When all the Unreal devs and..etc stop using Discord as their main source of priority support I can move away, until then... doesn't matter what alternatives there are when the only way to get support is a Discord link and I need to get something fixed.

It's kind of like 100% avoiding facebook. I don't have a facebook account—but I'm still on the site a few times a year because half of all local events are just facebook page links or QR codes.

Which is also the issue with youtube... Trying to block youtube means all the drawing lectures on patreon by all the artists I pay to watch stop working... Now beyond those three—at least for me—I'm not forced on any other social media networks—but I'm also sure there are people who are because other bubbles force them to be. X/TickTock/Bluesky...etc. Are not my thing nor in my circles I didn't use X when it was Twitter and it's even less interesting now. People say news happens there, but any time I look around it's just random scraps of news in a storm of junk... Any good news there hits discord, real news sites, and blogs so that makes me think that news writers are probably forced to live in that world... Which make me as a game dev living in Discord not feel so bad, at least we're only hounded to pay for junk features not forced to pay to send people DMs...

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Unless their giving the games awaya for free this feels wrong IMO. A company shouldn't be asking for donations to make products they are going to sell... At least not a big established company. If they were a tiny startup or something where they couldn't survive the time to make the product then sure, but not an old established company like GOG. Now if they were released for free for everyone then yeah that's something you need donations for because it's not a company product that's going to make money on it's own.

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"Windows 95.59% +0.36%"

My brains first impression was that Windows 95 had .59 and was up .36% XD

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I don't know if it really needs to be *better or cheaper* to carve out a niche for itself. I've noticed a good chunk of normal non-techy people who are getting pretty interested in cutting Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo out of their lives for moral reasons, but really outside of the steamdeck nothing else on the market really appeals to most normal people who don't want to trust weird small or foreign companies they've never heard of, but want something that's not the big three evil gaming companies or the three "tiny" but evil gaming companies: Meta/Apple/Google who all offer their own gaming ecosystems too but are really just as big and dirty feeling.

Bad joke explained: Tiny because their mostly mobile/VR game companies. ^-^;

Out of the big gaming companies making hardware Valve [at least from what I've seen from people] certainly has the most favorable persona. So I could see if they did something that was truly good enough, they'd have a viable market without needing to be flashy.

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I really wished Valve would just do a global survey ask so we could get real numbers. These are always kind of interesting but not really. I've still never been asked on my any Linux or macOS systems that I have steam installed on and use it on, only my windows systems.

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For as long as they keep letting me skip months I will stay subscribed. But they get rid of the skip month feature. I am gone. I've had a sub there since the dawn of the system, I've probably skipped more months than not because of unintresting games, or months where I already owned all the interesting games.

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It's too bad the Co-op has such bad reviews otherwise this would actually look pretty good.

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@grigi

I don't know what I'm supposed to do. if I move her to e.g. Linux and LibreOffice... is she going to be able to do her work?
She's 78, she doesn't want to learn new things right now.

You can pay a subscription to use then online / web version of MS office. So if that's the only thing she needs to escape windows than it's asking if the subscription cost is worth the other benefits.

Sure you have alternatives on Linux, may much better than Libre Office for people coming from MS office... (I'd go with the paid version of Softmaker office myself. It basically feels like an older version of MS office and has near perfect support for MS office formats.) But also why? If she's working at a university than she probably already has a free subscription to the online MS office anyway. I know my sister who works at a university has it for free.

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@rstrube

I've been running Cosmic since alpha 5 on my main gaming desktop

Any tips for setup? I was thinking about setting up Cosmic alpha 7 on a gaming computer tomorrow.

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COSMIC is pretty exciting, to me it's the potential of getting a DE that might actually care about the non-power Linux native experience eg: The people who just want to use their computers. I love the fact they are actually putting effort into accessibility.

Last time I tried to use Linux on my main computer it failed miserably due to lack of accessibility. The best accessibility tools were in KDE and they were subpar and complicated to setup properly. When I reached out to the devs they basically said it wasn't their priority or interest and that people with disabilities should stick to Windows and Mac, and so that's what I did for my main computer. Since System76 is a company with vested interest in people using and enjoying their computers which starts with the DE I have high hopes for it over the long run.

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