Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: PenglingMy thoughts are that when you buy, say, a kettle, that kettle is yours to keep. If someone from the company that made the kettle were to come into your house a few years after you buy it and take away the kettle that you bought and paid for, that would be illegal. It should be the same for video games. It's very simple, really.

But this does happen, with all these "smart" products. See news all the time about features removed, suddenly subscriptions needed to keep certain features going and so on. It's not just gaming it happens. Sadly.

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: PenglingMy thoughts are that when you buy, say, a kettle, that kettle is yours to keep. If someone from the company that made the kettle were to come into your house a few years after you buy it and take away the kettle that you bought and paid for, that would be illegal. It should be the same for video games. It's very simple, really.

But this does happen, with all these "smart" products. See news all the time about features removed, suddenly subscriptions needed to keep certain features going and so on. It's not just gaming it happens. Sadly.

Indeed, I have been making shopping decisions based on:
Oh it's smart, eh? Can I use all its capabilities without ever connecting to your services or creating an account?

On a different note, I see the UK petition hit it's maximum of 20 user limit, and now has to go through "approval". Sigh.

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I'm happy to say I've never bought a Nintento console, and also have never even played one of their games.

There was that big hoohaa about some N64 emulator that was too good for its time and Nintendo throwing lots of resources to find whomever was responsible for it existing. That didn't stop N64 emulation.

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I can totally see the Steam Deck being a fantastic tool for games developers.
It's affordable, powerful, and easy to deploy software to.
It has many input schemes you can try, is a nice portable size, etc...

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Quoting: hardpenguinI... am not sure what to say.

The Dwarves by KING Art Games [External Link] is a cool game with a native Linux build. Riddled by bugs but memorable and fun.

Really enjoyed that game. Didn't experience much bugs as I recall.
I found it strange that it didn't do better ito sales, but I can see the game not being everyone's cup of tea. Still, It's a better game than its sales indicate.

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My first throuhts were, it has a kind of KDE Plasma feel to it, especially the font choice.
Then later on it turns out the dev was using KDE Plasma, so probably was influenced by that :grin:

It's pretty cool, I love the instant feedback on everything. I feel that's something that all desktops are missing out on (but much of it is probably the applications themselves, alas)

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Point taken. There is distrust from both sides.

Minor observation: I don't think it's so much a fear of sabotage that's the issue, but more a fear of non control.
If you don't have adequate control sometimes the only thing you can do is race to the bottom and see whom blinks first.

There are many cases where Corporate and FOSS is working together happily, It depends on control being managed well.
e.g. Python, Containers, Linux kernel, etc...

Those projects have controlling foundations that basically exists to ensure that everyone plays by the rules.

Edit:
And also, the cooperation usually can only exist outside the core business of said corporate.

E.g. Microsoft is relative linux friendly thesedays, but much less so on e.g. office suite software. They don't make money on Windows any more, but to keep the money coming in from Office/Partners/Consulting it's in their interest to build barriers against the Linux desktop.

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Quoting: elmapuli kinda of understand what you said, but can you explain it a bit more?

to be more specific the specific relationship between companies and foss.

In a corporate environment, decisions get made from the top down. So unless an exec or middle manager delegates a decision to a lower more technical level, they make the decision based on "advice" from industry giants, such as IBM/Oracle/Microsoft/Adobe/etc...

These industry giants spend a lot of money on ensuring they stay de-facto by providing contracts that let them take on some of the liability in case something goes wrong.
(Yes, it's really just a way of passing the buck)

So executives/middle-managers go with the easy option and get an "expert" from one of these de-facto companies to make the decision for them, because that way they can honestly say they left the technical decision to experts, so can't be held liable if something goes wrong.

FOSS often doesn't make business sense unless they are significantly cheaper or become de-facto in some way. Cheap has a stigma of being inferior.

Another dynamic is that proprietary is seen as a form of ownership/control. So corporate will see if they can use it as a way of excluding competition in some way. Therefore it's rare that source code for a non--core-business-path tool ever gets released, even when it loses relevance. All in the name of building a large library of IP. You can then use this huge library of near-useless IP to negotiate a trade agreement with another corporate.

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Quoting: CatKiller

we aim to address market pain points and dedicate efforts to the handheld space

They haven't, though. It's still got an awful layout and no trackpads. Even in the saddled with an OS that's absolutely awful for a handheld PC sector of the handheld PC market they haven't fixed anything. Maybe this one can avoid destroying its own SD cards, but that's not a given.

It's MSI. They have a history of releasing a product that looks great on spec lists, but badly thought out and with impotent follow up.
My MSI A4DEK has not received a single BIOS update in its lifetime. To make it worse the product string in the DMI is wrong. Looking at timelines it's for a product that got released a month earlier.

I can't wait to finally get rid of this disaster of a device.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPI don't have an objection to companies downsizing for cost reasons.
Just makes business sense in some situations.

What makes this so crazy is that they didn't lose profitability due to "the market changing" or inflation or anything.
Their leadership made absolutely insane decisions that cost them dearly, but the ones to pay the consequences of that are the normal staff, while the leadership remains absurdly overpaid.

That's the part that's just really grinding my gears.

I lived through a similar thing. New CEO, new ideas. We tell him some of those ideas are built on bad foundations. He systematically replaces the board until anyone that knows the market is out-shouted by the yes-men.

What happened? The company shed over 10000 jobs in 3 years until it filed for bankruptcy.

And all that happened is that all the board members were paid off, but literally every other employee got pink checks and had to re-apply for their jobs at half the salary.

I was lucky in that I decided to leave about a year before the big implosion. It was a hellish work environment being out shouted and lied to by sociopathic yes men all the time. Sorry, I think I struck my own nerves there :dizzy:

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Agree with the sentiment here. If you can't do business without stealing, then you should be described as organised crime and get eradicated for the sake of progress.
Please don't say that you need a free pass to steal so that progress can happen, that's been proven multiple times in the past to actually mean "progress for the few, suppression for the many". Let's not have another dark ages again? OK?

On a lighter note, Liam, all those humanisms of yours only prove your authenticity :tongue:

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