Is QR bittorent different from qbittorrent or was that a typo?

Tenacity as the most successful Audacity fork after their Telemetry debacle.

Isn’t Overwolf’s business model literally monetizing and profiting from modding communities? Curseforge and Overwolf are the epitome of enshittification.

There is also WinGet.

I think there are three reasons for this:

1. Steam is not freemium. It’s built on paying customers rather than advertisers.
2. PC games, unlike TV shows and console games, don’t end up platform exclusives (and because games storefronts aren’t a subscription, there’s no reason for them to be). There are console exclusives but exclusivity has never really made sense for PC games. And without exclusivity there’s genuine competition (even if none succeed at dethroning Steam)
3. Valve is a private company owned by Gabe Newell, instead of a for-profit. Shareholders are short-sighted.

That second point got me thinking about Nebula (the streaming service). I don’t believe it’ll be enshittification even though it has exclusives. I wonder why that is.

yeah I just hope they can stay this good. I like them but am always thinking about when I have to ditch it when they get some fool at the helm.

I’ve tried so many times to switch to LibreOffice, but as far as I can tell it’s just not made for novelists. It regularly shits itself when dealing with a 300k manuscript that Word has never given me problems with.

I genuinely tried using it for a full year, using it on Linux even, to see if it was just me being cranky about changes to my writing routine…and maybe it’s still just me, but I eventually went back to Windows and my old copy of Microsoft Word 2010.

As far as I can tell, using Libre Office (or Open Office) as an actual writer seems to be a niche enough use case that developers don’t fix some of the issues that crop up that are specific to the needs of a novelist. It also gets laggy and unreliable for long word counts.

But if you need to make a basic sign to be printed out, or letters, or use it for short things like so many people use Word for in an office setting, it probably is ok.

I just had trouble with it behaving poorly with my long-format works in ways that MS Word never crapped out on me for.

Thanks for the heads-up. Got both on my pc but i instinctively open up OO when i need to do writing. Will give Libre another chance now :)

honestly I assume when someone says open office they mean libre office.

WACUP is the nice new alternative unless you want WinXP support retained

on linux i use audacious, works well

That’s kind of telling in itself to be honest. Services for most people these days mean subscription (or some kind of recurring cost). The nature of the overwhelming majority of businesses means they will be looking to increase profits. One extremely common way is to degrade the service you provide slightly. Increasing ads, lowering quality, etc.

One of the only exceptions I would say is Steam. But people could argue that Steam isn’t a true service because it’s closer to a store front, at that point you’re arguing semantics though.

There’s also self hosting a service to consider? How would that count in this instance. I self host a few things like nextcloud, Plex, and others. Yes it’s still a program and technically a service as well?

Some people miss this but Librewolf uses most of the code from Firefox…so its still VERY dependent upon Firefox developers/services to do its thing. Its still better, but if Firefox suffers, then Librewolf does too.

Theres an excellent graphic here: https://codeberg.org/librewolf/source
I used to compile and contribute a long time ago. Its pretty easy to get it working and make adjustments…when you know what Firefox does in the background.

It’s… beautiful

Until sites don’t work because they block too much.

I’ve settled on Waterfox.

They are one of the highest achievements of humanity, imho, that even make me feel proud to be a human.

It’s hard not to try to support them.
The “spam” is for them to operate, not maximise their profits.

You know what?

I’m gonna start doing that.

For real. The number of times I’ve been working problems on a Raspberry Pi and my searching ends up there is wild.

There are definitely some things PS can do that GIMP can’t, but I’d argue it’s fine for anyone who isn’t coming from Photoshop expecting all those features. I’ve only ever used GIMP, so it seems great to me.

Well thankfully FOSS allows anyone to fork anything, so I imagine there will always be decent distros out there.

We need to protect Linus at all costs.

I think Linux enshitifcation will happen when Linus Torvalds is no longer the benevolent dictator.

I hope not. Linus surrounds himself with good people (like Greg Kroah-Hartman) who will take over the reigns and most likely continue the legacy in his name.

You missed 3 times in a row.

1. The 30% cut thing has been industry standard since the dawn of time. Valve goes out of its way to make exceptions to this rule down to 10% in cases of very high volume but everyone only talks about the 30 since thats all they hear about. Only an Epic Games apologist would parrot this as a talking point. Plus, developers are not getting nothing for that 30%, especially games that use Valve’s Steam networking services. Unlike Microsoft and Sony who also take 30% cuts, Valve doesn’t charge $10,000 per game patch to have someone review and approve it to be published.

2. The regional pricing goes both ways. There was literally a game recently users were complaining about NOT getting it because the publisher opted out or something, where the regional pricing would have made the game affordable but in USD (Valves country of origin and therefore default), it was exhorbitantly priced. And this one wasn’t even Valve’s fault.

3. Valve did not censor games directly on behest of the Australian nutjobs, they fought back against them pretty hard, but Valve is ultimately beholden to the payment processors (who they also pushed back on). Once Visa and MasterCard started threatening to pull services, Valve was put in a “comply or die” situation. If they didn’t do as they were told they wouldn’t be able to accept money with anything but Stripe or Bitcoin. They literally lost Paypal as a payment option over this fight.

I think its very dishonest of you to frame these points as enshittification. This term means the intentional degradation of a product or service for the sole motive of increasing profits. For point 1, the whole industry literally started off like that. For point 2, it was literally an attempt at equity (valve may not get the deltas correct but in some countries they’re losing money on games). And for point 3, you might be able to argue it but ultimately it wasn’t for profits so much as it was survival.

If you wanted to shitsling at Valve, you should have mentioned how Valve invented lootboxes in TF2 and then exacerbated the issue in CS:GO/CS2, releasing that awful plague onto the industry.