Companies are also entire performative when they “support” the opposite cause.

As I see it the point of the cartoon is that you can’t trust them either way because they only give a shit about money.

PS: More broadly, changing one’s mind because of “known name/brand” is profoundly idiotic. For example why should anybody change their mind on transexuality because of what J.K. Rolling says?! Better have Principles than have superficial opinions that flop back and forth like a flag on the wind depending on what brands and celebs put out.

We really live in a fucked up society when people let themselves be guided in the Moral space by incredibly superficial branding or statements from famous people - those things are way too important for being influenced by anything other that actual Principles.

The comic is about how companies are entirelly performative when they “support” causes.

Either way, it all boils down to expecting a Sociopath to genuinelly care about what’s good for anybody but themselves, rather than just claim they love whatever to get something out of others or don’t claim it because it’s not going to lead to them get anything from others.

They really don’t give a shit about you and your feelings unless they get something for themselves from making believe like they care.

Well, things like Lutris do the same automated configuring of the underlying tools to run Windows games under Linux and putting it all under a “press button to play” interface as Steam as well as letting you manage your collection.

Lutris (and I believe Heroic too) even integrated with game stores and will list your games there and download them directly from there to install them.

What they don’t have is the store part - you can’t actually BUY games from those tools.

People using for example Lutris to play GOG games in Linux, have pretty much the same experience as using Steam from a browser to buy the games and then Steam app to manage your games collection and launch the games.

Having both Steam and Lutris, I personally prefer the latter because it seamlessly integrates with multiple stores and even works fine with games from other sources (such as games I bought in physical format way back in the day or games I bought directly from the developer).

Sure, the open source apps doesn’t include a store, but as I see it that’s actually a good thing since I’m not interested in getting the sales push to buy more games everytime I want to play a game, same as I’m not interested in seeing ads when I’m browsing the web.

I use Lutris myself to run GOG games and have the same experience.

Mind you, sometimes I do have problems and have to tweak things to get them to run (usually switching the runner to wine-ge instead of wine-staging).

It’s very rare to be totally unable to run a GOG game in Linux with Lutris.

I would say that my rate of success with Steam is roughly the same.

That said, in Lutris I can run my games sandboxed with networking disabled, which I cannot in Steam (even if I started Steam itself sandboxed with networking disabled, Steam itself needs Internet access).

Maybe Steam is a little more seamless for non-technically adept users (of which there are more and more running Linux nowadays), but at least Lutris (and, I expect, Heroic) are way much more configurable and hence give a lot more possibilities for power users to do things like sandboxing or even to solve problems with running some more obscure or AAA games from a certain DRM-heavy era (for example, there’s a game which no matter what I couldn’t get to run in Steam, but with a bit of tweaking I could get a pirate copy to run in Wine under Lutris - still now that game is listed in ProtonDB as not running in Linux)

Grand Theft Auto driving data.

Well, strictly speaking it would solve for good the problem of not having a charging cord for your iPhone.

That like saying that a shot to the head is a cure for cancer - technically true but the other effects of the “solution” are worse than the problem.

Missing potato?!

modern Internet

isn’t just the OSI stack all the way to IP.

Yeah, that was kinda the point I was making.

PS: And CERN is actually an international project, rather than just Swiss, though located in Switzerland.

Doing some of the work developing the modern Internet isn’t the same as doing all the work developing the modern internet.

The Web was born in that well known American institution, CERN, invented by that well known American citizen, Tim Berners-Lee.

One wonders why the application “used for everything related to authentication with government services” runs on a Private Sector cloud.

I mean, it’s not as if a Digital Cloud is any more than a bunch of servers running somewhere with a direct connection to the Internet.

Then again, this is The Netherlands, which is has been ruled by a very Neoliberal right-wing party (in various coalitions) for over a decade so it makes sense that the government there would have even essential software for interacting with Public Services be operated by the Private Sector.

Alternativelly, having been bitten by a radioactive animal early that day, they’re now an animal themed superhero.

