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Let's go through your arguments then, shall we? First, you agree with some of my points, so I'll only counter where your points differ:

While Amazon does host third-party sellers, your declaration that this facilitates small business overlooks the predatory nature of the platform's ecosystem. Amazon is both a referee and player, making it a clear conflict of interest. During 2020, Amazon systematically used non-public data from third-party sellers to identify successful products and then launch competing Amazon Basics versions to undercut them. Additionally, Amazon takes advantage of algorithmic bias when promoting marketplace items prioritising products with higher profit margins for Amazon even if they are more expensive or lower quality than third-party alternatives. Often sellers that try to sell outside Amazon's ecosystem are penalised.

The existence of other competitors does not disprove the abuse of market dominance - It merely indicates the market is large enough to sustain a few giants. However Amazon is the largest of these with the greatest marketshare, and is still the one to focus attention on. Amazon has successfully driven out competition in niche markets. The book industry (for instance) is nearly monopolised by Amazon. forcing independent bookstores to close or struggle immensely.

Before Amazon there were thousands of independent online retailers. Now the market is heavily consolidated, thanks to Amazon's damaging influence. The presence of Temu and Ali Express does not negate the fact that the biggest player, Amazon, has used its logistics network and capital reserves to engage in predatory pricing (selling below cost) to crush competitors. Only to raise the prices later, once dominance is secured.

Your contention that supporting local business requires dropping globalist capitalism, i.e. some things need global scale: This is a false dichotomy. One can advocate for fair labour practices, ethical tax contributions, and consumer protection without rejecting globalisation or efficiency of scale. The issue is not globalisation itself, but the unregulated concentration of power that allows a single entity to dictate terms globally.

Your argument relies on a "straw man" fallacy, i.e. that criticising Amazon equates to wanting to abolish all global trade. The reality is that Amazon's specific business practices - data exploitation, predatory pricing, and anti-competitive behaviour - These all harm the small businesses and consumers. Amazon is a monopoly that uses its size to stifle market diversity.

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Quoting: GustyGhostThere is no The year of the Linux desktop.

There is only Your year of the Linux desktop.

And for me, that was 2014.

Mine was 2015 (PC) and 2023 (PPC - pocketcomputer). Still speaking about 2025 as year of Linux desktop - you see, I don't argue with my personal situation. ;-]

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Am I the only one who thought Solo wasn't THAT bad? But yeah, in general, movies don't seem to care about writing anymore. There aren't many still being made with a compelling plot and characters that aren't flat as cardboard. Not only Disney. From that perspective, no need to be afraid of AI. It can't possibly be worse.

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Quoting: GustyGhostThere is no The year of the Linux desktop.

There is only Your year of the Linux desktop.

And for me, that was 2014.

Good point. Mine was 2014 as well. That's when I discovered that Linux was good enough as a daily driver that I didn't need to go back to Windows.

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UGH this whole thing makes me so mad. Steam REALLY has a chance to do something awesome with the verified program and they CONTINUE to do more of this garbage which makes the entire program completely worthless.

If some random person buys a steam deck and sees that the new Forza open world driving game is "verified" they'll probably be super excited! Then they will load it up and it'll run like complete ass and get like 20 fps which is unusable in a fast paced driving game, and they'll never trust any "verified" other game ever again. 😡

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As neolith says, I'm surprised Lego Batman was Verified. It feels like it's going to run like absolutely dogwater, which only asks the question: what criteria does Valve use to classify games as Verified?

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Better late than never. Controller support and local split screen is next on my bucket list. I never thought they would be possible before, but here we are.

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LoL. I just love Valve's sense of humor and whimsy. 😆

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🤣

this is so awesome. I love it.

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well when it comes to Disney Star Wars and creativity ...that ship has sailed sadly day1, even AI has more soul.

The Mandalorian and Grogu movie is expected to flop worse than the Solo movie, that should tell everything of the state of Star Wars

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Quoting: g000hThey abuse their market dominance to drive competitors out of business, they damage small businesses. After they have killed off competition, they increase the price of their own replacement products, so the consumer loses out. [...] I urge people to move away from buying things on Amazon.

