Russ

It’s not like they built a new kernel specifically for the steam deck.

I agree that the majority of the impact being seen is from various components that aren’t SteamOS specific, however Valve does actually have a custom kernel for the Steam Deck “linux-neptune” (there are quite a few mirrors for browsing, but this is the official source).

I believe most of their changes are just to drive the deck’s hardware. Every now and then there are some changes that Valve contributes that lands there first before it gets upstreamed, for example the Arch Wiki calls out the Steam Deck’s kernel as a way to fix issues between HDR & VRR (shouldn’t be needed anymore on modern mainline kernels).

IIRC on Bazzite neofetch is just a symlink/alias to fastfetch due to muscle memory and the overall prevalence of neofetch.

Well for one thing, playing online games (that aren’t F2P) on PC does not require me to pay a monthly subscription for the privilege of using my own internet connection that I already pay for. That is the most odd subscription to have to pay for - doubly so on Switch where most games of their FP games are ironically P2P, last I’d heard.

I also like being on an open platform where my games will generally continue to follow me as I upgrade. The only one who actually holds even somewhat of a candle to this is Microsoft with their Xbox backwards compatibility program, but there are no guarantees with that. If I had to pick up the PC I used in 2007 to play Portal, I’d be pretty upset given how hardware degrades over time (especially in the realm of handhelds - ie batteries). If I want to play the Nintendo Wii version of Animal Crossing however on an official supported Nintendo console, I’d have to buy another Wii given that when I moved out I didn’t steal the Wii from my other siblings who were still growing up. Thankfully I can emulate it on PC (such as my Steam Deck), but I wouldn’t want to gamble on emulation being possible, similar to Xbox’s BC program.

The money spent on the hardware in the PC ecosystem also go further than just playing games. I work from home, and am able to use that same hardware to do my job. Funnily enough, I thought I was going to end up having to dock my deck to do a shift due to a failing drive - meanwhile I can’t even open Spotify on a Switch to listen to some music. If I even tried that on a NS2, Nintendo wants to permanently brick the entire device, no thanks.

So no, I don’t need a “Haha! I can have this game and you can’t!” to justify a hardware purchase. There are plenty of reasons for me to justify my purchase of PC hardware that won’t just be used to harm me.

I mean, sure - but if you really don’t trust Apple to keep their word, then it wouldn’t matter if their Health app was FOSS or not. iOS itself is still (and probably forever will be) a closed source operating system. That gives them the power to do anything, including hijack the data from FOSS apps.

I have zero interest in Recall, but I thought it was already done on-device? IIRC it always was that way, which is why it’s only available on new computers containing dedicated “neural coprocessors” I believe was the term.

Now given that it’s closed source, you have to trust that they aren’t silently sending data back to themselves - which is where my problem lies, I don’t trust them in the slightest.

Kind of. You could only open the menus IIRC when you were not in a game, can’t recall the exact key bind though. At least, this was the case when I tried replicating the gaming mode session on my PC (I haven’t actually used a keyboard on my deck either). It was quite strange.

Jesus christ, that is absolutely disgusting. Texas has plenty of issues they should actually be working on.

I’m glad I managed to get out of there years ago.

As long as it is done properly and honest, I have nothing against a “Pro” and a “Contra” article.

Neither do I, personally. Though I am certainly less than inclined enjoy an article where the author is oddly preachy/“holier-than-thou”, sayings things such as you’re not a “real” programmer unless you sacrifice your health debugging segfaults at 3AM or have done the handmade hero challenge (certainly an interesting series to watch, but one that I have zero interest in replicating). Yet the author accuses copilot of having a superiority complex. I cannot say for sure, however I would assume if the article was in favor of AI rather than against, then there would definitely be comments about exactly this.

The overarching tone of the article seems like if it were written as a direct comment toward a user instead, it would run afoul of beehaw’s (and surely other instances’) rules, or at the least come really close to skirting the line - and I don’t mean the parts where the author is speaking of/to copilot.

According to another user in here, blocking on Mastodon actually works. So seems like it is possible to do in the Fediverse.

I was not aware of this, but their implementation of how they do this does bring up the limitation I mentioned. The other user cannot see your posts only if you are on the same server:

If you and the blocked user are on the same server, the blocked user will not be able to view your posts on your profile while logged in.

I actually thought blocks were public already.

They’re not, well - the operator of your instance could go into the database and view it that way in the same way that they can see your email address. But aside from someone who has database access to your instance, blocks are not public. What is public is the list of defederated (“blocked” so to speak) instances for an entire instance (this can be viewed by going to /instances of any instance), which might be what you were thinking of?

And personally I don’t see how it would be an issue if people that I haven’t blocked can see who I’ve blocked.

How exactly would you enforce that, though? If your blocks were public, all the person who you’ve blocked would need to do is open a private browsing window and look at your profile to see that they’ve been blocked.

If we’re looking at blocks as being a safety feature, I would think that having your blocks broadcasted to every single instance would be classified as harmful and a breach of your privacy. This is why although an instance that you register with has to have your email address that you signed up with, they don’t broadcast it to all other instances (same with the encrypted value of your password) - because otherwise it would effectively be public.

Perhaps I’ve just got the wrong stance, but considering that you can never block someone from viewing your content with an absolute guarantee (if the blocks were broadcasted, you still couldn’t prevent someone from just simply logging out, or standing up their own instance and collecting the data anyways) I would not consider that tradeoff to be worthwhile. Not that my stance has any weight since I’m not a maintainer for Lemmy (or any of the Fediverse software), but I wouldn’t be surprised if that has at least come up to those who are developing the various Fediverse software.

Aside from the rest of the discussion that has already occurred here, I’m not actually sure how this would work from a technical perspective.

You and I are on two completely different instances, if I were to block you, how is your instance supposed to know this in order to stop you from reading my comment?

The only way I could see that working is if the list of users you blocked were federated too, and effectively made public (like votes currently are) - which seems counterproductive to the problem at hand.

Then what happens if you post in a community where someone you’ve blocked is a moderator? Or if you block the admin of another instance? If you can “cloak” yourself from being moderated by just blocking them, that seems like an exploit waiting to happen. As far as I’m aware, on Reddit blocking a user doesn’t hide your comments from them - but they can no longer reply to them, and I assume this is why that is the case. Unless that has very recently changed.

The biggest difference between Lemmy (and all software within the Fediverse - for example, I’m pretty sure Mastodon is this way as well), is that there is not one singular authoritative server. Actions like this need to be handled on all instances, and that’s impossible to guarantee. A bad actor running an instance could just rip out the function that handles this, and then it’s moot. I mean, they wouldn’t even need to do that - they’d have the data anyways.

You could enforce it if both users are on the same instance I suppose, but this just seems like it would only land with the blocking feature being even more inconsistent.

For what its worth, I know that while a lot of the hardcore Linux community seems to absolutely despise Ubuntu/Canonical because of snaps and whatnot, I don’t think there is anything actually wrong with using Ubuntu if that is what works for you. Use the best tool for the job!