I use Nobara on my gaming PC just because it has some gaming tweaks by default but is otherwise just stock Fedora so any issues can be searched as if I was on Fedora.

Speedtest.net isn’t rigged, I can exceed the speed I get on it with steam.

Reminds me of the monty python sketch, “what have the romans ever done for us? except sanitation and roads and canals and public health” lol.

Steam gives devs a huge marketing presence that smaller devs simply wouldn’t have otherwise, it gives countless high bandwidth distribution servers that automatically scale to demand, you can integrate the largest PC social community for matchmaking or other multiplayer features, you get a community page where people can post fan content or mods, etc.

That is worth way more than 30% to most devs. The only ones who it’s not worth it for are huge companies like Blizzard and Epic who can manage all that themselves, hence why they’re pretty much the only ones who don’t sell games on Steam.

I have Tails on a USB for temporary use , I don’t think it’s supposed to be used as a full time OS with persistent storage though.

In my experience if Windows decides it doesn’t want to talk to your hardware because of some undecipherable 20 year old spaghetticode reason, You’ve no recourse except reinstalling Windows and it might suddenly work. At least with Linux you can debug and get things working

Yep, software dev here for a static marketing site for a product. We are in a constant battle with PMs and SEO who want Google tracking, Facebook, TikTok, A/B testing, cursor tracking, etc. We’re trying to keep page-speeds fast while loading megabytes of external JS code…

Luckily all that can be blocked by the end user without affecting the site though, all you’d lose is some carousels and accordions etc that are done with a few lines of code.

Yeah don’t worry I have no social media accounts other than Lemmy

I did try to install Qubes recently for this purpose but it’s not well supported on my laptop hardware.

My bank only has an app, no website option, but luckily it works just fine on GrapheneOS with no Google Play. I barely use it anyway as I pay cash everywhere possible

Bitcoin is terrible for that though. High transaction fees, slow transaction speeds, everyone can see your balances and transactions (and with KYC requirements it’s very easy to link a wallet and a coin to a person).

Monero is the only digital currency worth having.

The issue is, that people always say this but then people don’t donate.

People have server costs and living costs and ads are realistically the only way to contribute to those. I always swing €5 here and there to developers whos apps I use often but most people don’t: look at the Ko-fi page of small devs and they probably have less than €50 total, That’s a couple months of server costs probably.

What a bizarre comment. Of course I need traffic data in a navigation app. Why would I want to sit in an hour queue on a closed motorway due to an incident when I could be using the alternative route that’s still moving?

Depends, every tech company I’ve worked at has had Windows machines for project managers, account managers etc, and Mac for developers and designers. So it is possible to support two OSs as standard. I’ve always just picked the Mac but when my next laptop is due I may ask if anyone uses Linux

Probably vaguely similar from when I’ve visited

Tesco now even has stores in the UK where you scan your loyalty card on the way in, pick up items off shelves, and walk out and it charges you accurately. The amount of cameras and sensors on the ceiling was uncanny. So not only do they have your purchasing profile but they now know what you look like, your gait, and any other identifying information they use to make that work

(OK it might be just lads in the Philippines following you on CCTV like Amazon did but still)

As an aside, this is why I recently degoogled, having been all in on Google products for 10 years. 10 years ago you got amazing value for your data from Google but now every single useful product has been enshittified or shut down and they collect more data than ever. The sums just don’t add up any more.

Indeed. Its very uncommon to get flat cashback options in the UK for this reason. I think I had AmEx that gave me 1% for a year and nothing after that.

This is one thing the UK is really good for, all bank owned ATMs and most public ones are completely free to use for any cardholder of any bank. My bank doesn’t even have physical branches but I can still use the ATM of any bank lobby for free. There are some paid ones run by private companies but the fee is usually a flat £1-2 max. I’ve been to ATMs in Europe that have tried to charge me something like 10EUR to take out 30.

It’s a private contract between the business and the customer, you are supposed to ensure you have means to pay beforehand.

Interesting, we have £50 notes in the UK but they essentially don’t exist for most people. No cash machines will give you one, and shopkeepers mistrust them, although generally accept. 20s are the highest people deal with here usually.