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^ Welcome! So glad you are here and thank you for that info!

That's a good explanation, and yeah I guess I have very little experience doing anything with any controller configs, so I am just unaware of the steam issues. I know now though. I think the only custom controller config I ever did was with Dave the Diver on the deck to remove the QTE's.

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Quoting: voytrekkAre there any changes for English only clients? This has been used in the past to avoid bias from Chinese Steam clients.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/#engsplitanchor

8.29% for Linux on English only.

pretty wild.

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Quoting: eggrole

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: eggroleI DO blame over consumption.

Sure. Why blame the system when you can blame the ones with no power. You're blaming the addicts, not the pushers. You're blaming the players, not the ones writing and enforcing the rules.

Quoting: eggroleIf you're interested check out Propganda by Bernays for a really easy read and a good look at how this works.

As long as you keep in mind that it's not an objective, much less a critical look. It's written by one of America's leading advocates of propaganda.

The first point is a perspective. You say the consumer has no power while I say they have 99% of the power. If people stop buying, the corpos go broke. If corpos stop selling... the people don't get trinkets?

Unless you are wealthier than most of your peers, you spend most of your income on basic expenses and necessities from retailers you can afford, and maybe spend a relatively tiny amount on a "trinket" only rarely. Not the other way around. You can and should vote with your wallet (I sure do, all the time), but your impact is limited. Actual voting is more effective.

Quoting: eggroleOn the second point, of course it advocates for propaganda.

I simply brought some much needed context. You say "of course", but there's no reason to expect this to be obvious to people on a Linux gaming site. What you wrote, "a really easy read and a good look", comes off as a positive recommendation. The caveat is worth pointing out.

Quoting: eggroleI argue that we don't have capitalism today in the USA (or the west in general) and we have a system much closer to socialism.

No, the USA is undeniably capitalist by any real measure. Your economic system is fundamentally based on private ownership. And more to the point, virtually all of the "means of production" are privately owned. Even most of the ones fully paid for by your taxes. There are regulations, but there's also regulatory capture. Your government sets some limits to the ways a business can harm the people or the environment, but I'd argue not nearly enough, and less than it used to.

No country in the so-called western world is truly socialist, either side of the big pond. But this is one of the subjects where American scholars and analysts tend to disagree with the rest of the world to some extent, simply because your political spectrum is so skewed to the right, especially around economic policy.

Quoting: eggroleAll that said, I feel like we are nearing a period when the "free market" (lol) is going to seize up.

That's the vicious cycle of modern global economics. From one crisis to the next. As someone born to the tail end of Gen X, I've been through a few already. And it's not market regulation that perpetuates this wheel of misery.

Quoting: eggroleP.S. I really enjoyed this exchange. I like seeing rational opinions that differ from my own without all the name calling and echo chambering I see elsewhere. Cheers!

I can't say I've ever actually enjoyed debating politics and/or economics, but you're right; this is a much better forum for civil discussion than most. One of the reasons GOL gets a small amount of cash from me every month.

See? I'm voting with my wallet! 😁

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^ also tie that directly into how the current US republican gov wants to utterly destroy all trans people. It makes me want to vomit.

If a young person interested in transitioning were allowed to use a computer to access a website that might help them learn about that process in a healthy way, then how else could the republicans destroy their entire life starting right then and there unless they had lockdown access and tracking on everything all the time! WONT SOMEBODY THINK OF THE RICH OLD STRAIGHT WHITE CHRISTIAN MALES IN THE GOP. HORRORS.

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This issue is about Internet Censorship.

The mechanisms are being laid down to track and eliminate anyone who criticises a unpopular nation state. And to eliminate people's ability to share "upsetting footage" of things happening in the world.

This is also a war on the younger generation to raise them "jacked-in" to sharing everythign with "The Cloud" stored at your local AI Data Center and to fix Microsoft, pentagon contractor, loosing their grip on customers as their popularity has declined in the last decade.

Notice how various states across the globe are moving on this in lockstep.

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Quoting: Chrisznixwhat's stopping the urge to buy multiple guitars?

Fair point. I have a few that are entirely different. i.e. an 12-string electro-acoustic, bass, fretless bass. I suppose there would be some difference in character between some strat pickup sounds and humbuckers but, as far as recording goes, the biggest difference is EQ. Ignoring the speakers and mics + mic placements because that's all virtualized.

So, I guess my point is the thing stopping the urge is realizing that having multiple instruments is mostly for convience and aesthetics. Thus unnecessary. It's a bigger boast saying you got 95% of the way to another instrument/pup config and in the final mix, those differences were lost.

