I don’t know how I got here exactly but I was reading about Aaron Swartz and it dawned on me that life is limited and my thoughts will likely be lost forever unless I write them down. If I don’t write it down, it also allows me to repress being wrong in the past to embellish the past. I don’t want to be able to do that.
Premise
To be clearer about why I don’t want to be left unnacountable, I think that being imperfect is a very key part of being human. I want to show that. I want you, the reader, to remember me as human.
Make me learn. Remember me. Learn from me.
I think a lot of it will probably be benine but I think this is a good exercise to reflect back on thoughts and ideas. I’d encourage you to do the same.
Anyways, enough preaching and let’s get to the subjects. I may expand more on these thoughts at a later time.
Steam Deck
Today, the Steam Deck was announced. I have some thoughts about it.
First, I think that this does confirm that Valve was not simply working out of their heart but that they had a plan all along for their recent investments. I think I was naive to not see that coming. I can feel happy knowing that all of the work is still Free Software (proton, pressure-vessel, steam-runtime, gamescope and others) so I don’t really see this as a betrayal.
I do find it strange and disappointing that they’ve decided to solder certain components if the rumours are true. (I couldn’t find a source on that information)
I didn’t expect for Valve to use Arch as a base distribution. They seemed to like using Debian for pressure-vessel and SteamOS previously. I don’t believe this is the wisest decision atleast if they keep using the pacman package manager as that could lead to partial updates rather than safe atomic updates. They could probably wrap pacman or do something else to render it safe. We’ll see when it comes time.
They’ve also chosen KDE instead of GNOME this time around. I believe they’ve worked on Kwin at some point this year so I guess this makes sense. However, from what people have told me, the amount of options in KDE such as the widgets can result in crashes or worse. My takeaway from that knowledge is third-party software continues to be a problem when it comes to stability. GNOME has similar problems with GNOME extensions. It’s something being looked into but it’s not personally something I use anymore.
It’ll be interesting to see how Valve provides support when things go wrong.
The morality of corporations in the Free Software movement
Something that came up is that Valve doesn’t provide funding or help when it comes to Arch packaging.
This was mentioned by Morten Linderud, a Arch Linux package maintainer and member of the Arch Linux security team :
I mean, using Arch Linux is cool and all for this.
But it’s still weird griping about the fact that it’s work based around my free time while the profit is lining up Gabe Newells pockets.
But yas, let’s go idealism and dugnadsånd! (source)
I talked about this with someone privately but really, when does a corporation do sufficient good as to put them in a position to use Free Software projects for profit? Is it sponsoring the project? Should the sponsoring being linear with the profit they make? Is it providing developer? Is it publishing Free software code? I don’t know.
For me, these are moral greys and there’s really no perfect answer. I do hope that Valve gives something to the Arch Linux community though.
When you start looking at how corporations act with Free Software projects, there’s nothing really perfect. I think the closest things are probably Red Hat and SUSE. They sponsor projects, they contribute with developer time upstream. Both are mostly focused on the server space unfornately as the Linux Desktop has proven to not be a great source of revenue. Red Hat’s been doing more work in the Linux Desktop space because of an automobile project so that’s exciting.
Growtopia ADventure & some thoughts about social gaming
I learned about this new update yesterday, I believe. The update adds advertising in the background of worlds. I think that’s pretty awful. I think that this is the nail in the coffin for any hope of the game being like I remembered it when I was younger.
Since Seth Robinson and Mike Hommel sold the game to Ubisoft back in 2017, it seems Ubisoft has wanted to increase further and further how much money they could get from the game. It makes me sad. I hope to write something detailed about what I consider to be the downfall of the game.
Conclusion
That was it for today. At least, for things that mattered to me and that I can remember at 4AM (with some corrections from future me). I hope this was interesting in some fashion.