Clearly, you've already done so personally, or you might have noticed the contradictions to your talking points. I'm not trying to defend Amazon by any means, but your statement is not entirely accurate -- just the usual talking points against big business. In fact, I've noticed that fewer and fewer products actually have Amazon as a seller anymore. Most items are sold by marketplace sellers, often as "fulfilled by Amazon". Their software often promotes the marketplace item over their own (which is, admittedly, more expensive). This kind of suggests that they are in fact facilitating and benefitting small business.

As to abusing market dominance, there are loads of online shopping sites that do the exact same thing as Amazon (basically, modern mail-order) -- for example, Best Buy, Walmart, Temu, AliExpress, Etsy, even eBay could count, and many more -- so obviously Amazon is not succeeding at driving other online shopping competitors out of business.

That being said, I don't question your first two points -- or your last two points either. Those are typical of any modern mega-corporation these days. To support local, small business you would have to drop globalist capitalism and focus on local production and local retail of those products -- and be willing to pay more for them too. Some things, like computer tech and video game production, do not lend themselves well to a local economy. They need the economies of scale that globalisation provides.

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Quoting: StellaMandatory disclaimer that damage caused to your controller caused by dropping it isn't covered by warranty...

Drop it on a stiff padded surface. That's what I did! :D

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There is no The year of the Linux desktop.

There is only Your year of the Linux desktop.

And for me, that was 2014.

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Quoting: LoudTechieIt's also scary, since I want to design complex tools and not be thrown under the bus next revolution.

Haha yes, that is also very true. But I think as long things are done with best will it is very unlikely. The revolution usually starts when something goes very very wrong.

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This is like a decade late, right?

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Quoting: suchSo with all those reviews not one tested durability?

Well not by throwing it through the room, maybe crushing it with a rock?

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Originally I passed it off as being too expensive for my use case, but screw it I really want one of these now!

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Bold statement. Even pro-AI people don't claim that it has a soul... 😄

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: F.UltraPayment was never the issue though and AMD is and have been for years a HDMI licensee. There is nothing with these patches that would or could make HDMI Forum not get payed exactly what they where payed before.

I think the logic (from an artificial scarcity hoarding viewpoint) was that if they didn't keep the spec super secret, companies could just make stuff without giving them money. Which they didn't like the sound of. But, as you say, you still need to give them money (and AMD did) for the compliance tests and the sticker, and that's where the prestige is. "Proper" hardware companies will still give them money to remain "proper," and fly-by-night won't-conform-to-the-spec companies weren't going to give them money either way.

But companies making stuff without giving them money would be breaking trademark law and thus open to be sued by HDMI Forum, aka the reason that you pay for the specs is not to get access to the specs but to be allowed to sell products labelled with HDMI. And the fee for the specs are minuscule, only $10k per year (or $5k for low volume manufacturers), the real money is the per sold item royalty (up to $0.2 for high volume and flat $1 for low volume) since that times millions of devices per year adds up quite significantly.

And fly-by-night would not be affected by open drivers since they already have the specs (they are ofc widely spread in China for free). But I guess that some of the members where afraid of that and others have now countered, we simply don't know who it was since all 80+ companies have voting rights (and their votes are not made public).

Trademark law is weak compared to what the HDMI forum wields to keep others from releasing HDMI compatible stuff.
I'm talking copyright, contract law and patent.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: PlayingOnLinuxphoneThat idea exists for decades and all times it was tried ended up in banning potential serious developers. I mean, just give a look how Reddit moderators do their job. We all heard about the horror stories of people getting banned for non harmful content if it just contains a minimum amount of critics to a topic. If I can ban you in the network, you are banned everywhere, not just on my project, even if I did not ban you for AI usage, I just need to tell you used AI.

Not even speaking about situations like Github writing "co-authored by Copilot" on non LLM PRs.

