It just needs a dark theme. Work computer is powerful enough that I can run local models and use it occasionally. A cloud one that’s just using similar open models as what you can easily download is fine to me.

Proton does have aot of work to do understandable to people’s annoyance with them. Lack of Linux Drive application but they’ve released alpha/beta API for Drive. Drive performance isn’t great yet. The Docs feature is pretty barebones for now. Calendar is too simple for power users. Regardless for now they’re the closest privacy centric replacement for Google services

At least Germany, Spain, and Italy have resurgent far right political movements. I am not about to trust government payment systems to not eventually be abused as technology makes control and surveillance easier. A holy book can be replaced with whatever new age self-help, health movement, anti-<ethnicity/sexuality/religion> movement. All it takes is some instability and desperation and people will support whatever or turn a blind eye to whatever they may think is not their problem or they may potentially benefit from. Good for the EU to run their own payment systems. When a conservative wave takes a large enough majority in governance someday, it’ll be the same problem as Visa/Mastercard/etc

The governance powers we give with results being leftist in mind will someday be in the hands of conservative who will use them with a kind of zeal that leftist don’t

To me it’s an inevitability that if the EU weans itself off Mastercard/Visa, then EU based payment processors whether credit based or something like SEPA payments for a digital EURO would be censored. The EU would be happy to handle their own business and that may just end up no different than American companies and the American government. The European right can fight against porn while fighting for independent finance infrastructure

You’re a dick. Hope you get better

Practically the whole world has been having an authoritarian/conservative shift. I would not expect the EU and ECB to be a progressive force for sex work. The EU has been pushing to break encryption for a solid decade now. Visa and Mastercard process 90% of transactions outside of China. They’re huge. I don’t see why ECB leadership would be particularly less conservative and risk averse than Visa and Mastercard. Bankers are usually on the conservative side of politics

We already have the example of now itch and steam getting hit by payment processor restricted on content. YouTube and advertisers wanting to not be shown on categories of content and demonetized channels. I remember headlines about Pixiv and payment processors some time ago

Lose access to the major payment processors and they’ll lose far more than 7%. Until there’s a means of payment thats popular enough to replace centralized authority payment processing, it’s an easy choice for businesses to sacrifice their sex related sales to not sacrifice the larger portion of their sales that they’d lose without support of major payment processors.

The way things are going, there’s going to be the need for popular NSFW specific stores that don’t use Visa/Mastercard, private bank transfers, or national bank transfers. There’s a split in internet video where porn sites are separate from stuff like YouTube. This payment processor content moderation is in the same vein as advertisers on YouTube and other social media networks

The various groups trying to ban payments for NSFW products and whatever else they don’t like would just target the ECB and member states to restrict transactions they don’t like

Whenever it seems like people are saying there’s a solid RVA23 dev board out there, I’ll buy it especially if it has a pcie slot on it

I read the article and it just sounds like they’re praising ChromeOS for being web browser centric. Need office, open Google docs/drive. Pretty much a Linux distro but by default come with a bunch of progressive web apps installed for common applications?

Consumer expectations. On Linux you can just use the web browser just like most people already do on ChromeOS and I assume windows and mac’s. But on regular Linux, Mac, and Windows people expect more. So I guess a distro that brands itself and markets to users to just use the web browser for everything and maybe a store of progressive web apps/preinstalled ones

Also out of the box support. ChromeOS is Google backed. Laptop makers sell mainstream ChromeOS boxes. Linux doesn’t have major mainstream device support. It’d be far less fussy if hardware vendors were releasing plenty of Linux out the box hardware. Right now it’s some workstation centric hardware from Lenovo and Dell and smaller companies like System76

On that note I’d place my hopes with System76 since they’re currently focused on consumer experience. Cosmic DE is still not prime-time ready but maybe a couple more years. 26.04 release use as the default for their new hardware and it still effectively be early adopter phase for Cosmic DE. Then 28.04 ready for primetime. Keep trying to break into being a mainstream hardware brand. Other is what happens with KDE Plasma with Valve and SteamOS, Plasma Mobile, and maybe the TV interface. A bunch of consumer centric use cases driving development in KDE land. Maybe they’ll come up with a way to get flatpak permissions work in a way that alerts users on need and makes it easy to do like on Android/iOS

It’s to pander go conspiracy theorist. Not that a digital currency isn’t a privacy nightmare and a potential powerful tool for control, but I think the reality is that every country in the world will eventually shift over to a digital first based currency/finance system rather than the current Frankenstein of old paper banking with digital services stapled on top. It would be more forward thinking to legislate requirements for privacy and limits on government actions towards account freezes and seizures for digital currency accounts

Games from half a decade ago

Pretty sure Brood War and Counter Strike never stopped working. In the past on PC, developers released the files needed to host your own servers for online games. Ubisoft has been gleefully trying to kill offline single player games for over a decade though. The best we can hope for is that Ubisoft fades go irrelevance or even fully close shop so money can flow to better gaming companies

