No, in a lot of ways the open Android roms keep getting better, despite every possible obstacle being thrown in their way. It’s easy to make a mature platform sound like it has “stalled”, when you’re comparing it to alternatives that are still so unusably bad that they have nowhere to go but up.

Do what you want, but get real. If you care more about making your ideals happen, maybe stop debating internet randos so feverishly, and start making pull requests.

Nothing that has or will happen can stop the parts of Android that are already open from remaining open. Yes there will be fewer choices. Yes this means alternative ROM makers will have no choice but to shoulder more of the development burden themselves. And yes this means there’s going to be significantly fewer open Android devices and new manufacturers will have to make the intentional effort to make and sell new devices that are free by design - a few of which already exist.

But no matter how many obstacles open Android has, the thing you’re ignoring is that it’s still in a far better place than mobile Linux. For a start, any device that respects rights enough to be Linux compatible will automatically be compatible with free and degoogled versions of Android as well.

What these growing problems are is a galvanizing call. Samsung, Xiaomi, and OnePlus, and Google were never our friends. Whatever their imperfections, at least Pine64, Purism, BQ, Planet Computers, Murena, Fairphone, F(x)tec, Volla, and SHIFT have sold hardware that was rights respecting by design. We need more companies or other organizations to do that, and we need to choose to buy and promote more devices like that.

And as that happens more, open Android and Linux are going to benefit equally, but there’s no getting around the fact that for now and the forseeable future, the open Android variants are still far more mature, far more feature-complete, way closer to the kind of user experience the vast majority of people expect, and far more established.

And again, probably the biggest missing thing we need there is an app marketplace that competes more directly with Google Play, that gives more devs good incentives to want to switch away from Play.

You might have better luck looking at the distros themselves. They’re not exactly great on any device yet, but there are cases where mobile Linux distros work at least equally or a little better on select Android phones than they do on dedicated Linux phones.

I get where this argument is coming from, but I don’t think there are meaningful differences in the success of gpl or other copyleft licenses, vs permissive ones (except maybe cases where someone was willing and able to enforce the gpl in court). Companies are no less capable of doing EEE with copyleft. There are also plenty of permissively licensed software projects that have gained a lot of popularity, just like some gpl ones have.

The difference in traction between Linux and BSD probably has more to do with the same kinds of forces that allowed Android to succeed and then crowd Windows phones out of the market.

While I support the continued progress of real Linux phones, have a Pinephone, and even wasted all of yesterday trying to make a working build of Armbian for retro handheld I have; I think it’s more practical to focus on open Android distributions, getting more phones out that can support multi os’s and buying those, and growing a robust app market system that can compete with Google Play.

F-Droid is almost there, but being open-source doesn’t mean something has to be free of charge. F-Droid should be extended, or possibly an additional app manager be established, that still promotes software freedom and privacy, but allows for devs to charge for their apps as well.

Part of an overall concerning trend, but as someone who decided to stop buying consoles years ago: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I ran Trisquel for a little while several years ago. It was an interesting exercise but ultimately limitations pop up. I’d say it’s useful as a motivator to try to choose hardware that is more liberated.

Okay, so more World Economic Forum, less Electronic Frontier Foundation?

Sounds like we need more EFF’s of video games then.

My question is, what is this group as an entity, and why does their opinion matter? Are they an ngo-style advocacy group, or an actual governing body of some kind?

The thing I don’t get about these self-host apps is why so many of them exist when the thing they do would be better to implement as a run of the mill offline program.

I just want to auto-import recipes from websites into a cookbook app without any fuss. We do not need to bring a server into this equation!

Yeah, the way to make it happen is adding it to my wishlist and waiting for the price to drop to at least $40.

Joke’s on Nintendo, they already lost me as a customer back in the 3DS days, and I do not own a Switch for them to brick. 🖕

But if any Switch games look interesting enough to play, I’ll be happy to emulate them on my Steam Deck or PC. 🙃

That was somebody else’s point. I just chimed in with my own take. :D

On my laptop I switched from Debian to Fedora and that had a distinct impact on gaming performance, though I think it had more to do with how I had it set up previously. For instance I used full disk encryption for Debian, but skipped that on Fedora, because it does seem to impact games noticeably.

But it also might be because Fedora is more bleeding edge, so the OS itself might actually play a role here.

On my desktop I’ve been running Bazzite and that’s been pretty great so far.

The tariff situation makes it a bad idea to release or even announce new hardware right now. What they should do is finish Steam OS so they can officially release it for all platforms.

I prefer the symmetrical sticks, calling it outdated is just cult of inevitable progress vibes. Also the touchpad is hardly a gimmick when we’re talking about PC as a gaming platform. If anything a touchpad should become standard on all controllers.

My biggest complaints with the dualsense controller is that the shape of it starts to feel uncomfortable after long game sessions, the ds4 was better. Also the dpad sucks.

We all, all of me. I don’t have to care about what others are buying, because Steam and Linux is an amazing gaming experience and they’re the ones missing out. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Can they stop? I’m tired of having to relearn how to use the same dumb system every time they come out with a new version. Even more obnoxious is how they keep moving further in a gesture direction. Stop taking away my damn buttons!

I am looking forward to playing the Remaster. It sounds like they’ve fixed pretty much everything I didn’t like about the original Oblivion - like the awful level up system. Hopefully they rebalanced the “difficulty” in a good way too. Last time I played Oblivion I remember higher difficulties being boring because it mostly meant even the weakest enemies would take a billion hits to kill.

Skyblivion will be fun to play too.

Sacrilege.