These idiotic lawsuits. First of all, this isn’t even Valves responsibility. Second, Steam/Valve are small frys compared to Amazon/Apple/Google/Microsoft. In gaming they may be smaller than Sony and Nintendo and those two have full on closed software platforms. Steam is one software store among many on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. All these groups want to enshittify PC gaming. They want to enshittify personal computing in general. Turn pre-iPhone smartphone operating systems into iOS

Don’t know if it’s still a thing in hiring for minimum wage jobs - what I remember were all the meyers briggs and similar test. When someone tells me their personality type from one of those test, I instantly start thinking that they never had a retail hell job stage of their working life

They’re hosting their own Forgejo. Forgejo is easy to self host. There’s even easier simpler stuff like Gitbucket. If you want something with a ton of features, Gitlab self host but that takes way more resources. Personally I have Gitbucket on my NAS for my basic stuff but am thinking about giving Forgejo self hosted a try. It looks better than gitbucket

Tech writers consistently suck. We’ve had 3rd party app stores for a long time. Googles trying to make them worse, not welcoming them

The only solace is that wireless operators are becoming competitive for me. Like all these companies suck but now I can use Cox, AT&T, EarthLink as the mediocre to crappy wired options and then Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile for 5G internet options which are good enough for me

I use it mostly two ways. Important emphasis enclosed statement as compared to in between parentheses which I treat as lesser required context/info. Second way is an indicator of a pause in a statement but not so much like an ellipses. Like a short pause for a punchline whereas ellipses for a long thought or time collect feelings/compose oneself. A sharp contrast compared to a period from the first part of the sentence to the post-em dash part of the sentence. I’ve been using it before LLMs and frequent enough that I am pretty self conscious now since I’ve noticed people call out em dashes as a call-sign for bots. A lot of times it’s such an innocuous usage that I feel like people are witch-hunty paranoid reading posts on the internet

That’ll be nice to see. I like Collabora but haven’t tried hosting it. Opening that up and LibreOffice up side by side with the tabbed interface, barely any different. Maybe LibreOffice exposes way more buttons in each tab so maybe more intimidating but it looks pretty good compared to what I remember when the tabbed interface was first made available. Looking forward to seeing this progress

If someone doesn’t like Mozilla, use a Firefox fork rather than a chromium one. Brave and other chromium forks to get away from Google surveillance and dominance of web standards makes no sense to me

You can use this to connect your TV to bookshelf speakers through an optical cable. Just need some speaker wire or banana plug cables to go with it

https://a.co/d/06KEUx7E

This one has HDMI ARC which most sound bars use for connection along with optical

https://a.co/d/0cKQrMAZ

Then offerup/craigslist/marketplace for used bookshelf speakers. Practically anything will be far better than your TV. Like $50 used polk, klipsch, and sony speakers are real common on the second hand market. They may be old but speakers last a real long time if you’re not blasting them at super high volumes. Go for speakers that have 5.25"-6.5" woofers. You’ll appreciate them for music too

There’s a bunch of brands and you really can’t go wrong compared to TV speakers. Edifer powered speakers don’t require a separate amplifier. Other major brands like ELAC, Kef, wharfdale, paradigm, …

Usually when I hear someone swear by lossless audio one service provides compared to another, I swear the reality is either placebo or one service is just using a better masterering of an album compared to another. The service that has on their service the better version album mix and mastering. Like they could serve it as 192kbps MP3 and sound better than a lossless encoded album version with the non ideal mix and mastered release

I’ve been in the audio enthusiast community for like 17 years now. When I was fresh, the internet commentators had me thinking there was some audio heaven in the high end compared to the mid range priced gear. Now I know better and the gear community is not so high end price evangelicals like it used to be. I feel like there was a before and after the $30 Monoprice DJ headphones and the wave of headphones since. Then especially IEMs. Once ChiFi really got rolling with IEMs and amplifiers and DACs, $1000+ snake oil salespeople got to deal in a way more competitive market

Same with speakers. Internet changed everything. No more at the whim of specialty audio stores stock and Best Buys. Now you got the whole worlds amount of speaker brands at a click of a finger plus craigslist/offerup. Also again ChiFi amplifiers and DACs. Also improvements in audio codecs whether for wireless or not. Bluetooth audio was awful until it stopped being awful as standards improved

These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys. Headphone and speaker communities these days seem a lot more self aware and steeped in self-deprecating humor over the cost, diminishing returns, placebo, snake oil they live in today compared to 17 years ago. I want my digital audio cables endpoints plated with the highest quality diamonds to preserve the zeros and ones. No lab diamonds. Must be natural providing the warmth only blood diamonds that excel in removing negative ions. I treat my room with the finest pink himalayan salt sound absorbent wall panels to deal with the most problematic materials used by homebuilders. Authentic himalayan salt has been shown to be some of the highest quality material in filtering unwanted noise and echos while leaving clean pure audio bliss