And while I really enjoy (re-)learning this skill, I don't have the time or desire to do all the things you do in this game. They're very different things, this game isn't even about playing music and more about the life of a musician.

fair enough. For me, it's more of a matter of time to get some of these things done IRL. I've done plenty in the past already. I also don't necessarily want some of the presumed endgoals -- signing to a big label and being frontloaded with very large sums of money.

So, as much as I enjoy playing (video) games, I have to ensure to keep a balance between those and everything else I would like to get done. Games can very easily become a huge time sink and distraction beyond being a way to relax and hone some B055 5ki11z.

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Holy mackerel! Support for Star Wars: Pit Droids!

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Lots of alarmed comments in here. I agree that it's a slippery slope, but in practice this seems like a good idea to ask OSes to provide an API for this, especially for age brackets (prevents tracking if any user worth tracking is "over 18" -- this may make for a neat tracker blocker if you just need to input a lower age).

Now, the title make it sound like the "verification" is privacy invasive, but if it's just a mechanism to store the age in account data, provided at account creation time, there are many ways to implement this: new field in /etc/passwd, or new config file. Provide /proc/is_user_over18 or some D-Bus API provided by the DE. Could be a new "portal".

I don't see any "official / secure verification service" being enforced, so if it's just another picker besides "time zone" or "keyboard layout", fine by me. If they start mandating something else though... Slippery slope, as I said (though we could use key-signing parties for that).

This could make it trivial for parents to setup a very basic parental control system, and could avoid all these popups about "are you 18+" on Steam and other websites.

Thank you Liam for your accurate reporting, though the headline is still a bit click baity. I would say "require OSes to provide|share your age".

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This is punishing businesses / OSes with bullshit work and potential fines. The only way this law works is if someone actually checks you put in the right info (people lie; shocker right???) and fines you / throws you in jail and it can't get anymore 1984 than that.

This really smells like the old DRM days with CDs and export restrictions on encryption. Honestly, I'd just switch to a distro that has a "non-US" version download and get on my with my day. Fuck California and any politician who uses "think of the children" for this sort of invasive bullshit.

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Brotato has been where most of my time is spent.

My son is deep into Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered.

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There is the danger that this will stop the possibility of disabling secure boot. I'm not happy about that.

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played a round of Lexispell (fun, but lacking depth and variety in demo form), Scope Creep to the demo's end (simple incremental game with a good theme IMO), and EvoCreo 2 until 3 evolutions and completion of the available quests (twist on classic pokemon games with a slightly more involved energy/ability system). I'll have to check out some of these other popular demos.

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It's funny that almost every article on this has focused on it including Linux but it's clearly aimed at Windows and MacOS. The bill doesn't actually define what an "operating system" actually means. It specifies that this applies to "account holders" but what does that actually mean? It's fairly obvious what it means in desktop environments, but TTYs? Is root an account holder? How old is root, the number of days since you installed your distro?

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Quoting: Jarmer[…] I may or may not have to look up if there's a way to hack or mod these into new chars without ever getting them to begin with!

Why the hassle? Didn’t you say you played through the game 4 or 5 times already?
If you have the Forgotten Gods expansion it is a matter of buying the merit from the NPC in the Conclave of the Three and throwing it into your stash. No internet required.
SSF means you delete your savefile (or move it to a different directory) every time before you create a new character, it has nothing to do with multiplayer.

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Quoting: Jarmerjust curious: what was the scam?

It was me being silly on a secondhand platform (kleinanzeigen in germany), transferring funds via paypal family&friends. I've had just good experience with these in the past, buying lots of things with this method. Well, one should not do that anymore...

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As someone who lives in the US, this is one of those issues that would be bipartisan. Make no mistake, I expect legislation like this to pop up in "red states" like Texas, Florida or Tennessee; if they haven't already.

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Quoting: JarmerI'm not a huge controller user (only on deck) so I'm wondering: isn't this just recreating the steam community layouts feature? Why not just utilize that?

Author of SteamInputDB here

Well, the community features of Steam are not really that great - And have been not that great for ~10 years...
The filter and sorting options especially.

Additionally, it's not really that obvious to some people when it comes to sharing specific configs on third party platforms like Reddit / Discord, etc.

The website is at the current stage what I would consider the absolute bare minimum viable product.
Just imagine what it could be in a few months from now with proper and more direct SteamClient integration and community features Steam lacks

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Quoting: pb

Quoting: doragasuAnd what about my smart light bulb? Will it have to verify my age to turn on?

Your light bulb will stream the picture to the central server where AI will evaluate your age. If you're <18, The light will automatically turn off at 22:00 so you get a proper rest before school.