Well, a quick check of my Mini-PC which has a bit more software than Lubuntu and Kodi but not by much (so, also stuff like Firefox and qbittorrent) shows a bit over 20GB used for everything but the mount to were the qbittorrent is downloading files, so even in this day and age of stupidly expensive storage all the storage you need is still going to be about €20 or less (that’s the price of a new 64GB SATA SSD from AliExpress, which should fit the same connectors as your HDDs unless those PCs are so ancient they still use PATA instead of SATA).

I expect a dedicate distro for just a TV box like LibreELEC should be even smaller.

Mind you, I have the storage for the videos I watch in Kodi outside in the form of portable mobile HDDs since its a much better price per GB for bulk storage and the speed of even mobile HDDs is fine for playing h264 and h265 compressed stuff, so that’s of course not counted in those 20GB.

Upgrading an old PCs with a 64GB SATA SSD should be reasonable cheap and more than enough to run either LibreELEC or Lubuntu with Kodi plus a bunch of extra stuff.

That said, the benefit of a Mini-PC like the one I got (with an N100 processor or similar) is that it uses very little power (unlike old desktop PCs or even notebooks) so it’s cheap to just leave running all the time and it’s quiet.

When my really old TV box was in it’s last legs I tried 2 different Android TV boxes, which whilst not in TV Stick format like that, have very similar hardware specs.

These things were around €50 from AliExpress.

They were frustrating, one was actually sluggish, the other not exactly fast (it really boils down to the version of the cheap ARM CPU in your device and the processor names don’t exactly make clear which ones are more or less powerful), and ran Android TV isn’t all that great at customizing it and comes with pre-installed crap and Google spyware.

Replaced them with an N100 Mini-PC running Lubuntu and with Kodi always on top. That thing runs circles around those 2, not even reaching 10% CPU usage when playing 1080p h256 videos.

Now, I also use the Mini-PC as a home server, hence Lubuntu makes sense, but for the stupidly simple solution just install LibreELEC which is a distro pre-configured to just run Kodi.

You can get a wireless remote for it, at which point it’s pretty much the same sofa experience as a TV Box or TV Stick except for the ON/OFF button (because it only works to turn the Mini-PC OFF, not to turn it back ON).

That said, that Mini-PC with 8GB memory and a 128 GB SSD was about €130 over a year ago and now it’s about €240.

I believe the Shield and Apple TV are actually more expensive and you don’t fully control what’s running in that hardware, what it does with your personal data and even if it will end up enshittified or not, unlike with a Mini-PC were you installed Linux.

I got an N100 for about €130 last year but the same one with the same amount of memory (which was only 8 GB since that machine is for use as a TV Box + Home NAS combo) is now about €240.

Still way more affordable than the usual game machine with a dedicated graphics card and perfectly fine for many Indie games which are fun and have tons of replayability.

Now, if one want to play the latest God Of War on it, forget about it, though myself I genuinely find something like Rimworld more fun.

Fun gaming machine 2027: N100 Mini-PC with integrated graphics and Linux for playing games like Rimworld.

The main argument against the idea that the steep price increases in PC consumer hardware will lead to a Future of “everything runs on the cloud” and “the end of personal computing” is that the makers of software that can’t run on the cloud and remain decent (most notably game makers, as proven by the totally failure of things like Stadia) will just target their software the the hardware that’s expected that people will have in 2 - 5 times, which as far as we can tell is “the same hardware as people have now” because only a small fraction of gamers can afford to upgrade.

If people can’t afford upgrading their PCs, software makers can’t afford to demand upgraded computers.

I would even say that the trend towards that predates this shit - in the last decade or so it’s pretty much only AAA games who have been pushing the envelope in terms of hardware whilst increasingly Indie games are targetting lower end hardware.

That’s also good for Linux because, lo-and-behold, Microsoft is one of those software makers who with spectacularly bad timming just put out a main product that demands upgraded computers exactly when it’s way harder for people to afford upgrading their computers.