All the employers where I am. Heck, they have some group chat “newsletters” and such set up to let us know of updates and things. Sometimes it’ll be used for informal group chats where things aren’t really binding, and reserve email for official communications.

Yeah. Basically as a way of saying that they’ve done the research, and also so you don’t go on the offensive when those “pieces of Eden” come into play.

A premium tier for WhatsApp? The app I want to get rid of but can’t because employers can’t be assed to send emails or make phone calls first?

Not using a launcher equals fewer barriers. GOG installers work out of the box with Wine. The whole point of GOG is literally that you can do all of that without restrictions like say… Being forced to use a launcher. So it’s not a big deal if Galaxy for Linux isn’t around.

I once saw someone somewhere comment that HL2 is actually a tech demo meant to show off the physics stuff. Which I wholeheartedly agree with, and even that didn’t win me over. The game doesn’t feel like a shooter meant to be enjoyed, rather it feels like Valve flexing its muscles only because they can.

Wish we could all do more of that!

I played this game twice, and tried to get to the end twice, and in both times I just WALKED AWAY. The original was actually playable and beatable in comparison.

One moment it’s a shooter, then it becomes a driving game, then it becomes one of the earliest walking sims with long stretches of nothing, then a horror game, then a tactical shooter, and it wasn’t good at any of them - it was all just cobbled together. Valve would have had a much better game if they sold just Ravenholm, the only part that actually evoked strong feelings in me.

And by this point in time I can’t help but think the funny letter G guy is just a Mary Sue to glue the game together with very little character or substance besides “man in black”.

I firmly believe the only reason this game is “beloved” is the same reason that iPhones sell just because of the logo of the company that made them. (And also because of this game every fucking company that breathes has an online DRM launcher)

Fear by Monolith and its expansions on the other hand, they were so much better despite the aiming system being unintuitive in comparison to HL the 2. Everything just clicks. I just loved Fear. But I’m sure this won’t save me from “Ubisoft target audience” allegations.

No, what you mentioned is just one of the options. They literally go over “bare metal” installs even if it’s just a skim. I always find their article funny because of that.

I saw the mastodon post about ad traction. Strange that they would redirect to a middle service like that, considering GOG itself supports affiliate links. I think you can see these sorts of links on PCGW too. Still, it’s good that they addressed it, but the ad tracker thing remains iffy.

I am under the impression that even if GOG doesn’t support them to some official capacity, that they are still cool with them, and for all intents and purposes we basically can treat them like that no problem. And needless to say, it’s a great thing that it is open source - if it were Galaxy or Steam or Epic or whatever we’d find out about this stuff way too late, get even slower turnaround and the damage would be already done. Not to mention we can fork the project if someone’s dedicated enough. Like I’d definitely appreciate a simpler option making use of Comet for one.

Does it really freak them out?

I think you might be underestimating how some people type really slowly when given a full sized QWERTY keyboard, numpad and all.

Then again the one limiting factor of phone keyboards (touch or physical) is that they’re designed for two thumbs, instead of just whatever fingers happen to be closer to the button you want. Though I’ll admit I do miss when Nokia, BlackBerry, etc, came up with unique solutions for how to get a small physical keyboard attached to a phone.

This is real iffy. Do you know when that change was made?

Fortunately the thing about GOG is I can drop those launchers anytime I want, I’m not stuck with anything unlike some others. Since Heroic relies on another open source project (I believe) called Comet it’s also not hard for an alternative to pop up.

GOG’s installers work great with Wine as do the games themselves. If you desperately need a launcher before you can even consider them, you can use Heroic Games Launcher - in fact I’d prefer if they throw their weight behind it than on Galaxy. A match made in heaven.

I guess the other good thing is GOG is not a US company, they’re based in Poland. No tax money going to the American regime and their shenanigans I never asked for.

Might be an unpopular opinion but

In the late 2010s or early 2020s, I wrote a short story in the Notes app on a Nokia C3-00. It was one of the budget offerings with a QWERTY keyboard and WiFi support, and it was pretty awesome for the time, and still is to an extent.

By that point I cycled through a few touchscreen phones beginning from tiny Samsung junkers to mid-range Chinese phones we would have called “phablets” a few years back and got used to touchscreens. I’m typing this right now on a touchscreen and it’s pretty nice, yeah autocorrect is wrong some of the time but it is solid most of the time, and I can type really fast. Typing on a phone with a small physical keyboard was eye opening in a way. It felt slow, and I had to actually put some effort into pushing the buttons to make them register. In all fairness, it could be the age of the phone making the buttons stiff.

Something else is how the labels on the buttons eventually wear out. If this was a physical keyboard I could just replace it, but a small panel of keys built into a phone? Yeah not really replaceable.

I get that all those very tall, very flat slabs of plastic and metal can get boring very quickly, but I guess because there’s not so much more left to perfect that form factor.

Should I switch from Wine Staging to stable?

I’ll raise you one and say I’d rather pirate games than use either of them. At least there’s GOG, itch, Zoom-Platform, putting aside games that never come there until a decade later.

How’d it get enshittified? Last I used it, it was essentially the same ol’ reliable one, but some things randomly break when you switch the launcher on HyperOS.

Yeah, no. EGS is a piece of shit DRM launcher, just like Valve’s own piece of shit, but it has the Epic logo. Heck, they even have free games and not even that is enough to kill the vitriol, so yeah it’s just “no steam no buy” all over again, or Steam would also be chided for many of the same things - which would be very dandy if it happened, after all, neither of them respect us enough to own our games without having to phone them home first.

I swear, the whole outrage over EGS can only be plainly and simply explained as the stupid “no steam no buy”. When a game remains exclusive to this DRM launcher made by an American corporation for 50 years, all is well in the world, but when the game becomes exclusives to that DRM launcher made by that other American corporation for a year, suddenly all hell breaks loose. They’re both the same toxin! Just blind devotion to a company that only did very pro-consumer things like make lootboxes really popular and making it hip and cool to give up ownership of your games.

For the record, the Tim should really just shut up. Or really, any American wealthy CEO for that matter, their grand standing over freeze peach isn’t worth the oxygen required to produce it instead of just… not enabling CSAM like normal platforms do?