I don’t really get people saying fuck Nintendo. It’s their IP, and Yuzu team was pretty blatant it’s made for piracy

Because a significant percent of people have always seen IP as theft and IP lawsuits as shakedowns. Real Talk - IP was codified to solve one problem (it wasn’t casual piracy, it was inventors being ripped off by evil businesses), and it made that problem worse. We should’ve just thrown it out from there and tried something else, but then the evil businesses convinced the soccer moms that their little Billy listening to Metallica on Napster was everything wrong with this country.

It’s not what you do when you try to stay under the radar

And people walked down the street smoking pot in my state before it was legalized. We still said “FUCK the war on drugs” when they got harassed by cops.

I’ve used playnite a few times. I always forget about it for some reason or another. Gog has a built-in tool like playnite and I fail to use that, too.

Still do that. For over 25yrs I nourish my library. Just the MP3s made room for FLACs.

I still have it somewhere I’m sure, but I really gave up on it, for the convenience of youtube music of all things. Literally every song I ever had including a couple super-obscure albums I’d lost. And it’s SO convenient. It just works for me everywhere I want it.

Yeah ok, I get that. I’ve got 2 servers running 24/7 with proxmox/hyper-v, so those tools all run in seperate VMs. But especially in this case, it’s practically no maintenance

Every time I mean to start setting up servers, some reason (or my wife) talk me out of it. I’m jealous. It’s on my bucket list. I’m the only guy I know who has run server clusters professionally who has never had his own.

I must say that i’m in the warez-scene since the early 90s and I never had a virus-problem.

I have had a couple over the years; usually use the “nuke and restart” solution. Only one was REALLY major and I was never sure whether it was software or a dumb family member. My password-protected screenshare app went live one day and started buying Chinese gift cards with a clearly automated script. Thank god someone was in the office when it happened and they only got through a couple hundred dollars before we pulled the plug and called our bank.

You won’t see that elsewhere here. No way. First you gotta prove it wasn’t YOU that broke it at home. I could on for hours…

I know resellers hate Amazon returns, but they agree to them. I will literally make buying decisions based on the presence or lack of the “Free Returns” flag. I would literally pay for “return insurance” if AllState started to do that, too. I hate return hassles.

a game i actually played on epic.

Here’s a few of mine (not sure if any come from Amazon): Control (this was awesome!), shapez (almost bought it, then it was in my inbox), loop hero, Guardians of the Galaxy (Christmas free games), Outer Worlds (ditto), Evil WIthin 1 and 2, most of the fallout games, Death Stranding, Gloomhaven… I’m only on page 5 of 20 lol. Only 1 out of 5 of their free games are any good, but between big giveaways and the like, that’s still ~15 good free games a year lol. So needless to say, Epic is always installed on my computer.

It just never occurred as a prime (no pun intended) reason to pay… Errr… Prime

Perhaps THE problem with Prime right now is that none of their services except maybe TV is worth $11/mo on its own. Their free games aren’t Humble Monthly, but HM is just games. Their TV isn’t Netflix, but it’s $4/mo cheaper. You can get free shipping without Prime now (that wasn’t true before), but next day is phenomenal. As for books, there’s not really any replacement I know of. It’s not perfect (has this annoying thing about having books 2 on in some series, without book 1), but if you read a book a month, it pays for itself.

Warez were never convenient. Just “free”. Yet, with a tiny amount of “work”

For sure. It’s always been a baseline of convenience. I remember the old days of curating my mp3 collection every 6 months, removing dupes and fixing organizational shifting. But if I do that stuff for apps, I have to maintain freaking sandbox environments for each app, make sure my computer is backed up in case I have to wipe it, make sure nothing auto-logins so a remote attack doesn’t happen, etc. About 1 in 2 cracked apps show up as a virus and you can never know whether it’s a false positive, so you have to use a computer condom and then STILL get tested.