The mind behind this idea is great and I would support it, but the real world situation just shows that it harms more than it actually helps. The FOSS-community needs to think about a better solution.

That's fine and all, but the horrors of moderation even before AI tended to pale in comparison to the horrors of no moderation.

For people who want to question this.
Remember that the xz-attack was build on a directed harassment campaign to get rid of the existing maintainer.

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Quoting: PlayingOnLinuxphone

Quoting: LoudTechieI don't know whether a rule of thumb from political science is that useful for market observation.

Because it is actually also a political movement. The way complex tools are designed (that also counts for software) is always highly political, because it defines what people can or cannot do with it and how much they have to rely on this specific tool. Now many people decide to change the political paradigms in favor of more freedom, even if it also means not to be able to play everything. That is an actual political decision, if people do it in knowledge of it or not.

That would not apply between two companies (like Microsoft/Apple) where the tools are political pretty similar designed.

Okay, that's a very convincing point.
I can even point to the political effects the movement started having around the 3.5% mark.
The EU utilizing it to evade American power, major influencers talking about it and special open source provisions in the DSA and DMA.

Edit:
It's also scary, since I want to design complex tools and not be thrown under the bus next revolution.

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My Vencord/Vesktop install works every time I open it now, so I might chalk that up to these little improvements over time. Good to see!

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Is that Bastila? If so, why is her lightsaber blue? If not, why isn't that Bastila?
This game better be good.

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Quoting: LoudTechieI don't know whether a rule of thumb from political science is that useful for market observation.

Because it is actually also a political movement. The way complex tools are designed (that also counts for software) is always highly political, because it defines what people can or cannot do with it and how much they have to rely on this specific tool. Now many people decide to change the political paradigms in favor of more freedom, even if it also means not to be able to play everything. That is an actual political decision, if people do it in knowledge of it or not.

That would not apply between two companies (like Microsoft/Apple) where the tools are political pretty similar designed.

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Quoting: StellaI've seen how the leaked build of Forza Horizon 6 runs on the Deck and it doesn't even manage to hold 30 while being extremely CPU bound. That is not Verified Material.

I don't think Lego Batman is going to run well either given the minimum recommended specs list 16GB RAM, upscaling and framgen for lowest detail @1080p/30FPS...
Optimization really is a lost art.

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Totally recommend it, bought it the same day it came out and its so much fun. It supports family sharing too so my two sons have been enjoying it. It was 10% off too if you owned a few other indie games in their bundles, but its under $10 normally.

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Quoting: LupertEverett

Quoting: Arehandoro

We are investing in KDE because it is one of the two major desktop environments used across Linux and plays a key role in how millions of people experience open technology

Maybe then support both?

Anyway, this is great news for KDE, happy for them!

They have done so for GNOME already though?

https://www.sovereign.tech/tech/gnome

Ah, amazing! :)

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That is completely awesome.

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Quoting: PlayingOnLinuxphoneFor some people year of Linux desktop is when it reaches 5%, for others 10% or 20% or when Windows has less market share. But all these numbers do not care. The science call a movement to become successfully, when they have around 3% ([3.5% to be exact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule)), which we reached last year. And everything proves it. It became a public topic, more and more companies recognize Linux (as Discord) and jump on the hype train to benefit from it. Sorry to say, but the joke is over and everyone still not seeing it is just showing a random opinion without any facts why 10% or 20% is so special other than "is a great number to talk about".

It is kinda funny to see Discord jumping on the hype train, because the philosophy of Linux is everything against what Discord stands for. Privacy, Freedom, Free Knowledge - everything hurt very hard by Discord. I hope they earn the Big Brother Award 2026 to get a standpoint back from the Linux community.

I don't know whether a rule of thumb from political science is that useful for market observation.
Also 5% is still relevant according to this rule according to Lichbach as stated in your wikipedia article.
It's where the Free-rider effect counters potential counter movements.

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Steam Controller = Scream Controller

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