive economy before our glorious economist-god-emperor Tayyip fucked our economy, we were able to buy your 60€ all-stores-including-own-store triple-A games for like 5€-10€. Indie games? Man you won:t believe it, but cents. Now you make the calculations about how much Steam exploited us.

    Anyway, I, too, can enjoy this criticism-deflection game, so here goes my response to your personal background digging: Go suck Tim Swiney’s epic child-addiction-exploitating-Fortnite-whatever-the-fuck-ever-is-exclusive-dick after you find solace that you supported grinding down the best gaming store that is practicing the most pro-customer policies reliably in a stable and self-sustaining capacity over more than a decade and a half.


  • And what you don’t understand is that this whole affair about “Valve taking 30% cut is overcharging” is bogus. Valve and whole others can sell fully-fledged carrots at $1M each, with Valve adding better packaging and better preservation while doing discounts regularly, all the while Epic can sell a malnourished and cut-out one at $500k each and give away a stale and cut-out one for free regularly.

    Both are expensive if their base prices can be discounted by electing smaller margin of profits. (That is another topic as Steam is doing jackload of live-service that can’t be served as an offline service, without any form of subscription or recurring payments.) Even so, picking on the one that offers a sustainable price plan and fully-fledged product with extra benefits just because it is pricey for your wallet while all others in the market do a poorer job at the same prices or price-per-value is just grabbing your pitchfork because someone else started a riot against your cordial and caring overseer while the world around you is rife with jackals who’d like to be your king.

    Go bug Gaben to spend more of his personal wealth gained through Valve’s distributed earnings on betterment of the product they serve rather than on the yatches. Don’t go around asking just Valve to get less cushion for experimentation, being generous in return, lax bout worker load and project development, etc., while they are the sole company doing that. Better yet, push your governments to install blanket resolutions against exorbitant wealth accumulations or uneven wealth distributions so that both better product development is prioritized and all employees are rewarded fairly if any single one is to be rewarded.

    Anyway, I’m changing the discussion to be about how Stephen Hawking’s name is on Epstein’s list. Lets talk about this, I don’t care whether there are more concerning people named on that list or whether Hawking is unique for his contributions in some fields. Hell, I am not even interested in if the discussion is worthwhile through the factuality of the claim or the scope of the claim because why, this is a discussion about Stephen Hawking being on Epstein’s list now.


  • What everyone is debating with you is that you are wrong in picking your target while your base claim of enabling someone, anyone at all, to be a billionaire is correct.

    You are wrong in picking Valve or Gaben as exploitative wealthy scum, because Valve is the closest thing to something that is not exploitative corporation, while Gaben as the head and sole person having the final say in which direction to go and which not to go, has been the best guardian of unexploitative gaming entertainment. If you think I’m making these up, please search around to see if you can find the equivalent of these features in any of the meaningfully-accessible companies: Family sharing, Proton, Steam Friends, Steam Network, Steam Workshop, Steam Community Hub.

    Steam Family sharing: The current version enables players to have access to the games in other’s libraries as long as those accounts are not having access at the same time. The upcoming version allows for access to other’s games as long as there are enough copies in the sharing pool. In the age others in the entertainment industry is cracking down accessibility with ever increasing prices, like Netflix’ oppression on password sharing or even having access to your own account on multiple devices, please don’t tell me this Family sharing improvements by Valve isn’t extremely pro-consumer.

    Proton: Provides an almost silver bullet, or an easily configurable base template, for gaming on Linux. You can be a Windows or Mac user all you want and never give a thought to Linux, but you can’t argue not letting Windows have monopoly over PC gaming by enabling access to gaming on free OS isn’t a completely pro-consumer endeavour. It is also open source, so they are not even gatekeeping their own work on this.

    Friends and Network: While having no-DRM copies from GOG is great and all, having your games connect to your friend’s games, or forming completely random lobbies in seconds, with just a couple clicks requires some always-present middleman. Your no-DRM copies can stay with you till eternity, but you’ll have to configure your own methods of connection to your friends outside your local network.

    Workshop: Mods hosting for games that support it, and easy installation with 1 click. Yes, there are still free alternatives like Nexus, but they show you ads to meet their hosting needs, so in that sense they are as free as Valve sparing budget from their 30% cut from game sales to Workshop.

    Community Hub: A catalogue of all game-related stuff, from guides to memes, troubleshooting threads to feedback, promotion space for developers to knowledge database for players. Open to the whole world wide web and not restricted to account walls or pay walls.

    Now, I agree that even providing these services with the best quality-and-features-per-buck option out there, there shouldn’t be billionaires while there are starvation and wage slaving ones life this prominent in the world. While these issues persist, having yatches to one person’s or a few people’s name is an indecent behaviour that should not be allowed in a working social contract. However, when you look at the rest of the companies in the same industry, or even other industries, there are way worse offenders of this wealth inequality that don’t even come close to Valve in providing the same quality-and-features-per-buck value, while having billionaires and actually striving to make them more wealthy instead of providing more for the customers and workers.

    Case in point: You are not even looking a gift horse in the mouth; you are beating your most hard working horse for eating a hearty meal, claiming you are right in that amount of meal is not needed to survive, all the while letting the rest of your slacking horses raid your pantry without batting an eye. Pressure the others to provide better services per buck, also at a self-sustaining rate so as to not be deprived of it a year later, first.