There are levels of paranoia that gets to the point of excessive time spent managing your footprint that could be better used elsewhere as I would imagine especially if you’re not a high value target. I am not a high value target

PC gaming should head towards 21:9 for ubiquitous support in games. 1680x720, 1920x800, 2560x1080, 3440x1440, …

Also OLED or higher density dimming zones. Full coverage DCI-P3. Then color reproduction and brightness highlights will also be hitting a point of diminishing returns. Then it’ll be onto VR/head mounted displays where density and brightness/contrasts will better show off

I early adopted 3840x2160 way back and recently went with a no name $200 3440x1440 monitor in 2024 and that was a way better upgrade than 1080p to 2160p. I’d take 2560x1080 over 3840x2160. 8k has no relevance until it’s the best value for up to $1000 for a 65" TV

It’s an odd thing. You can buy them in the US off their website at first and then not long after on Amazon. But then I’ll see reports about how you can’t sell them on eBay in the US

ahhh damn. It was a post from the person that submitted the wine merge request for Adobe installer support. In it was a screenshot of a steamdeckhq post about his WINE patch he did and Tim Sweeney having a mocking reply to the post about Linux and Adobe users. The dev was celebrating that Tim for whatever reason got a bit triggered about people celebrating his work to get the Adobe installer working in WINE

Saw this today from the guy that did the WINE development to get the Adobe creative suite installers working

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1qidql1/it_appears_that_i_have_rage_baited_tim_with_my/

I went from Sony, Samsung, and LG to now buying TCL. At under $1000 for a 65", they’re the best option.

Anything under $1500 I’d bet on TCL. Keep in mind TCL manufacturers a great chunk of the worlds LCDs that aren’t just for TCL. Pretty sure they bought LGs LCD plants. Maybe Samsung too.

Their TVs have a lot of dimming zones. Sony I don’t think makes LCDs or OLED panels themselves. At least one line of their TVs use TCL panels already. They buy from others

Here’s a review for the model that came out last year. At this point where’s it’s regularly on “sale” for $1000. TVs are MSRP for like half a year and then the discounts always seem to me to be happening

https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/tcl/qm8k

1,680 dimming zones in the 65" model and from what I’ve read, the global models are usually one year behind China. So in 2025 China had TCL TVs with even more dimming zones. 8 years ago sub $1000 65" with array LED backlight zones were like 100-200 zones. OLED were incredibly better and would kill off LCDs when prices came down. The density of dimming zones I think progressed faster than people expected

So TCL has solid image processing while Sony has great image processing but not so much better for me to think it’s worth it. Same with the $1000-2000 mini-led backlit LCDs vs OLED. Yes OLED looks better. Don’t feel like it’s large enough for me to go much higher than a $1000 TV. That’s a reality for home theater brands today. TVs, speakers, receivers/amplifiers, headphones, mics, etc - there’s good stuff at low prices.

Everyone’s competing on value now. There used to always be rumors about a Apple TV (actual TV) and Apple EVs. Never hear about rumors for those anymore. Don’t think the quality difference possibility and profit margins exist to make those appealing anymore for Apple. Sony like Apple is increasingly a services/media company.

Samsung - Tizen sucks. I don’t recall how LG and WebOS looks, but to me Tizen is leagues above Android and Roku in making your TV into a loud billboard. At least Android you can install a different launcher.

The current free game are the two Styx games. I grabbed them on Steam when I saw they went 90% off so I’d have an easier time running them on my legion go and my Android phone. I learned of the games because of them being the EGS free game and the game looked up my alley

https://store.steampowered.com/app/242640/Styx_Master_of_Shadows/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/355790/Styx_Shards_of_Darkness/

It doesn’t take 3nm/2nm chips to make a great computer. The Switch 2 is has a Samsung 8nm SoC. Steam Deck is TSMC 7nm. A Steam Deck has a better processor than my Intel N150 NAS. We don’t need the strongest hardware for self hosting. Don’t need it for a good gaming experience. Someday we’ll get second hand server parts salvaged into home equipment. The PS5 had that jailbreak. That can someday be a useful Linux machine. Someday the Xbox Series. Someday there’ll be a wave of RISC-V SBC’s that are better than the most recent raspberry pi

Go Valve go. Screw Facebook/Meta, Google, Apple. I want the future of VR to be standard desktop Linux centric. The iOS/Android state of mobile is annoyingly restrictive compared to even Windows let alone desktop/server Linux