Well, I must admit I'm in favour of the sun not exploding.

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I'm a little unclear about just what this does. So for instance, say I have Steam Play as the default and I cannot un-default it. Does that mean I can't play Linux native games as Linux native?

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Huh. I think of Jitsi-meet as an alternative to Zoom. In my tabletop-RPG group we're using it for 2 out of 3 campaigns, Zoom for the third (GM preferences). For the videoconferencing it's pretty decent. One nice feature Jitsi-meet has that Zoom doesn't seem to is you can easily tweak volume individually, so if someone is particularly loud compared to everyone else you can turn them down.

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Well, for simple stuff there are a bunch of little graphical programs on Linux, aren't there? GIMP is the big serious thing, if you just want to fiddle with a photo there's stuff like Cheese and so on.

It's good to see GIMP continue to move forward. Even on Windows I suspect there must be a lot of people really wanting to get out from under Adobe's horrible annoying subscription model thing for Photoshop and, well, all their other stuff. If only there was an open source Linux program to do what Acrobat does . . .

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"Everything must change, so that everything can stay the same."

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Hmmm . . . OK, thinking about software as a service strategies . . . maybe if I were Microsoft and a ruthless greedhead, I'd launch the thing with full and easy Steam (and various other things) support. Then, in a couple of years, maybe with the next generation device, the basic experience would be just Xbox-and-MS-store, whereas a relatively full Windows OS experience (along the lines of SteamOS' desktop mode) would be a paid subscription. And of course, Steam would be in that full Windows OS experience . . . just a co-incidence, of course nothing to do with blocking Steam . . .

And then either people fork out (in which case, profit!) or they mostly don't, and in the second case I'd cancel the subscription service because it's not popular, leaving the customers captive to only Xbox-and-MS-store and Steam frozen out.

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Too Americana for me in my current mood, I'm afraid. Just not really feeling like being nostalgic for the Twin Towers.

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Intellectually, it seems clear to me this is a major threat. Microsoft have the money, they have the motivation, they have the track record, it seems like seriously bad news. But somehow in my gut I'm finding it hard to take it seriously. I feel like Microsoft kind of lost their predatory mojo years ago and just don't really have the stuff any more to pull off a major disruptive move.

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Guess I'm not the target audience for this sort of thing. I'm just finding myself thinking "OK, this doesn't look like a place to put it to actually use it. So, instead couldn't I just plug it in and put it on the coffee table or a bookshelf?"

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So I wonder if this is one of those "The overlord company is losing money bad" situations, or just one of those "The overlord company isn't making money as fast as the shareholders gripe it should, so they're cutting a source of short-term losses to use the money for share buy-backs, at the expense of future revenue" situations.

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