Dishing out 100 bucks would need a lot of benefits to convince me. Though i get you. Trading money for tinkering-time. All depends on our preference and skill and nerdiness 😂

I’m in an ok place right now. And Amazon is still the cheapest place to buy anything, for me. If I spend over $1000/yr there on everything, a lot more if you count the holidays, then Prime has already justified itself. And slower or not, Amazon with Prime is STILL the fastest Christmas shipper.

Anecdote… We bought Ring cameras from the Ring site for a family member in November. By mid-December, they still hadn’t shipped because Christmas orders were so backlogged. So we bought them again on Amazon and they were on our doorstep 2 days later, just a couple days before Christmas. Was it next day? No. Was it worth it? YEAH.

Then we had to fight with Ring for 2 weeks because they wouldn’t cancel the order. We got the Cameras the 2nd week of January and my wife was on the phone with them 6 or 7 times before they finally approved a return. Amazon has this thing called “Free Returns” on most items. You can literally write in “I was drunk shopping” for your return reason and nobody bats an eyelash.

But i doubt it just downloads and that’s it. No tracking? No phoning home? No play-statistics? Hmm

I can’t be positive. I’ve never run any network traces on it. But it doesn’t have any of the hallmarks of service DRMs. No “connecting” popup or login prompt. I’ve played Amazon-downloaded games offline. If there’s a hidden DRM, it’s more-or-less obscured.

Let’s be honest, though. Amazon gives the games away for free in an app that will never be used to sell products; and they do it as a bullet-point for Prime and to nudge people towards Luna. It’s obviously the games they get for free that they give away. I see no reason for them to do more work than they have to, plugging in a DRM.

But i never heard of anyone actually using the app instead of maybe even playing one of those freebies and then quitting the app again 😁

It’s hard to remember what games I got through Amazon vs Epic, but I clearly remember a few times I was excited about an Amazon Games offering added an Epic game.

In Amazon Games natively, my happy games are Autonauts, Terraformers, Close to the Sun (recently), and a few of those short adventure games I completed that nobody wants to spend $20 on but everyone loves to play.

I tried watching like 3 things. And one i could rent, the others pay extra and i was like “wtf? This is prime? Fuckit”

Their rent thing sucks, but I *never *see rentals in front of me when I use Prime Video on my TV. I named 3 of their big exclusives, but there’s plenty more either exclusive or just licensed. It’s never the most awesome shows of any service, but I could still find a few hours per day of video if I tried.

It just sucks that you’d need like 5 services and still can’t watch EVERYTHING

Yeah, I’m with you 5000% on that. That’s where Gabe Newall is right. I’d probably be willing to drop drop $100/mo or more on a service if it had EVERYTHING on-demand, convenient, with no DRM of any kind. And I’d never once think to download-and-unsub or distribute or anything.

…as for your experience, I say wave that damn Jolly Roger. Gimme convenience or give me death. I pay because things are convenient for me. If it wasn’t, I probably wouldn’t be paying either.

The games are on their app (nope, thanks) or epic (no thanks).

Their app is surpisingly fair. No inherent DRM, just click “download” and it downloads. Epic… well, I have 100+ games I got for free, so I have it anyway. I probably have a $1000 collection of “free” games on Epic at this point.

The tv stuff is the worst I’ve seen back when i actually paid for my series/movies

With all the subscription services, I think that’s the rule. If you like what they have, you love it. If not, you go elsewhere. At least Prime is cheaper than some of them, but at the end of the day it’s about the stuff you enjoy.

For me, it’s WoT, Reacher, Good Omens on top, along with a few of their FreeVee partnership shows. But I have to respect they also have The Boys, which I’ve been meaning to get into.

I mean, to me they beat Apple+ and Hulu, lose to Disney+ and Netflix. At $11/mo, I get all those things along with the expedited shipping and the books. Convenient, but also not overpriced.

And when the other website costs more, has worse return policies, slower shipping, and possibly is even a scam site? The problem with Amazon is how good it is even when it’s being evil.

