Yup, the Xbox does that; but it’s at least good to acknowledge that was not an insignificant effort on their part. They had a lot of people slowly putting out compatibility packages for old Xbox games based on popularity.

I’m guessing Sony doesn’t feel like doing that when they can also provide that hardware via more expensive cloud systems.

I’ve definitely had some of those issues. I won’t count an old issue where my GPU needed a special connection to attach audio to its DVI output (rare oddity). Some others:

• Most computers would need to swap default audio device between whatever you use at a desk, and the TV registered as an HDMI audio device.
• Bluetooth connections to arbitrary controllers have gotten better, but they had often needed manual enablement each time through mouse-based menus or a number of firmware updates to work with Windows/SteamOS.
• My Steam Deck, even in its current iteration, takes some time to recognize the connected TV and swap resolution.
• The mouse cursor issue can come up if you had to do any mouse-based option swapping, like that thing with audio devices.

I’ve definitely gotten it working and had a blast, but the number of button presses to get to starting the game can sometimes be hard to predict. Even when I had a computer dedicated to the TV (a long time ago when SteamOS was fledgling) it was pretty unreliable about having all the right updates and not needing a mouse.

On the idea of random drives: Many of them might not be able to read the encryption on Playstation discs. I could be wrong, but I think the way they operate involves more than just software encryption. Sony is best off making their own. Hence why pirates burn special copies.

On reading prior generations: I think they’d be capable of reading those if they wanted, but running old Playstation games is more a matter of correct CPU architecture. Most of us have played old games on the new consoles, but often there’s a bit of manual porting/emulation logic going on to get it working - so the package delivered from PSN isn’t exactly would come from an old PS2 disc.

Props for accepting a counterargument on the internet graciously. Not something we see often.

I guarantee you they’ve only ported over about half of the Control Panel’s features. The common stuff, sure. The rest…

I’d argue part of this is true because of minimum wage and wealth disparity.

When you have a healthy disposable income, it feels more reasonable to give out some donations for good online content. But that’s not the case for a lot of people now.

It sucks because monetization models definitely influence the types of content we get. For instance, freemium video game models with cash shops are better for our current wealth gap, while a large set of consumers having extra cash through the year is much better for expensive, well-produced singleplayer games.

Part of me once wished for a utopia of only getting ads for things I have a reasonable interest in - working to inform me about options to spend my money on a service or product I need. It was based on Steam, which shows ads for games I like. No repeating ads to harass a particular message, no convincing people they need Brand X.

I don’t imagine we’ll ever get close to that.

It’d be fun if the EU started policing any use of the phrase “We are required to show this dialog”.

They’re not. They choose to show that dialog so that they can try to apply commercial tracking cookies. Anything for website function is already covered by EU laws.

thanks, your objective experiences are wrong too

Aren’t most seasonal content updates in other games free? The way I tend to see it is, they put out new gameplay content to attract attention, then entice people to pick up related cosmetic/extra items during the event.

Fun fact, the Steam Deck discord has subcommunities designed for indie developers to group with Deck-owning volunteers; since not all indie devs own a Steam Deck, they can take a look at preview builds and inform the devs about any particular issues.

Linux’s main selling point has become “It’s not Windows”. That was a boring line five years ago, but Microsoft has eagerly been trying to invent new ways to make their flagship OS worse and worse.

The obvious reaction to anything typically free getting paywalled is vehemence, of course - and that’s my thought given Reddit’s track record.

Still, if it weren’t them, I’m thinking about how this could be done in a classy way. Most people are not willing to engage on topics like politics because there will always be an unending army of trolls arguing in bad faith about them or needlessly engaging in flame wars. If there’s some form of friction behind entry, that CAN at least get people to think twice about insulting each other.

Price tags as a form of friction are problematic, of course, in that they “only allow access to the rich”. As such, I’d also be open to other ways of making it “difficult” to enter in a way that people could still do with no money. The silliest idea that comes to mind is that people must mail a physical postcard requesting entry (which could then loop back to price tags, since that uses a stamp)

Not quite on topic, but: This past week developers at my company have been slammed by the Chrome DevTools debugger freezing when you hit a breakpoint. There’s been no tracked bug and no timeline from Chrome on a fix. It’s been a little bit of a lesson in having just one browser engine.

Every time one of these articles is posted, I predict a very very short investigation into the technical workings of the project will find that the same could’ve been done with a much simpler central database. Or, that they were actually using a database at the backend and wasting their whole crypto approach.

I mean…I’ll go one further. I know there have been many historical “aged like milk” quotes, like about how much RAM computers need, but I’m still saying this in confidence: I don’t think that cryptocurrency or blockchains will ever have a useful purpose. Their design is built to solve societal problems, but introduces worse problems in implementing them. This goes well beyond just taking too much electricity.

Never trust your credentials to yourself, you can be bought out by beer, poor decisions, and tripping over the cables connected to your home server you cobbled together.

The dog whistle of “maybe it’s not for you” is pointless, since all we’re doing here is talking about preferences and opinions of design. Whether something is “complicated” or “poor design” is very subjective across many fields. It’s easy to laugh at someone pushing at a “Pull” door, but less so if there’s a pushbar there and they don’t speak English.

I could easily be facetious and suggest “Maybe Windows is just too complicated for you” but that’s similarly needlessly talking down to people’s intelligence. The topic only came up because it’s frustrating there’s no operating system out there that:

• Has wide support
• Doesn’t nag you with AI features
• Designs its filesystem paths in a way that is consistent, informative, and readable between devices, regardless of user preference or configuration.

For now, issues like the last one are what keep me on Windows, and I’m not even claiming they’re easy to solve.

No, this is on 10. Perhaps they’ve made it harder there.

While it might be suitable for server environments with 400+drives, all home setups will have fewer volumes than there are alphabet letters, so it’s a suitable setup there.

Someone else identified how you can run an extra command to identify actual location of a file, and while that’s useful, it’s an extra step that’s unnecessary when the design of the location string itself also identifies that. Unless you can tell me which drive /home/supra-app/preconfiguration/media is on - without running something different. (Vs windows: C:/Users/Someone/AppData/supra-app/preconfiguration/media) That’s what the design of WWW URLs was for - you never have to ask which domain a website is on, and it can even inform you about whether a site is trustworthy.

I don’t think you’re helping your case by showing there’s no drive location convention at all. A friend plugs a USB device in your computer while you’re busy in the kitchen. He’s fine if he just uses a UI autopopup, but if he needs the full path, he has to ask you where you’ve set up auto-mounting, if you have at all.