Mostly propagated by people enabling toxic people. Meh.

Doesn’t change shit. Epic is literally pumping out free games and what does it give it? Nothing. Because it’s store is straight up vile to use - no human feedback anywhere, the whole shit is suited for publishers to orchestrate however they see fit. Same shit applies to most online game stores. They are aimed at publishers, not gamers, and thus ignored by the latter.

But hey, let’s look at two shops that are, slowly but surely, carving their part of the cake. GOG and Itch.io. What differentiates them? Both are trying to play with users. GOG with rescuing old games, dropping DRM as much as possible and working with other launchers and Itch by creating probably the biggest Indie publishing site ever. But Itch.io is niche and GOG is still lagging behind.

Win 11 is a trojan horse confirmed

Naaah, Win 7 was best. They didn’t fuck with control panel, Aero slapped, system was fast, stable and customizable. Win 7 was a system made for the user and felt like future.

8 was, from what I heard, not that bad and 10 entered freefall. 11 got jetpack, but was badly oriented so it boosted itself down.

So no tinted glasses. 7 was actually great.

Tried commands, tried proton experimental, tried gametime or whatever it’s called, tried switching dx’s and all that. And yeah, used proprietary, except on cachyOS which I believe supports my hardware out of the box.

And honestly, I didn’t need co.mand line for anything when I tried and. Spent a week on it, made it mirror more or less my wi dows config software wise.

Only thing that, except gaming, pissed me off is Linux not being able to read my portable HDD. “Yadda yadda, suprblocm damaged, yadda yadda”.

Windows, seemingly, didn’t get the memo as it opens it without a problem.

Not exactly potato, but my performance on Linux sucks ass and I believe it’s mostly due to drivers. I am mainly gaming as of now, so not running games I can run on Windows is no go.

GTX 750 + i-4460. So yeah, low end but servicable…on windows. Tried Linux Mint, Nobara and CachyOS. My benchmark was Fallout 76 and Hogwarts Legacy. On windows both work. On Linux, no matter the distro, Hogwarts dies pre “press start” and F76 blinks, lags and freezes. In both cases after I already set settings as low as I could, lot lower than Windows.

Oh and yeah I tried various fixes and tricks, used both steam proton and GE, tried to adjust commands. Nothing worked. And all I am asking for is to match windows performance.

Tried to. It doesn’t like my pc. Not buying new rig for it. Win 10 LTSC it is. ^^

( Honestly tho if you have modern hardware in any meaning of the word, try it. )

Heh. Paid for Win 7. Still not ashamed. Best system I had, even if it had it’s weird stuff. And it’s licence carried on to Win 10 and prolly 11. Cannot say with 11 as I am highly uninterested in it xD

My living standard fell down heavily even tho I earn a lot more than I used too, cannot travel, have to watch out for promotions on food.

Just over yonder there is an actual war happening as I live in Poland, with one of our neighbours that we know wants to fuck us too, with growing fear of incoming escalation and doubtful allies.

NATO is set to soon fall apart due to USA, EU tries to become more and more like federal goverment, my own country chose nationalistic idiots and only now, slowly, cuts down their influence…

And all that next to “normal” crap like being forced to stay in a workplace I feel hateful of with no prospect of any possibility of having an actual career because I ended up in a dead end job.

I am not priviliged - I am tired. When all I see and hear are bad news, bad becoming worse becomes new normal, new baseline. And sure, it could be worse - war could actually reach us, NATO could dissolve etc., but if your argument for why I shouldn’t be desensitised is literal WWIII then I dunno what to say to you.

You think? Because honestly, I got so desensitized by now I honestly cannotncare less.

You mentioned adding non-Steam games, but that’s just a shortcut.

And it’s exactly how I mentioned it. It’s simply a way to use some of steam features - for free - even if you use different shop. Their controller support, friend list, library access. A limited amount of access but nonetheless, yet again, something they provide that they don’t have to and other shops (except GOG I believe?) don’t support.

You lose the “Join Game” buttons, the cloud saves, and the lobby invites. That is the definition of a social moat. You can leave, but you’re socially penalized for doing so.

Cloud saves should be handled by whatever alternative you choose, and both join game and lobby invites should be ideally handled by game - that’s how it began, didn’t it? Steam simply offered option for games to extend it to friends chat out of the game. And hell, today even Discord of all things has something like this.

As for competition, the fact that GOG and Itch.io have to hide in tiny niches just to survive proves my point. When the #1 player has 75%+ of the market, they don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be too big to leave.