As I said elswhere, I look EVERYWHERE before Amazon first. That involves me checking out BBB on mom&pop storefronts and trying to filter out the scam stores or the ones with significant issues. It involves me price-checking, coupon-checking, seeing if services like Rakuten can get the price to match Amazon’s. I don’t expect most people to do all those things and neither should you.

And even then, I end up buying from Amazon about 2/3 the time. Because I won’t pay 20% more in some meaningless protest that isn’t going anywhere.

It’s an extreme-case prisoner’s dilemma. For shoppers to prevent a Walmart/Amazon monopoly, people would have to both give up convenience AND affordability in hope that everyone else had the same radical values. There were PLENTY of boycotters for both, but they just weren’t anywhere near enough.

At some point, when you’re starving and Sam Walton comes by and offers you food your family can afford, you pull the trigger. And I don’t fault someone who does that.

It’s the Walmart problem. People buy from Amazon because they can’t afford some necessities at MSRP when going to a local store.

Some of the stuff I can get in bulk on Amazon are as much as 50% cheaper than getting those same things in bulk from a restaurant supply (which is cheaper than buying them at a grocery store). And that’s before Subscribe&Save’s 15% off. Coffee (for example) costs would drive me into the poor house if I didn’t get my beans from Amazon… and I end up getting higher quality beans than my grocery store at that lower price.

Do I NEED coffee to live? No. But it’s not exactly a luxury in the modern world, and beans are much cheaper than going to Dunkin. There are things I buy that I need; there are things that I buy that I want. And as much as I hate it, most of them are not available locally or are FAR more expensive locally. I never go to Amazon first, but I very often find myself landing at Amazon last.

And yes, that doesn’t justify Prime on its own. But because I have Prime, I get those things that I couldn’t find cheaper elsewhere the very next day. Prime will never be necessary when there’s free shipping options, but boy have they packed it out with more features than (for example) Walmart’s subscription model.

Here’s what I get with Prime that I appreciate:

1. Free games every month, some of which are pretty awesome
2. that fast shipping
3. A fairly average TV service with a few of the best exclusives out there (imo THE best but I’m a WoT-head).
4. Tons of included books and I live in a family of readers

I mean, a lot of it I could get on the High Seas as it were, but it’s the law of convenience. They make it easy and there’s a value prop there for me.

If I JUST wanted free shipping, Prime would be a complete waste of money to me. But I’d still end up giving Amazon my damn paycheck because the alternatives are just not there where I live.

Yeah, trust me, Linux Gaming used to be real shit. “When it works it works” is lightyears better than it used to be.

I remember in my linux-only years, trying to muddle through linux exclusives. Oftentimes you had to be super careful because linux doesn’t love prepared binaries

I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate WSL with a passion that makes me scream. It has BSOD-looped a computer on me before. WSL is the only thing worse than making Linux work on something like a Legion.

Adding Docker Desktop on top of WSL is just a disasterpiece, and I have to work against a large dev docker cluster on a regular basis.

But if I’m being honest, none of that matters for gaming.

I mean, I freaking LOVE linux. And for what it’s good for, it’s the best of the best. I’ve never had a better dev experience than in Ubuntu, mostly because WSL is a pale shadow of a good unix backend (and because Macs, while good, are still subpar for that purpose). But that means I’m already committing 40 hours a week to maintaining and using my machine!

But for gaming? For casual use? I dunno. The hardware has to be hand-picked carefully, as do the games.

Interesting. I wish I could bring myself to like mint. I’ve typecast myself as an ubuntu-head ever since I went full “Elder Price” with the CDs back at my first dev gig.

This seems to be the Windows/Linux yinyang in gaming.

If you go through the effort (or non-effort. It really seems to be luck-based) of getting a gaming rig working in linux, 99% of the time it is simply better at everything, crashes less, etc. The 1% can require hours or more of troubleshooting.

Windows runs slower and worse than linux, and arguably less stable. But you boot up, click play, and (largely) it just plays.

