It maybe used to be more true, but these days even when someone posts a decent guide on de-bloating Windows, it can A) Miss something critical, leaving spyware telemetry running, or B) Become out of date one month later when a Windows Update manually re-enables all the things you turned off.
I would’ve appreciated it when I was on Windows, but now? I’m kind of just happy not to be constantly fighting my OS on things, even if I do get compatibility annoyances.
I mean by that logic, stop using Steam. It’s (marginally) possible for a company to get big, and not do terrible things. Just keep an eye on them and don’t become fully reliant on them.
It’s sad to say while it was the default choice for a while, it seems like a lot of people are avoiding Ubuntu now.
Gaming is awesome on CachyOS; it’s very possible much of the better capabilities there can be installed on Ubuntu, but I don’t know how hard that is. I imagine most games would perform similarly by default.
If I understand right, the usefulness of basic questions like “Hey ChatGPT, how long do I boil pasta” is offset by the vast resources needed to answer that question. We just see it as simple and convenient as it tries to invest in its “build up interest” phase and runs at a loss. If the effort to sell the product that way fails, it’s going to fund itself by harvesting data.
For anyone looking for new alternatives, I’m sure most Lemmy users can suggest more open-source pubfed options, but for anyone trying to generate a bit more presence (not that there’s much) I did find a YouTube video highlighting some “indie social media” sites, mostly focusing on nostalgia of simpler versions of the historically popular ones.
Having the whole world operate off of publically-owned shared systems is probably an ideal, but having them at least in tight competition, with easy destinations to abandon off to, is still quite a bit better.
This has been a common sentiment, enough that I’ve thought of making a video about it.
Running a desktop OS, catering to everything people need from their PC, from printing to fringe drivers to VPNs to package management, is a big task. I have long doubted that Valve is personally interested in taking on that task. They write SteamOS for the deck and machine, since their only real responsibility is playing games. People who try to install that OS for other things will see some Flatpak friction - but that’s fine, it wasn’t built for that.
I’d strongly recommend looking at some other distributions with broader group support. My recommendation is CachyOS. Bazzite has worked great for others, but as a general desktop user I sort of bounced off of it - installing some unusual apps ended up getting a lot of friction against its emulation layers. I believe both are based off the same sort of origins as SteamOS, so that may be the safest thing.