China has announced a ban on Gacha game mechanics (and lootboxes, predatory discounts, and gambling) which should hopefully ripple out to Europe and the US soon.

A lot of these mechanics were adapted from the Chinese gaming market and I think the same will likely happen in the reverse.

We had to convince my brother in law (13yo) to not spend his birthday money of £85 on Genshin impact skins. Kids are fucked by advertising man

rust Vs c drama getting out of hand

Keep the snark going, I’m sure it’ll help when you’re scrambling to get people to vote when their lives are being made worse to ensure Israel’s endless wars keep going.

How many dead kids will it take for you to grow a spine?

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Yes that has worked really well so far

Insane levels of cope from the party that’s suing states to remove the “unviable” third parties to protect their genocide candidate’s chances at beating someone who is literally incapable of forming basic sentences

Probably in relation to the Chinese govt. banning these practices too. We’ll see a lot of governments following shit soon hopefully.

If consoles want to remain relevant in the age of the gaming PC, they have to try harder than being locked-down gaming PCs.

Free and simple multiplayer, subsidised hardware, and physical game ownership were staples of most consoles for years but now the urge to turn every device into an “everything machine” has kneecapped the very purpose of these devices.

At best, these are slightly less hassle and slightly more social than a gaming PC. At worst, they’re as anti-social and user-hostile without the cost benefit that once made them genuinely preferable.

I think (aka speculate) that the fact that Windows is the largest OS plays into the fact that Linux-Mac compatibility isn’t more developed.

I bet some 90% of desktop software is available on Windows (even many core KDE are on Windows!) so targeting them brings most Apple apps onto Linux “for free”. Especially since Apple’s insistence on trying to make Metal a thing hurts gaming support, which is a big driver behind Linux compatibility development.

The few applications that MacOS has over both Linux and Windows are usually so embedded into the Apple ecosystem that you’re not getting much by porting them anyway. iTunes? The App Store? Garage Band? Probably doesn’t help that many of those apps also use Apple’s own UI framework which isn’t really portable.

However, stuff not designed to live in Apple land like Teams for Mac or Adobe CC might be more possible. But still far too few applications to necessitate the effort to bring them over.

Pop is the only one that really ever makes any reference to windows in its marketing. I’m more talking about distros like Zorin which are targeting public sector orgs and windows users by bundling windows compatibility apps and features into the ISO.

The other examples definitely do also target “new users” which of course means Windows users too, but they aren’t explicitly tying their distros to Windows software compatibility the same way some are.

I did some reading in AV1 and it’s derivative formats - are they any more accessible to Linux than HEVC/H265? Fedora IIRC removed support for them and a few other codecs out of the box over some patent concerns or something.

Fucking hell you could cut the Reddit-tier snark with a knife.

BSD is more binary compatible than Windows. The fact there’s less MacOS ports on Linux seems to me like a lack of resources, but if you have a reason beyond 🤓☝️ then I’m genuinely interested.

MacOS still ships x86 builds, and most software either provides binaries for both platforms or some kind of universal/hybrid binary. Still a few years before that becomes an issue.

At some point an ARM->x86 translation layer is going to be needed too, regardless. It’s not long until ARM becomes popular enough to make it necessary to translate both ways.

Yup. Same issue will plague all Windows-alternative distros. Unless serious work is done to fix Microsoft 365 and Adobe creative cloud, there’s genuinely little benefit trying to claim Linux is an alternative for all but a minority of people.

That, or we can work on improving the alternatives to those apps. GIMP, Inkscape, and OnlyOffice are on a spectrum of laughably bad to just-about-comparable to their proprietary counterparts.

I don’t think it’s an insurmountable issue: I think there’s more we could do to bring Apple software to Linux (using a BSD-based kernel means a lot less complexity!) and with it the few applications that currently don’t play well with WINE.

Thing is, none of those advantages are real either, compared to a public database and API. Steam’s inventory API already maintains items beyond the lifetime of games, AND you can use items across other games. You can’t manipulate the Inventory of other games but I bet if there was demand (there isn’t) this could be implemented easily.

Google’s involvement is weird, not for any conspiracy reasons but because the chromium team previously cancelled JPEG-XL.

Neoliberals are represented across both sides of the US one party system.

first good thing the French have done

Please bro please let me generate a few sentences of garbled sentences for you please bro I fucking love to say stuff like “delve” please