That’s also my recent experience with Ubuntu on a gaming laptop. Every single step of the way gives me trouble, but when I manage to run something in the linux side, boy does it run well. So I’ve got this nice “todo” since I already blew my only free day on it last weekend.

Optimus? Because Optimus is an absolute bastard. It’s improved and I’ve had some luck, but it’s painful.

Well that too. The real joke is that despite the fact we’ve had 10 “years of the linux desktop”, it’s still an absolute bitch to get PICK A GAME working on that shiny linux box.

My new Lenovo Legion, I’m struggling with desktop graphics tearing issues in linux (just viewing the WM, of all things). When i have time, I’ll muddle through it, but I can’t pretend that is easier in linux than windows. It’s vendor-driven, sure, but the end user doesn’t care why they waste 8 hours doing setup work, only THAT they do.

What’s Ubuntu’s “particular madness”? They used to be a little FOSS-only, but they’ve chilled out on that.

I agree on the other points, though, with one caveat on both.

No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives. Without linux exclusives, there will always be more games that run in Windows than Linux, even if the majority of them run in linux AND run better than in Windows.

Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it. The real problem Linux has with office is that it has no well-marketed office suite. There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.

It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both. It took me a few years back in the early 00’s, but I quickly realized that there will never be a “year of the linux desktop” regardless of how good Linux gets at games, office, user-friendliness, or anything.

And that’s ok because MY life is easier when I use linux.

I don’t know if we know it’s shrinking back for sure. With the exception of Q1’23, there seems to be a balance around 19M sales per quarter. There’s a way to read it as shrinking, but there’s also a way to read it as stabilizing. There’s just not enough samples to be certain.

What we have to remember is that we’re finally reaching a turning point in GPU pricing. Laptops that were in the $2000+ range a year or two ago are closer to the $1000 commodity price. There had been a “value stall” that just broke, where a new computer used to not be a significant upgrade on an old one, and so people might hold onto their current computers a year or two longer.

I mean, I sure I pulled a few discounts out of my ass, but I just landed an i9 laptop with a 4090 for just over $2k as a replacement to a computer that died. Two years ago almost to the day I bought a middle-of-the-road gaming machine with a 3070 in it for about the same price.

I wonder at the various nuances of that. My wife and I have 4 phones and 3 tablets between us between home and work. It would seem any multi-person household would be likely to have more mobile devices than PCs due to the variety of the former. So that chart seems to be that there are more mobile devices per person, but perhaps no reduction in PCs.

In fact, PC sales rocketed up in Q3’20 for very obvious reasons, and have largely not come back down to pre-COVID levels.

Every time I’ve seen an HR degree, conflict resolution was a required course.

It’s one thing to say that they’re “not good at it”, but I suppose by expert I mean professional qualifications. I like to have coworkers who are proficient in their professional qualifications, and then forgive them for the things they’re not qualified in but replace them if they are incapable in the things they are supposed to be qualified in.

Maybe I’m a jerk, but I’m used to having competent people around me and having difficult discussions with those who aren’t. HR is the same as any other department in that, to me.

EDIT: I realize how much of an asshole I sound like. To be clear, I’ve got the Boston IT scene in my blood. Starting salaries in the 6-figure range, incredibly low oversight. But zero pity for people who can’t keep up. I know I need to have more sympathy than that for people who aren’t as capable in their job - it’s not like I love capitalism as concept.

And I recognize the irony of acknowledging my own assholishness when the topic is Linus Torvald’s assholishness. But then, I’m also used to HR that can move heaven and earth to reconcile a situation with a valued employee. To keep your job where I come from, you need to be so valuable that they’ll hide bodies for you (figuratively).

If I had to guess, probably for the same reason you can’t sue for not being able to pick what apps you install on your toaster.

Google probably opened themselves up to this monopoly shit by trying not to be as much of a monopoly as Apple is trying to be.

I’ve heard a lot of lawyers say that the law punishes virtually every good behavior because that behavior can be construed in a way that you can be sued for, and that it favors being a dick more than anything. In this case, that might be what happened?

I mean, not that Google is a saint at all.