I admit, bad wording on my part. But while Itch relies on niche, in GOG’s case I meant their initiative of saving old games. Other than that, they are really competing as a full alternative. And…I just learned GOG does not publish it’s number, huh. But they are constantly growing from what I saw published, so evidently, you can throw gauntlet at Steam and do well. And I just learned that they aren’t really that far on feature parity, with library integration being something unique, huh. No wonder people on lemmy praise it xD

My solution of mandated interoperability is exactly how we fixed the phone industry. You can switch carriers and keep your number. We should be able to switch launchers and keep our friends and games. If Steam is truly as perfect as you say, they should have nothing to fear from a system where users are actually free to leave. A benevolent gatekeeper who refuses to unlock the gate is still a gatekeeper.

I just want to underline, again, that this is the first time I am facing that point and thus, have no opinion of my own yet formed, so I am not gonna say anything as it would simply be reductive. First reaction is mixed from me - number is one thing, forcing a store front to suddenly have to change contracts with game providers, clash with legal and all that to essentially allow you to carry over hundreds of products seems iffy. On the other hand, these are just copy keys at the end of the day so the only question is how easy would it be contract-wise? Dunno. And that’s why I am witholding forming an opinion as of now.

At the end I wanna mention only that our talk made me look up some stuff about both GOG - which I now appreciate a lot more, they really are closing in feature-wise to steam - and phone operators. The second one especially was a weird thing to discover. I was a kid when the number carry-over came to be and, honestly, believed it was some weird marketing strategy…fun to know it was one of early EU thingies.

First of all, yeah, price parity sucks…but also the only thing it changes is that simply being cheaper isn’t an option. From my PoV all it does is it forces competition to compete on features. Which they all fail to do.

Also, it is not just about making a better product. It is switching costs. Because our libraries and social circles are locked into a proprietary ecosystem, we aren’t choosing Steam every day. We are just stuck there.

Friend, steam literally alows you to load games outside of steam. You absolutely can still rely on steam friends when playing even pirated games. Steam literally allows you to do it. And having more than one store installed, while not comfy, isn’t a sin - we are choosing steam due to it’s services - controller support, linux support, inbuilt forums, friend network, robust review system, robust return policy, great user support, and probably even more that I don’t know about due to being more niche.

The solution is not for a competitor to build a “more perfect Steam,” that is impossible because Valve has a 20 year head start on our data. The solution is mandated interoperability.

Again, bull. Let’s look at competition, sans “We only sell our own games” stores.

• Epic Store - Literally antithesis to all you wrote. They push free games for you to build your library, buy exclusives to remove the forced price, advertise themselves as much as they can to push through steam’s domination…but they don’t support anything aimed at consumers. They don’t give a diddly doo about you. Thus, they fail…better yet, managed to piss people off.
• GOG store - They tried to innovate and find their niche and…they did it. Oh my, it’s like if you actually offer something it gets apprwciation from clients. It’s small compared to steam and doesn’t offer that much client-side, but with what they offer, they found themselves in stable position and with good public opinion.
• Itch.io - Similiarily to GOG, they used a niche and created sctually somewhat rich ecosystem there. And again, similiarily to GOG, they achieved stability. Supporting both comments and forums and alloeing creators to be close to their community, they became great place to start up and test waters. But they lack friend networks (AFAIK), game invite integration and all that. Although it seems they are okay with their niche…also I believe that their shop actually did chomp that niche away from steam, so they prove that competition is possible.

And just to be clean - I am not against your interchangable library idea, although I am not really for it either. I just really disliked how you described steam as some monstrous entity holding people by ransom.

When I studied, there were two kinds of proffesors. Immediate reply ones, and Seen (3 months ago) ones. xD

Yeah duuuuh. Women leave their claw marks everywhere, blood splatter, and oh my god throw that tampon to the trashcan it’s literally there for that reason!

But also yeah duuuh, men take personal offence at the idea of not pissing all around the stall, and washing hands has to include splattering water, somehow, behind the stall. Also never manages to drop the paper towel to bin.

We are all terrible lil shits <3

Dunno if it has some funny, wide-area name in my country but my parner and her mother simply say aunt visits them. xD

Agree to disagree. 10 is fast, reliable and convienient. I agree it served as a sandbox for all the shit they crammed into 12, but it doesn’t change anything.

Still would prefer 7. Kinda loved 7.

I feel like the very moment we go for any linux aimed at being lightweight, windows loses due to cramming cramming as much compatibility and tools as is possible inside.

…

…and also you got me intrested in AntiX. I have old laptop that struggles even with Debian…wonder if that would work on it.

Straight up said I wouldn’t call 10 better than 7. So what’s your point? 10 is, overall, good OS. Not best, not great, good.

You say so yet 10 is fast, convienient and easy to use. Wouldn’t call it better than 7, but it was good.

People forgot already…

EVERY SECOND WINDOWS IS GOOD Win XP good, Vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad, 10 good, 11 bad, 12 good?

Only this time around Linux got to the point where everyday users can switch and only run into debiliating problems twice a year, so MS is losing customers.