I think the key was that Steam wasn’t created to make money, but to solve problems they themselves had, like “How do we get new versions of Counter Strike out to all these players?”

Then as Valve wasn’t the only company having these problems, the solution could easily be sold to others.

If the other companies really wanted to crack Steam’s near-monopoly, the solution would be to tackle the problems associated with not having all your games on Steam. Work together on a open-source launcher supporting all stores, similar to GOG Galaxy. First make something useful that tackles an unsolved problem, then you can make money off it when it becomes successful.

Instead they go in just trying to make a buck, and end up just being worse versions of Steam.

That ended up being a bit of a rant, but I’m frustrated at their shortsighted market strategies :p

It’s at the level where, after spending hours there, I feel like it has to be a conspiracy to waste your time. Because there is no way there could organically be that many posts about a topic without there being any useful or correct information.

Seems suspicious. There probably is such an option hidden somewhere. Because whenever you get a clear answer there, it’s invariably wrong.

Is this how people can claim that Arch is stable, they just redefine breaking to exclude anything that might actually happen?

Debian in particular is rock solid, even Debian Unstable has been very reliable for me if you want a rolling release with newer packages.

But I’ve also had very few problems with Ubuntu. My mother has used it for ten years at this point and will happily apply any dist upgrade she’s presented with, and rarely does she need support.

A pro tip is to check out the alternative desktop environments. A lot of people rightly hate Ubuntu’s awful default DE, but it’s not a core part of the distro, there are other complete desktop “flavours” available in the repositories and installers that will give you them from the start at https://ubuntu.com/desktop/flavours

(Switching an installed system from one DE to another is in principle as easy as uninstalling one desktop meta-package and installing another, but you got to make sure you get the right packages, or you might run into annoying conflicts, so I would not recommend it for a newbie)

Why does blocking ads not seem like a sustainable solution?

Yup, just like a library

I’ve never seen a place selling books not have them organized alphabetically! They might not be libraries but they have an interest in their customers being able to find what they’re looking for

You can run systemd (or cron) inside a pod for scheduling and call the kubernetes API from there to run jobs and stuff. Not sure if this helps you, but it can be easy to overlook.

May I suggest you spend more effort understanding the situation, and less coming up with wild speculations?

I’m sorry but that is absolutely not “the whole point of open source”.

The point of open source is the ability to read, modify, keep and share the source code of the software you use.

It’s a good thing that no one is beholden to anyone then. Which is the entire point of free software.

2024 is the year of Red Star Linux on the desktop

You might be surprised to learn that Sweden also has sanctions against Russia, together with the rest of the EU, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, South Korea and a bunch of other countries. Because this is not about the US being an ass, it’s about Russia being an ass.

The massive negative outcry over this fairly uninteresting change certainly seems oddly overblown, almost as if there are parties trying to turn it into a big political issue to paint Russia as a victim. But idk, nerds freak out over stuff all the time completely on their own.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I think the Linux Foundation has a hard time being clear on the matter because it just isn’t clear. These are new laws and a global open source cooperation run by a non-profit is likely a corner case that the lawmakers did not think about at all when making them.

Yes, the sanctions against Russia, as mentioned by Linus. The change also said the maintainers “can come back in the future if sufficient documentation is provided”.

My guess is that the Linux Foundation must ensure that none of the people they work with are in any way associated with any organisation, person or activity on the sanctions list. And that they preemptively removed all maintainers that might risk violating the sanctions while they work with them to establish whether they might be covered by the sanctions or not.

Regardless of what you or they think of the sanctions, they are the law, and I don’t think anyone wants the Linux Foundation to have to spend their money on lawyers and fines because they had a maintainer who also worked on a research project funded by a sanctioned entity. (If that is how it works, IANAL)

I use macros to solve most of the same problems. You just on-the-fly record a sequence of regular vim commands that you can then replay as many times as you need. Great for formatting a bunch of data without having to deal with the misery of regex

Really? Not that I’d notice, but I assumed ed was so tiny that there wouldn’t be any reason to not include it. (Ubuntu has it and it’s 59KB)

Asking for vi and getting vim is just a pleasant surprise :)

Just type :!bash (or whatever heathenous shell you prefer) and you never have to leave the warm embrace of vim ever again

For just regular text to be consumed by humans, it’s not that great, you probably want a word processor.

It shines when you do a lot of more structural editing, stuff like “change all quotation marks on this line to be single tick”, “copy everything inside these parentheses and paste it after the equals sign”, “make the first word on the next five lines uppercase”, these are the type of things vim make easy that are not easy in other editors.

So it’s great for code and config files. Markdown is borderline. You can have a setup that lets you live view how the markdown renders while editing in vim, so it can be pretty good, but the advantage might be a bit dubious.