‘You would never find a nicer, kinder person,’ the father added about his son. ‘He’s a committed, conservative Christian, a tremendous father, a tremendous husband. I couldn’t be more proud of him.’

“Nice” and “kind” seem mutually exclusive with “committed, conservative Christian”

I heard a joke once: Man turns on computer. Goes to edit settings. Needs a patch to fix a system deficiency. Can’t find any other solution. Windows says, “The fix is simple. Only a system administrator can make these changes. Go call one. That should take care of it.” Man bursts into tears. Says, “But Windows… I am the system administrator.” Good joke. Everybody laugh. Upgrade to enterprise for $199.99. Curtains.

(Original reference)

Not to mention those companies have divided priorities. Valve’s main income is Steam, they have a vested interest in keeping their product dominant. Microsoft and Epic simply don’t, because their stores are only side projects that incentivise their main income sources. But that’s not to say I want to substitute Steam with some other corpo giant’s latest money grab either.

The bigger question is why more consumer-friendly stores like GOG that sell DRM-free games can’t compete with Steam. High profile games have no incentive to release DRM-free versions of their titles on GOG because the bigger store where they make more money encourages DRM. And these locked-in publisher relationships built on DRM allows Valve to outcompete more consumer-friendly stores through sales and user experience.

Valve gets a lot of clout in the Linux sphere because their adoption of open-source platforms is better than their competitors, and we have the mindset of “a rising tide lifts all ships”, but this is also what we were saying about Google and Android 15 years ago and we can see how that is shaping up. Something something “you either die a hero…”

Basically, Valve is too big to compete with at this point, because any competing product needs to be more perfect out the gate for people to even consider using it. Which is hard to do when you are not as entrenched and don’t have the kind of money Valve has.

Or maybe we can all just, like, stop trying to take over countries?

I think the complaint is that the start menu searches the Internet at all in the first place.

Looks like this is already poſt-thorn, though.

That, or this is the alphabet for a different European language entirely.

Dang, who let Bulgaria into the EU and NATO? That is just courting disaster at this point.