Netflix and Spotify almost ended Piracy by making it easy to access whatever you wanted for a reasonable fee. Then they got greedy and everyone else wanted a piece of the pie and now we are in a worse position than package bundle Cable TV.
I’m in my late 30’s and went back to the high seas. I used to sail the seas in my early 20’s when i was broke AF and didn’t have cable TV. When Netflix came around it sudden became easier and more convenient to just pay $6.99/ month to watch whatever I wanted. For years I got by with Spotify and Netflix and I didn’t even look back. Then, all of a sudden there were more streaming services than i knew what to do with and every few months they would all raise their price and reduce their libraries. Then they started putting ads in. Now I’m self hosting all of my media and using Stremio/Torentio for my one off TV shows and movies. I directly support creators wherever I can as well, whether it’s Patreon or Kofi or just buying their Merch.
Canadian here. I broke my leg in January. The only thing I ended up paying for was $25 for a pair of crutches. I did have to wait a significant amount of time to get seen, but its a small hospital and someone walked in with a stab wound right after me, so I was okay with it.
We do currently have a doctor shortage in my province and I myself do not have a family doctor, which does complicate things, but there are clinics around that I can still go to that are just less personal than a family physician.
We do have to pay out of pocket for prescriptions, but generally speaking the cost for most things are pretty low. There’s also a whole bunch of basic I also have 80% drug coverage through my employer, which is pretty common as well. In addition in my province a lot of diabetes medication is provided free of charge.
The day I have to watch ads is the same day I stop youtube. So far ad blocks seem to work well for now and I’m more than willing to spend hours getting them working if needed.
I assumed it was a Patreon because of the name, but its still a for profit company asking their customers for donations in the form of a monthly subscription so they can sell you more games. You don’t get anything tangible out of it, just a private Discord and a badge on your name.
Its skeezy no matter how you spin it.
Gog has been my preference for a few years now, but there’s no way I’m subscribing to a patreon that gets me literally nothing. I honestly assumed at first you’d get something out of it at first, like a free game from the preservation program every month or something similar to Amazon Prime’s giveaways. Its honestly cause me to start to re evaluate how much I purchase from them. Its kinda skeezy.
Nice. I’ll give them a shot. Thanks.
Its the best way. Its cheaper, you have plenty of user reviews to check first, and you get a completed game, without bugs.
AAA games are just too expensive and many are just not finished at release now. I’m not forking out top dollar for a half finished game. Outer Worlds 2 is still $89.99 CAD. That is absolutely insane in my opinion. I enjoyed the first one, but I also bought it on sale. Indy games nowadays are generally a better bang for your buck anyways and theyre only $30-40 regular price and they are also generally at a finished state or at the very least very honest about the state they are in.
I’ll probably pick the game up in 2 years when its $20 on Steam or something.
Or not a teenager worried and stressed out about how and when to talk to their parents or something.
I understand why he did it that way, but I completely disagree with the assessment that was all an end user should do after installing a fresh is on a new PC. Whenever I start up a fresh install of Windows or Linux I always make sure everything is working properly before I really do anything else. Is my GPU working properly, is my printer working, can I hear sound, etc. I just assumed that was standard.
Its been 8-10 months I think. I haven’t had any major problems that weren’t caused or complicated by my own ignorance of Linux as a whole. I’ve learned a lot. I have gotten every game I wanted to play so far to run, one way or another. I set up my own home lab server for streaming and cloud storage complete with a VPN to allow remote access. I have also set up a Windows VM for some stubborn software that my partner uses from time to time (I honestly thought this would be harder than it was.) I also am in the process of indoctrinating several coworkers. I’m currently running 1 PC with Bazzite, 1 with fedora KDE, 2 with Mint, and a server running Ubuntu server and using casaOS as an interface.
I’ve really enjoyed the learning curve. My future plans were to change my server from CasaOS to something else, and to build a new gaming PC and try CachyOS, but that might get put to the side while hardware prices cool off a bit.
I went myself about ten years back when I worked for a small electronics store. It was literally 70% slop and 20% cell phone cases. There was only one company there that we actually got excited about and looked at bringing in their products. Their products were much better than what we currently carried and our current supplier was a pain in the ass to deal with.
They were imeadiatly bought out and closed by the company we already dealt with before we could even place an order. We only ever received a demo unit.
Probably. Its most likely going to look like the steam machine except it’ll run on win11with an Xbox gui instead of linux. Probably be quite locked down in regards to software and store access as well.
Nope. Trust has been broken too many times. I don’t even buy anything anywhere near release anymore. I won’t buy anything anymore unless it’s either an indie game or its on sale and even then I deep dive the reviews and make sure I’m not wasting my money.
Lol, I guess that is a thing. They also just jacked the price on that, didn’t they?
No multiplayer paywall, but they’ll probably try to charge you some sort of subscription anyway that’ll end up costing more in the long run.
Man, I was soooo excited about the PS5, but then it turned into such a shit show to get one that I just put my money into my PC and I never even got around to picking one up when availability became more reasonable. I don’t think I’d ever really want to get back into the console gaming space anymore.
I had been thinking about it for a while. I had played with linux before on an old laptop, but not seriously, though I had been getting more frustrated with windows every time it updated it seemed. I then got the urged to play an old game of mine that i had picked up on a steam sale recently that i hadn’t played in years. It took hours of tinkering and web sleuthing to get it to run, then i played 20 min had to run to town, so I shut down my PC and bam. Windows update. Game no longer worked again. The next weekend I installed Linux mint, then Fedora, then the weekend Bazzite the weekend after that. The game I wanted to play on windows worked right out of the box on Proton. I’ve had less problems overall with Linux than Windows too. Most of the problems I did have early on were also self inflicted. Pro-tip don’t try to remove then re-install the lastest python manually in mint. It breaks everything apparently, luckily (unlike Windows) its very easy to re-install. It’s been about 7 months now.
I’ve only used KDE until recently because it’s pretty familiar feeling after coming from windows, but my wife recently put gnome on her laptop and she loves it. I’ve used it a bit, and besides just being unfamiliar I do actually like it.