So 2030 at best for a new game

Bioware dodged making a milky way game after ME3 and didn’t make anything compelling for andromeda. 2030+, 18+ years after ME3 release, got to keep any expectations super low especially after Veilguard happened where that at least had the David Gaider lore bible to finish off the plot threads of the first 3 games. Bioware characters and multigame plots from scratch modern Bioware, that is not an exciting prospect

I think that’ll still be the problem with it being in the storefront at all. Some parents org makes large enough fuss about porn games on Steam and payment processors demand stronger moderation rather than have their brands associated with Steam and whatever may be released on it

I don’t think there’s a way for Valve to avoid this. Like I don’t think it would be enough to mark games as only available for purchase without support from the major payment processors/rails. Like disable those and add crypto payment support and only use those for those games. Those games being on the store that major payment processors support, they’ll not want those on a store they support

This is a case where probably should be another store that doesn’t use major payment processors but until alternative payment rails became popular, it’d be a low sales volume store. I know cryptocurrency has negative connotations because of the community, but I think those currencies are the only long term solution for people making porn games or whatever type of content that may have rich/powerful groups wanting to suppress

Excellent. The umbrella of KDE is home to a bunch of my favorite applications. Kdenlive, Krita, Digikam. I’ve been hotly anticipating the day I get a phone running Plasma Mobile

This may be better eventually than Plasma Mobile for what I imagined as an ideal gaming frontend that isn’t just Steam Big Picture

Maybe someday Waydroid and Android Translation Layer will make Linux as a HTPC+gaming great

I’m guessing maybe having the Xbox branding entails some certification fee? Also is the base Z2 supposed to be stronger than the Z1 Extreme? It’ll be rough to compete with older Z1 Extreme handhelds and presumably any of the Z2 family of chips that come with SteamOS

I tried to play through Unbound and I couldn’t deal with the writing. It was “hello fellow kids” to me which I feel has been a worsening problem with video game writing since Borderlands 2. Even worse with it feels to me like video game writing really tried to moralize moral grey’s or bad behavior or make characters not just people that want to go fast, make money, feel cool, getting in trouble with the law for going an incredibly dangerous for anyone in your vicinity speed disobeying traffic signals, probably associated with organized crime and just trying to survive but in over their head because their only skills really are just cars, …, they’re actually people just trying to express themselves and find community of deep down kind and good people

Also I felt like I was playing rich/sheltered kids ideas of street racing and people that live in the night. Way too idealistic. Should be way more cutthroat, emotional burnouts just trying to go fast as their happy/thrill place. The sheltered/rich kids fantasy comes to mind when games try to make living among graffiti and gangs as like living among street art and community health organizations. It’s the digital nomad view of local (underground) cultures and the digital nomad view of the old guy in the club as a really cool dude rather than probably a bit of a creep and probably very immature and irresponsible

I wouldn’t know how to fix the series so that it’d sell. Same as burnout. The arcade open world racing game with a sterile storyline is dominated by Forza Horizon. Cop chases don’t seem to spark excitement like before the PS3 era. The last couple of NFS games, I played abit and even though they’re about street racing, didn’t feel very grungy, youthful angst and peacocking, like I’d expect street racing to be

Street racing doesn’t seem to spark excitement like the pre-PS3 era. I’m thinking every game after NFS Carbon hasn’t been able to capture any sense of mystique of street racing and that just may be that street racing isn’t culturally significant anymore. Fast and the Furious isn’t about street racing anymore

With Forza Motorsport seemingly on the way out, there’s room for a multiplatform Gran Turismo competitor. Something that’s gamepad centric rather than wheel. Seems just as hard to resonate with gamers as these other racing games though

It the country wasn’t so hostile, also pretty racist when talking about Chinese (99% of the time people say Chinese not CCP as an insult to anything about creativity, invention, culture, whatever), to Chinese consumer big ticket goods, I’d imagine BYD and other would build manufacturing plants in the US. If things weren’t so hostile, the Chinese battery companies like CATL may be willing to build batteries in the US without major concern of a hostile nation stealing their battery tech

It isn’t even a truly political idealism conflict that causes the split. Americans were fine with South Korean and Taiwanese products when those countries were military dictatorships. Vietnam has the company VinFast selling cars in the US and it’s political structure is a lot closer to China than the US. Americans have never shown appetite for reigning in how American companies treat labor in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Really not even domestically like in makeshift housing that American farmers pack migrant workers into or meatpacking plants. So it’s really just rich/powerful people not liking to see non-European descendants take the leading role in global trade of high margin goods and services that are often cutting edge technology

If China was still primarily a labor country, damn near no one would care about Chinese domestic issues like famines. In my mind the inevitability will be another wave of xenophobia that will eventually target India and the Indian diaspora as their military and domestic military and technology companies develop

Over the years I think Honda and Toyota are the two brands I most commonly see an old guy managing to keep running well for 30+ years and hyper focused on wanting to break 500k miles or dreaming of hitting 1 million miles someday

Tariffs be damned, I will not buy an American brand car. They’ve been mediocre my whole life and it’s always been easier to source parts for Hondas and Toyotas. I’m not sure how repairable any EV is, but I doubt American brands will top the charts of value in repairability in my lifetime