Thank you so very much!

I had no idea! Thanks for the list, I’ll check them out!

EDIT: It seems like a lot of these are Android apps. I was looking for desktop apps if I was being honest. That, and I have an iPhone.

Given the revelation that it hooks into Spotify to get playlists etc, I really wish there wasn’t that strong of a dependency on Spotify, and that I could just search for songs and start playing.

I was hoping for more YouTube music player, and less Spotify.

I have Spotify Premium which I pay for, and the desktop client is very fast and snappy to play songs. SpotTube is OK, but it isn’t as snappy as Spotify. For something that is free, that is absolutely fine, but the fact it requires Spotify for playlist etc…

I definitely get why. Spotify does playlist generation like no other, and it is the biggest platform by far. But I kind of wish I had a version that wasn’t all about the algorithms.

Also, the way you “login” to Spotify on the desktop is incredibly user un-friendly at best, and incredibly brittle at worst. Copying and pasting a cookie that Spotify uses shouldn’t be used as a way to login to any service, like, at all. And if Spotify are smart, they’ll break this functionality within a month or so using something like Fingerprint.js to identify which device the session belongs to, thus invalidating the session.

It’s a fork bomb. Specifically it’s a piece of code that recursively calls itself and then it calls itself to run the code.

Thank goodness it did not work, but please do not actually run code like this!! Do your best to figure out what the code is doing before you attempt to run it!

I think OP is trying to say:

• There was the Reddit API catastrophe
• That led him to lemmy/ActivityPub
• Which gave him exposure to Linux
• Which he used to give Linux a shot

And he seems to be having a great time with LInux

It’s funny. When I saw this last night, I was in such disbelief that I was watching the real trailer that I was nitpicking all the way going “Nah, this looks bad, R* wouldn’t do that. That looks too good for a GTA game” etc until I double-and-triple-checked the links and went “oh”.

Now I’ve had a few hours to digest:

• The buildings and environments look absolutely beautiful
• It seems to be running at 60FPS? Thank goodness
• The characters look… waxy… I will say that black characters look absolutely phenomenal - much better than previous entries
• This whole game sort of feels like “GTA V+”, which makes sense. Unfortunately, I’ve overhyped myself to a level that R* could never achieve. Not really R*'s problem, but still a bummer.
• Looking at some of the social media/news freeze frames, it seems a lot of the satire’s edginess has been toned down a lot. Honestly? Thank goodness. GTA V was nauseating in how much it was trying to be a shock-jockey. However, I hope R* will still have its political leaning. Even if I don’t agree with R*, it (usually) is something of substance and is usually somewhat grown up (with exception of GTA V)
• I would bet money that GTA VI will be delayed to 2026.
• It will be interesting to see how the writing will be now that Dan Houser has left. It seems OK so far.
• Everyone’s faces look so expressive except for the two main characters. They just look kind of robotic

EDIT: One massive thing I forgot - the marketing for this was so stupid. R* kept saying “Upcoming Grand Theft Auto title” as if it wasn’t going to be called “Grand Theft Auto VI” like they called GTA5 “Grand Theft Auto V” and the one before with roman numerals. Like, for goodness sakes guys, get over yourselves. We know it’s going to be called Grand Theft Auto VI.

RMS has been a divisive figure in the FOSS community, but I don’t think anyone deserves cancer.

Hope he fights through it and comes out of the other side well and healthy.

I don’t think folks realise how much effort and investment Valve has put into making Linux a viable gaming alternative for modern-ish games.

Most distributors use Windows because it is easy to install and setup for gaming. Is it perfect? No. But any vendor can pay Microsoft and get a viable OS for gaming.

Linux will need a lot of custom graphics card drivers and a lot of tweaking (think power as well as graphical features, memory, CPU etc) to get the optimum performance. Most OSes out of the box have OKish performance for gaming, which is OK for any hobbyist but would be a disaster for a consumer product.

And before Valve came along, Proton wasn’t even a thing. Proton is now a thing, and the way Steam utilises it makes it effortless, but it will need a fair bit of custom args to get it working well.

Each of these things separately can be quite painful in its own right, but altogether it would be a headache for any company not well versed in Linux. Not only that, but having to provide customer support for a Linux OS would put the fear in most companies.

I would imagine most vendors would just slap Windows on their machine and be like “you know what to do with this” and let them go nuts.

I didn’t really consider 2D indie games. For 3D indie games, some games are cut down while others are “good enough” to the average Switch end user.

At the end of the day, if the ability to play 3D games from about 5-10 years ago in 30-60fps sounds like a dream to you and you are willing to jump through some Launch Properties/Proton version hoops for some games in order to get that perfect gameplay (for example, I have GTA 3/Vice City/San Andreas OG games, and I spent days modding the games on the SD to get it running close to flawlessly as possible) rather than settle for compromised ports - which for the average person playing video games, they wouldn’t care too much about framerates or graphical fidelity as so much as the convenience to push Play and just go), then Steam Deck is for you.

Otherwise, Switch is perhaps preferrable. OR, if you care more about visual fidelity more than anything, maybe consider getting a PS5/XSX. I say this as I do love my Steam Deck for GTA5 sessions, but for RE games I often go to my XSX.

• maybe some games you don’t want to spend time tweaking the launch options, the graphics, the sliders, the mods etc and you just want to play the game as the devs intended. Switch is good for that.
• maybe there are times you don’t want to deal with all the hassles of a handled pc as a gaming system. Switch is good for that.
• maybe you want to play Nintendo games, but you don’t want to go through all the hassle of emulation (especially switch games). Switch is good for that.
• maybe there is an indie dev you want to support, and you know their game is more expensive on switch than on pc, but it’s well within your budget and you want to give them extra coin. Switch is good for that.
• while switch games are generally low fidelity and low frame rate, you know what to generally expect going in.
• maybe your group of friends mostly own switch and play switch online compared to steam.

Truth be told, once I got my steam deck, I sold my switch. Not because the switch was terrible by any means, but I realised that I missed my pc game library, I didn’t care for online multiplayer, and I didn’t care for Nintendo games. Also, I grew up with Linux and tinkering both Windows and Linux - it’s in my blood at this point, so getting a steam deck was just pure joy for me, even if I spent 90% of the time configuring the thing and 10% playing games.

That’s actually a really good point. I think, ui wise, skype and slack served a different audience. I think skype was about 1-2-1 messages and calls, whereas Slack was about chatting amongst team members.

Teams as a product feels like a really direct competitor to Slack in a way that Skype could never do (at least in the last iteration I used it in).

As for Teams, same here. In my last job I had slack and it was quite pleasant to use. Now at my new(ish) job and we are all forced to use Teams as part of the license. And I guess that is the reason behind EUs decision right there.

I think you got it the other way round - EU are upset that Microsoft used its massive customer base with Office to ship a video conferencing product like Teams for free in order to dominate that market.

I assure you, very few people would actively seek an individual Teams license. I’m very sure companies force their employees to use Teams as it’s part of the license.

Teams, especially when compared to Slack, is incredibly slow and bloated while being entirely lacklustre. Slack is lean and efficient at what it sets out to do (while being pretty expensive).

This is absolutely something I would expect to come out of the Mastodon community, and I’m all for it.

Please Christ let this be better than gta definitive edition!!!

And here I am, just waiting on the next fediverse app to be written in Java so I can actually contribute code 🥲