Pixel phone with grapheneOS has been an interesting ride. Not having push sucks but I still get notifications for SMS, signal, xmpp, and Matrix. Only one I miss is Discord.

Maps gets replaced with Organic Maps or its fork CoMaps.

I access my bank through my browser.

"If I can't have it, they can't either"

Your point was addressed in the thing they said immediately after the part you quoted

I do both. At home I do what you're describing for Linux but at work I do sysadmin work.

The stuff that winds up mattering on the Windows side tends to be a lot more social and resource based than it is hyper technical and digging in the weeds. If vendor software sucks, you debug it by yelling at the vendor to stop sucking (in the nicest way you can muster). You'll need to document expected vs actual behavior but most of them will hop to and provide a fix fairly quickly. The rest is just making sure you have correct configurations and a proper environment set up (including security and such). Easier said than done of course.

Sometimes. Most times they buy them to gut them for their patents. Fitbit and Pebble both probably had some patents that Google really wanted.

You missed 3 times in a row.

1. The 30% cut thing has been industry standard since the dawn of time. Valve goes out of its way to make exceptions to this rule down to 10% in cases of very high volume but everyone only talks about the 30 since thats all they hear about. Only an Epic Games apologist would parrot this as a talking point. Plus, developers are not getting nothing for that 30%, especially games that use Valve's Steam networking services. Unlike Microsoft and Sony who also take 30% cuts, Valve doesn't charge $10,000 per game patch to have someone review and approve it to be published.

2. The regional pricing goes both ways. There was literally a game recently users were complaining about NOT getting it because the publisher opted out or something, where the regional pricing would have made the game affordable but in USD (Valves country of origin and therefore default), it was exhorbitantly priced. And this one wasn't even Valve's fault.

3. Valve did not censor games directly on behest of the Australian nutjobs, they fought back against them pretty hard, but Valve is ultimately beholden to the payment processors (who they also pushed back on). Once Visa and MasterCard started threatening to pull services, Valve was put in a "comply or die" situation. If they didn't do as they were told they wouldn't be able to accept money with anything but Stripe or Bitcoin. They literally lost Paypal as a payment option over this fight.

I think its very dishonest of you to frame these points as enshittification. This term means the intentional degradation of a product or service for the sole motive of increasing profits. For point 1, the whole industry literally started off like that. For point 2, it was literally an attempt at equity (valve may not get the deltas correct but in some countries they're losing money on games). And for point 3, you might be able to argue it but ultimately it wasn't for profits so much as it was survival.

If you wanted to shitsling at Valve, you should have mentioned how Valve invented lootboxes in TF2 and then exacerbated the issue in CS:GO/CS2, releasing that awful plague onto the industry.

My family and I often play multiplayer games that require each person to have a system to themselves. It's a PC after all.

We sometimes play split screen games on one of our decks plugged into the TV, but overall each of us has our own and will play separately on them whenever possible.

We can also then take them with us at our own discretion, and I don't have to worry about anyone else in my family shattering mine.

This one is a stretch. But for those struggling like I did at first, the joke is a play on the phrase "diamonds are a girls best friend"

I don't. Handhelds are personal devices, and Steam Decks are cheap. Everyone gets their own.

Yep, just make sure to set the permissions so you're not sending notifications to the other phone (if it's someone else's) or allowing remote control of yours. Just enable file sharing or whatever you want, and maybe allow them to do the find my phone ring thing.

When you and your wife send pics over KDE Connect instead is a powerful moment. Still requires one phone to connect to the other over hotspot or be on the same network at home, but its slick otherwise.

This happens to me when I run games sometimes in 4k at max settings, with a 7900XTX. So far I have not found anything that prevents it, and I'm starting to suspect my power supply or my house's wiring might be the issue. It almost seems like a voltage sag.