Monopoly means it’s the only seller in the market. This isn’t true for PC gaming. You have GoG, Epic, Itch.io, Battle.net, Origin, Uplay, Rockstar smaller websites that host different kinds of games. Steam is the biggest player on PCright now, but there’s nothing about Steam that prevents any other type of competitor from getting into the market and possibly de-throning it.

It depends on the medium, but for TV shows and movies, the market is a mess. It’s all streaming services, you have to pay multiple vendors to have access to everything etc. I’ve low key stopped watching movies because the whole thing is an expensive mess. It’s no wonder people prefer piracy.

I wonder how difficult it would be for a vendor to be like Steam. Buy a movie once, add it to the library, watch it whenever. Afaik Youtube does that but I haven’t tried it yet and I’m not sure if it’s worth it.

I have Linux on my personal computer and Windows on my work laptop. Best of both worlds. Linux is currently a very nice 0 stress experience for gaming/casual stuff. With Proton, gaming on Linux is nearly as viable as on Windows.

And the EA game pass, so you can pay to own nothing.

These companies want to own all the hardware so you are forced to rent a computer. To buy a PC that does nothing by itself and requires some remote hardware to function. Amazon is already preparing a “game streaming” service, for example.

ok but what is social media? It’s basically a catch-all term for any website. Governments currently have their sights on the big websites like facebook and instagram, with the goal of annulling freedom of speech as anything you say will be tied to your ID. They target these websites because they are popular enough. If people move to other forms of communications, you can be sure the government will also label them as social media.

Once the law is in place, what stops them from manufacturing consent to present other websites as unhealthy hazards and force them to have mandatory ID as well?

Every website is fair game. Only websites that can escape this that I can think of are the self-hosted ones because they are decentralized and maybe small forums that don’t attract any attention.

Switched to Kubuntu about a week ago. 0 friction. The OS supports all the stuff I used to do on Win11. The KDE Plasma environment is eye candy. For me, it’s prettier and nicer to use than Windows. Only thing I had to configure was enabling Flatpak, but this is a personal preference.