Incredible. Purism has come a long way. It's amazing to have a truly open phone. A lot of people don't know how hard it is to mod an Android phone. You have to worry about drivers and firmware, security protections and attestation. For me the value of this comes from its freedom. Not from its privacy necessarily, but the hardware switches are great. I hate that I rely on the very many apps for Android and iOS that don't have a web counterpart like Discord. Linux apps on phones are very much a chicken-egg problem and I don't think we can break the duopoly
Accounting and exclusivity. MS can try to make GamePass a gate for all future purchases, and the interchange cost is just moving money around inside MS at that point.
Because it goes from a hope to a rule. No need to hope that Diablo IV will be free on Gamepass, day 1 (and let's be serious, if ActiBlizz stays independent there is no hope in hell for this to happen) - but if the sale goes through then this will be reality.
Imagine Diablo IV or each of the Call of Duties... free... day 1. That is huge value. Something Steam can't compete with.
But that is how licensing works for Steam games (that require it). I don't want invasive rootkits, locked down software, or resource consuming software. Steam is light compared to other alternatives. The best option is to buy games from GOG (or another DEM-free store) or from publishers directly, assuming they don't have a crappy launcher. Epic Games Launcher, 2K Launcher, Riot Client, Rockstar Games Launcher, etc are awfully slow and consume a lot of memory and disk space. Steam just happens to be the lightest of them all and therefore people tolerate it more.
What Steam does isn't what annoys most. It's what game publishers do with their own launchers.
My GOG account suddenly broke (500 server response upon login) back in 2016 after adding The Witcher 3 to it, and despite repeated attempts over the years to demand that they fix it and restore my games, it remains broken. All I've got are empty promises to look at it, but no results.
You’re totally right that this is bad, unacceptable customer service and worth criticizing. Don’t take my next paragraph as an attempt to downplay your problem, because I agree with your justification.
That said: unlike Steam games, your GOG games are not lost when your account gets FUBARed, so long as you backed up the installers. GOG provides that capability; Steam does not. I do back up my GOG installers, just in case I ever get locked out like this. I can’t do that with Steam.
You either have the games or you don't. You can't have it both ways.
With the prices of hard drives these days, anyone that truly cares about this stuff can save up and back up game installers. You don't need a fully fledged NAS server with four drive bays loaded to the brim if all you're going to do is occasionally sync the installers with GOG.
Hard drive prices are around a cent per gigabyte these days. With today's absurd game sizes, that's a $20 "keep it after the cloud service shuts down" surcharge. Not great, but not impossible to overcome either.
Nobody backs up their installers because it's much easier to just rely on cloud providers keeping around your game installers forever. That doesn't mean it can't be done if you actually care.
Yes, I remember how happy I was when GOG was announced, that a digital store with that ethos would exist. It's a shame that it has since become soured like that for me.
There's no migration path from Skype to Microsoft Teams (Personal). Microsoft hasn't picked one as far as I know.
Microsoft similarly has a bunch of duplicate services and products. They've got chat functionality spread across many apps, specifically Teams, Skype, and Xbox. Windows also has widgets in Windows 11 and widgets in Xbox Game Bar. There's also the mess that is developing apps for Windows that has just become Chromium, partially due to Microsoft's own messes.
Doesn't help that Epic Games has three instances of Chromium. Add that to Steam's and all of the games' instances and you've easily gotten at least 2 GB of duplicate instances of Chromium. Edge and Edge WebView, at least, are hard-linked, provided that they're the same version.
I think it's because the apps have additional functionality and because the services push users to use the apps on their websites. Some of the additional functionality is artificially limited to apps as companies can put more tracking, advertising, and can ensure that people won't leave their service easily by just closing a tab.
Another concerning web API is the Battery Status API. See demo[1]. Firefox and WebKit have not implemented it thankfully but Google refuses to remove it for some odd reason. How it ever came to be boggles me. A low-power API would make much more sense. The Battery Status API does not have a user facing toggle in Chrome, unlike the sensor APIs, let alone actual permissions. Speaking of which, I can't believe the Chrome team still hasn't done anything about the sensor APIs. I've turned it off and see so many analytics tools in websites try to use it. Another surprising browser API that's only in Chrome is the Network Information API - again, permissionless, and cannot be opted-out of.
A lot of the specs say that user agents must provide users with a way to disable support for certain API. CSP reporting is one that many uBO users will recognise. But of course, Google doesn't follow that. And many of the aforementioned APIs are not W3C standards and are merely working drafts.
Dopamine is chemical that makes you feel good. The algorithms are made to increase engagement. Some of the most engaging content is content that makes people angry or shocked. Look at the YouTube homepage when you're not signed in. YouTube's algorithms are not necessarily made to give people content they want to watch and were thinking of watching. And often times not content that makes them feel good.
Edit: maybe I'm half asleep and not getting what you're saying lol
This could be because iFixit is trying to be more consumer facing so they can sell more of their repair products. A wild guess. More likely that they're getting paid by these manufacturers though.
