Sony owns 14% of fromsoft and 10% of their parent company’s parent company. I bet that’s enough for them to push some shitty things but it still gives from some room to push back.

That’s certainly a choice

Valve’s added some Nvidia support to steamos, but Nvidia has not played well with Linux in general in my experience. Sounds like that’s gotten a lot better recently though.

Other methods of data collection can be scarily effective. Stores have identified people were pregnant before they knew.

Very likely they identified you as someone that could have that condition, and you noticing the ads after talking to your doctor is a form of recency bias.

You can collect almost all the same data from traditional surveillance methods. Collecting and processing mocrophone data just isn’t effective enough to make up for the massively increased costs from processing it.

Yeah, there’s just more effective methods to get essentially the same data.

GOG Seels DRM free games that you can download the installers and all necessary files. No matter what they do, once you’ve downloaded it, they can’t stop you from playing it.

They’re like the only store that actually sells you the game and not a revokable license to a game

USB A is bad and ditching it is the one good thing Apple has done.

There’s going to be a transition period, but we’re at a point where you can buy USB C peripherals for pretty much anything

Eh, there’s a completely independent reimplementation of the server, so I’d be surprised if the same doesn’t happen for the apps if there’s a real issue that comes up

People learn about different things at different times. If we care about promoting privacy we should be accomodating and not hostile about that.

In addition to everythong everyone has said, one major thing that people often don’t think about privacy is how it relates to enshittification.

Modern software services try to optimize everything to make as much money as possible. Everything is a/b tested, and whatever increases some arbitrary metric is what gets released.

They do this by tracking a ton of metrics about how you interact with everything. I know where I work we collect data about every time you click on anything, how long you hover over buttons, etc.

Yeah, I’ve been spoiled because most of the heavier workloads I do is all programming related and Linux tends to be better there.

I have had issues with Autodesk products, but I’m able to get 99% of what I need with freecad.

Fair, but in the context of gaming I doubt there are that many people gaming on their work machine.

The only other (not absolutely tiny) one I’m aware of is brave, but it has its own issues

If you self host bitwarden/vaultwarden, each client stores an encrypted copy of the database, so even if your server was completely destroyed, you’d still have access to all the accounts you’re saving in it.

Yep, it does!

You’ve been hearing about it because there’s been a lot of pushback at all stages of them doing it. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen, they’ve kept pushing for it and there’s no indication they won’t go through with it.

SteamOS is based on arch, but it has major differences. The steam deck’s update mechanism is completely different from normal arch Linux.

Arch normally immediately updates to the latest version of every program. This is usually fine, but when a big bug is missed by the developers, it can cause problems.

The steam deck updates a base image that includes all the programs installed by default, and by the time it releases a lot of them aren’t the absolute newest version. When valve updates SteamOS they definitely run a lot of tests on the base image to make sure it’s stable and won’t cause any issues.

SteamOS is also an immutible distro, meaning the important parts are read only. This also means updates are done to everything at once, and if something goes wrong, it can fall back to a known good version.

Not to say arch Linux is unstable (its been better for me than Ubuntu), but SteamOS is at a completely different level. It’s effectively a completely different distro if we’re talking about stability. I think what they’re hoping is this support would allow arch to build out testing infrastructure to catch more issues and prevent them from making it to users.

You could try flashing the recovery image and re-imaging your deck. https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1B71-EDF2-EB6D-2BB3

I’d contact valve support if that doesn’t work, they’ve always been great whenever I’ve interacted with them.