Didn’t spot that, thanks

Not explicitly, but 2011/83/EC does state that it applies to everything but “financial services, gambling, healthcare by regulated professionals, package travel, property transactions, social services, timeshare and most aspects of passenger transport” and reservers. And steam’s refund policy is most likely a reaction to this. See https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32011L0083, which mentions the 14 days basically everywhere as a default withdrawal period.

I think this is factually wrong, Steam only introduced refunds because they were forced to for the European market

The average Linux user definitely will not care about reproducibility.

I think a lot of people do care about it, just not under that name. But I think a lot of users asked themselves at least once “what did I do back then to achieve X”. Not in that the whole system is reproduced 1:1, but certain aspects. That’s something much easier to answer with nix.

Well, you don’t need to learn nix as a programming language for a simple installation, you can use it like a slightly different json, which the configuration.nix part was about. You can get the reproducibility aspect from just that, so I wouldn’t say you get no benefits at all without learning the language.

There are more disadvantages (like time required to rebuild because you added a single package), so Arch is the better choice depending on preferences. Arch is a very good traditional distribution in my opinion, can’t go wrong with it

Arch is easier in my opinion, at least if you want to leverage the power NixOS can offer. A simple /etc/nixos/configuration.nix maybe not, but once you enter custom options / submodule territory and use stuff like lib.mapAttrs, I’d say NixOS is quite harder. Or just a more complex overrideAttrs. But then again, Arch doesn’t have an equivalent to that…

On the other hand, why they actually enjoy this, regardless of the reasons, why would they stop?

Sony could just have ignored this

It’s a PC after all, and Valve has access to chipsets the average consumer normally doesn’t. I can see me upgrading my current rig with this if it competes with traditional PCs

Bonfire itself is a framework that implemented ActivityPub, on it you can build applications that make use of it without developing from the ground up. Bonfire Social is a social network similar to Mastodon. Collaboration is is about project management etc and allows one to host their own, but integrate with others, e.g. to synchronize milestones via federation. What they have in common is that both build on Bonfire and as such use the same protocol for federation. But they’re tools for very different jobs.

Not as common as one would like

Similarly here. Have an Odroid with that platform, it wasn’t cheap but it came with several advantages:

• 4 SATA ports on addition to the M2 slot
• Intel QSV
• 2 x 2.5 Gbit Ethernet (I only have gigabit at home though)

Very powerful machine for the power usage, I ran a really old Athlon before though (from 2010 or so that I retrofitted with 16GB RAM) that did most stuff just fine. But I wanted some transcoding and also possibly a smaller case.

I run everything bare metal though.

Luckily, it’s not the entire Internet, just the unfun part.

While there is quite the push thanks to Valve, they built upon the work of others, mostly Wine (which I think they fund nowadays) and DXVK (they hired the dev after a short while). So they’re definitely not freeloading, but the main lifting has been done by Codeweavers and Wine contributors through their massive work over the years, plus the quantum leap that was DXVK.

I’m not trying to shame Valve here, they definitely go beyond what they’d be required to by license, but I feel it’s also not fair to call them the reason most games work under Linux when others have poured literal years of work into making it possible.

I think an Apple machine will set you back slightly more than a League capable Windows 11 machine

Yeah, this wasn’t about whether they’re screwing the customers - they are - but about whether this has any negative financial implications for them

Lol yeah the naming was incredibly bad. But I’m pretty sure it was 360 -> one -> series. I only owned the original one (not the One one) and a 360 which luckily was unaffected by RRoD.

I think the 360 was really good all things considered, it was a good console at the time and MS actually helped getting smaller studios their stuff into the store with summer of arcade. It also captured a lot of interest from third party studios. All in all pretty solid. Damn shame that the RRoD tainted the console so much.

Segmenting the market after into S and X was a really dumb move in my opinion. The other one was trying to turn it into an entertainment machine instead of a game console (TV, TV, TV, sports…)

unless you’re running one of the Enterprise/IoT SKUs…

That is the whole point. They’re squeezing the users they don’t give a shit about. But personal users almost never buy Windows licenses from Microsoft I’d bet. So what if they switch away? And how are they or their kids going to play Fortnite or League after switching?

The money for Windows non-Enterprise is made with OEM deals. They probably wouldn’t even notice if nobody bought personal licenses anymore. Might as well make actual money from selling data about them.

Enterprise is a different story, once you squeeze too hard, companies will find ways to replace you; they are somewhat resilient to pain, but it does have limits.

Just because it doesn’t offer features a database has doesn’t mean people aren’t trying to use it as one

I support your argument, but unfortunately there are some real monstrosities out there that have carried small businesses since decades

My personal take on that issue is that fighting the vendor is ultimately a losing battle and the later you switch, the more painful it is. If Microsoft wants people to make a Microsoft account for using Windows in non-enterprise environments, it will eventually be impossible not to.

First and foremost, I do think Windows is the better choice for most people to play games on, mostly due to vendor support.

However, I’d say that a lot of people have some sort of issue with Windows, albeit probably less than they would have with some Linux distributions. I just wanted to express that “without headaches” is a goal that is maybe higher than necessary.