or

No.

Intel management engine, then whatever its successor is called. Same concept. I think there was some other more specific collaboration with the regime.

Nvidia straight up contracted with palantir.

The thing is: they’re not different.

And their hardware isn’t, like; special; it’s a single board computer running the standard x86/64 architecture that ships with a lightly customized OS most users won’t change.

I’m more worried about what nvidia Intel and and are getting up to. They’ll fuck you first.

I guess valve kind of is special? They are a games company, so they don’t have big government contracts, they don’t work with palantir, and they dont work at a low enough level that they can easily install something my electrical engineer or hacker friends can’t possibly fix with a soldering iron.

Theyll fuck me, sure, yes, but the chip makers already have their pants down.

Why can’t they take back shit you ‘bought’ rather than just licensed?

Ownership is just a licensing agreement under capitalism.

I agree the problems are real, but they are not specific to valve.

Okay. I agree this is likely abd a problem. But like, is valve’s hardware locked down? How are they different from dell?

Because most people play on the 300$ dell their mom got them for school ten years ago.

And when they do, that hardware will be worthless shit, but steam still has to run of my 15 year old Debian/Fedora x86 box, and other companies are making handhelds like this now.

But it’s much easier to pirate a program than an OS, and they can’t fuck with the bios too terribly easy once the thing’s in your hands.

Yeah those cases were bad, steam deck just has Linux on it though. Arch based I think with two DE’s: KDE plasma and a modified’ ‘steam big picture’ mode.

I don’t think anything is locked, and they aren’t fucking with that in any way dell lenovo or system76 couldn’t.

The competition on…

Okay, so, it’s an OS right?

So for free linux-native stuff, there’s the default package manager that comes installed. Switch your steam deck to desktop mode. There’s a lot there, including emulators that will run on steam deck from ancient Atari shit to Nintendo switch.

But you can also run non-steam executables with proton. Heroic, lutris, etc are great tools from that. You can buy your games anywhere without rootkit DRM. Most things from itch.io or gog.com will run. Or, you know; other places. You can just pirate shit.

You can in fact uninstall the stock OS and run anything you can compile for midrange x86 hardware.

Holy crap I’d forgotten about that.

Yeah, nvidia needs to die. Nothing tied to palantir should survive.

Especially with the llm crash, this may keep the fabs running

Its some degree of good from like every direction.

Thank you for your investigative work!

Yeah.

Like, im sorry your old fav turned to shit and is shit now, but it is shit now. Let’s look for options that aren’t shit and aren’t turning to shit.windows users:

how DARE you!

UE used to be, before they started chasing the military sector super hard.

To be fair this time it’s obsidian. That is kind of their whole deal.

That and horrible game breaking bugs. If the plot is absolute fire, and also it crashes every five seconds, this is on-brand.

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