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The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

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241–250 of 272 posts

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#241

> Some people have criticized that their company culture of libertarianism sometimes takes precedence over other important values including equity and inclusion. To push for equity is to discriminate and dehumanize people, so it's certainly good that valve does not put this value ahead of anything else let alone allow them to take precedence over taking care of their customer base. They are perfectly inclusive as wel…

I don't want to get into this on this discussion because...well. video games. But consider the following: The organization and customers benefits from meritocratic hiring of the best candidates. But individual hiring managers have biases either for specific people (nepotism) or against groups of people (bigotry). Those individuals would be acting against the best interests of the company and customers whether they ac…

Meritocratic hiring of the best candidates is equality of opportunity, not equity/equality of outcome. Equity requires discrimination and dehumanization of individual people to achieve because racial distributions vary at an earlier stage than the hiring process. I agree that a responsible company tries to remove bias and doesn't discriminate on the basis of immutable characteristics, however...

It's not the people criticizing them that have lumped them all together. People in support of these programs have failed to self police entirely, for example IBM/Red Hat, google, apple are suffering very firmly evidenced racial discrimination lawsuits for discriminating against people with white skin using quotas, firing hiring managers for refusing to discriminate, and so on. These lawsuits were initiated long before the 2024 election, it's not a trump thing for example though he has made use of it because his dem party opponents support these practices.

If someone makes a blatant racist comment on twitter with their employer directly implicated, if the target race is white that person does not end up being fired in today's companies. These public and frequent appearances of unfairness stack up in the public eye. It's enough evidence there's a failure to self-police within the general DEI and HR landscape and i think people are very much done with the entire concept.

It appears to be a common view of many that "you can't be racist against white people" (direct quote of a kotaku journalist journalist, who was not fired for the statement, they also had a couple statements supporting racial violence against whites, big surprise), but obviously such a view is in itself race based discrimination that generalizes and dehumanizes individual experiences on the basis of race.

You can also look up the Dani Lalonders racist tirade, she's a game developer who has not been fired from EA for her comments despite openly admitting to illegal discrimination and only hiring black people to her team and just generally being insane.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#242
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devil's advocate here but I've had a Steam account for well over 15 years now and my library of games has only grown. I am sure there are stories and certain situations where people have lost access to games, but I think they're fringe cases.

I have an account as old as yours, and the games I have lost access to have been pulled by the publisher, never by Valve. We’re talking about one or two games in a 500+ library, and I don’t even remember which. Yeah, it’s not a very big concern of mine either.

500 is a lot of games. I think mine is around 100-150. Just to get a sense of scale, maybe the reason why I never saw anything get pulled. In fact the opposite, I have received free games over the years.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#243
> You can’t run arbitrary programs of your choice on an Android phone without rooting, or on an iPad or an iPhone without jailbreaking.

Since when? You can easily run your self-built / third party apps on Android WITHOUT ROOTING and without paying / getting verified by google. Not-rooting only prevents you from circumventing the Android security model (dedicated toggles for each permission)

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#244

No company is your friend. But Valve does a great job at being consumer friendly. Steam is a great low-pressure sales environment. It provides features that make it more enjoyable for users to play, hang out, communicate, share content, mods. It doesn't harangue you or change your settings, or the UI, or your games (mostly) without reason and warning. Things work like you expect them to in other apps, back buttons wo…

The sticky thing that keeps me in the steam platform is the software itself: notably, Steam Workshop. I normally source my games DRM free but after some experience trying to manage mods of heavily modded games like Rimworld I have come to discover that the value add of package management via Workshop for the exact same price is 100% worth it. Even though I trade DRM for it.

Interesting. I think the software is absolutely tasteless. For a long time it had to update "twice", asking you to restart steam 2 times in a row. It defaults to showing an "ad" on startup. Its chat had a bug that had hidden messages everytime someone wrote you, so you had to reopen the window several times to see it.

Headbangingly bad software and UI design. I've seen people from Fiverr create better UI in 2 hrs.

Not to mention there's a terrible 5-10% sale 99% of the year thats more expensive than everywhere else you can buy the game.. Just great.. What a treat to gamers, gotta feel real lucky to get -5% off 365 days a year!

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#245

They’re not saints, especially with the games distribution platform monopoly they’re sitting on top of, but... I really think Valve have become the de-facto owners of the “don’t be evil” motto nowadays, even if they don’t advertise themselves as such.

They have done absolutely nothing to be a monopoly. The only reason they are at the top is that their competition consistently keeps shooting themselves in the foot.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#247
> Not all these thousands of games running on the Deck have binaries that run natively on Linux. Pivotal to the success of the Deck is Proton, a middle-layer compatibility software, that makes this (mostly) seamless emulation possible. Nonetheless, the greater the adoption of Decks, the likelier we are to normalize prioritizing game-builds for Linux.

This exactly the problem with Steam Deck, and will last while Microsoft decides tacking Proton isn't high on priority list for Microsoft Games/XBox division issues to sort out.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#248

It truly is, and it's the culmination of a long history of development to get to this point. Back in, I want to say 2016 or so, we had Steam Machines, which were a series of hardware partnerships with various vendors for a console-style form factor of essentially PC hardware running on the first version of Steam OS. It was an incredible idea, but at the time rather frustratingly, I think some people came down with wh…

The Deck is so transformative that if Microsoft were serious about XBOX at all, the next XBOX would be a handheld.

And kill Steam Deck just like they did with Netbooks, why get Proton translation of the real XBox experience.

Gamers that reach out to handelds in Nintendo Switch numbers don't care about what OS their consoles use, and won't be buying Steack Decks "because Linux!".

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#249

It truly is, and it's the culmination of a long history of development to get to this point. Back in, I want to say 2016 or so, we had Steam Machines, which were a series of hardware partnerships with various vendors for a console-style form factor of essentially PC hardware running on the first version of Steam OS. It was an incredible idea, but at the time rather frustratingly, I think some people came down with wh…

Valve should acquire Framework and have them do Steam Machine 2.0.

The Framework Desktop is what you would want for a Steam Machine 2.0. But the price is around $1,186 and I think that price is too high for a game console. As a PlayStation 5 Pro is $700. Maybe they could reach that price with a second-gen chip? Or when they introduce a new chip and this machine gets discounted.

I do think Linux-based experience for a TV based game console is still lacklustre. There are rumours that Valve integrating either Google TV/Chrome OS. And it would be nice for a game console to also be used as a media center for Netflix and others.

Re: The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

#250
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Deck is so transformative that if Microsoft were serious about XBOX at all, the next XBOX would be a handheld.

And kill Steam Deck just like they did with Netbooks, why get Proton translation of the real XBox experience. Gamers that reach out to handelds in Nintendo Switch numbers don't care about what OS their consoles use, and won't be buying Steack Decks "because Linux!".

They might not care which OS their consoles use but they probably care about whether their games cost $10 (Steam/PC on very frequent sales) or $80 (Switch 2), and whether they need to buy all of their games again with every generation.
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