Also, it will have the wrong time zone, and thus turn off the lights between 15:00 and 03:00

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#ExcludeCalifornia in the EULAs

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Since the Chinese are probably using pirated versions of Windows, what's stopping them from using something Kylin? I'm guessing it is that darn anti-cheat not working on Linux. Or the Chinese don't care.

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I am above 18, so I will tell: I have 120 years - no matter how old I am. Does telling your age should not be prohibited? Why Google, MS and other should known, how old you are?

Quoting: Eocene84As someone who doesn't have kids (thank God) and never will, I'm really tired of being punished because other people can't or won't parent their children, which makes the government feel the need to step in. Hopefully the state I live in, Colorado, doesn't do something like this.

I always told: add special tag to http, so it will inform material is for adult. Parents will install special browser on children PC, which will cut every material marked with that tag. No nonsense law!

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Are there any changes for English only clients? This has been used in the past to avoid bias from Chinese Steam clients.

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Is it just me or does anytime you hear "age bracket" you think about advertising (and/or taxes)? I really want this bill to go away. It sets a bad precedent, or maybe a gateway for worse. Perhaps it's intended to be a "good enough" solution to a pretend problem so that we don't get an even worse solution, but I agree that it's a slippery slope.

If I had to compromise, I might annoyingly settle for a checkbox for being under/over the age of majority. Any more than that binary option is giving away data that doesn't need to be given away. Does age bracket info fall under any US data privacy laws, like HIPAA? Will every single website that requests your age bracket be required to follow HIPAA data security requirements?

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^ LOL I always do the earliest date possibly in the picker. So I was often born on January 1st, 1901. I've seen some stuff man.

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I think that we will discover there are a lot of users born on 1/1/2008 out there. 🤔😁

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I'd love to see actual counts in addition to the percentages, since a drop in percentage doesn't necessarily mean an actual drop in users. But I don't see such detailed info on Steam's survey results page, so I don't expect that's possible to report on here.

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Quoting: EWG

Quoting: Chrisznix

Quoting: EWGI don't understand games like this. Instead of virtually pretending to do things. I could actually pick up an instrument, book shows, and all the rest. lol

That´s cool, you probably should then. :)
For me, i never stepped above hobby levels and went down the Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS) path of instruments and synthesizers. I know some folks that went that route, and quite well actually, but man is that a tough life. So... i'd rather play Legends of Rock. :)

The [Mod: Dwarf](https://mod.audio/dwarf) solves GAS. It's fully libre and does everything from effects, utilites, amp+cab sim, to loops, metronome, and other stuff. Forget the AxeFX or huge pedalboards that cost in the thousands. lol

That sounds like more gear though (just kidding). It also only solves part of the problem, what's stopping the urge to buy multiple guitars? I have a Stratocaster and a Spanish guitar, but I should also get an electric guitar with humbucker pickups and an acoustic guitar with steel strings.

I'm a 30 something with young kids who has just picked up the guitar again after dropping it when I went to university. And while I really enjoy (re-)learning this skill, I don't have the time or desire to do all the things you do in this game. They're very different things, this game isn't even about playing music and more about the life of a musician.

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Quoting: Eocene84As someone who doesn't have kids (thank God) and never will, I'm really tired of being punished because other people can't or won't parent their children, which makes the government feel the need to step in. Hopefully the state I live in, Colorado, doesn't do something like this.

This has nothing to do with parents properly parenting their kids or not. This is all about control and consolidation of power. Taking the power away from the individual and putting that power into the hands of the gov to tell you what you can and can't do. This is just one tiny aspect of the overall goal. The gov doesn't give two shits about parenting.

so instead of you going about your day doing whatever you want with your computers and websites, now you have to check in with the gov and ask them if it's okay if you go about your day doing whatever you were doing. Then they can tell you yes or no. They have the power now, and you have lost your freedom. Yay Murica.

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The last diagram in your steam tracker page "Linux market share on Steam, another way to look at it" is also interesting.

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Quoting: Eocene84As someone who doesn't have kids (thank God) and never will, I'm really tired of being punished because other people can't or won't parent their children, which makes the government feel the need to step in. Hopefully the state I live in, Colorado, doesn't do something like this.

It's sadly not about protecting children.

It is simply a lazy and easy excuse because any criticism of the law will open you up to be marked as "dangerous to children" and thus socially destroy you. It has been used for all kinds of things going back hundreds of years. It is unfortunately quite effective on the species as a whole.

These laws also hurt small businesses and marginalized groups harder than large businesses and privileged groups, so it is unfortunately very apropos in the current political climate.

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