Most of us in Lemmy know the importance of privacy and owning your devices in a big tech owned world (me included) but for once I thought to make the opposite question and ask if there are products by them that you actually use and enjoy them.
Important to say, I mean products you use even though there are alternatives, not monopolies like YouTube.
Steam or anything from Valve
Agreed, but the prices on Steam are fucking ridiculous nowadays so they can occasionally put things on “sale”
I just opened it and it was trying to sell me Half Life Alyx for sixty fuckin quid
Steam.
I fuckin’ hated it and even the idea when it was new. I liked updates and being able to download my games (even though I just had dial-up at the time; it was slow, but at least I could get any game and not just what was available at the local EB). I didn’t like the idea of not having it stored off-site, though. I didn’t like the interface or having to run an extra thing. I especially didn’t like not being able to use the online gaming services I had been using for years because they shut down WON.
But now I would be lost without it.
The thing I like most about Steam is that games under Linux just work, for the most part. I don’t play AAA games online multiplayer which is, I believe, where that falls down, but other than that it really is pretty seamless
This, my dad refuses to download proton or lutris and prefers to use wine baseline, and he has been waiting for months now for his game to be playable again, meanwhile I’m over here installing games right and left and just playing them, even newly released games, it just works (most of the time)
Agreed. I hate, however, that I don’t “own” the games, I can’t play game A on computer 1 and game B on computer 2 at the same time even though I bought game A and game B.
You can with Family Sharing. It also can be done a bit easier with some games that are otherwise DRM free by just running the executable from its install directory instead of through steam. Like Kerbal Space Program.
The latter method will even sometimes allow you to play the same game on two machines over the internet. I don’t know if you can do that with Family Share.
Android. Sure the main branch is open source, but I use the Google version Ann’s don’t bother flashing a new version.
Google Maps is best-in-class IMO. Some other services come close but aren’t quite as good.
Maps is good but most of the time the algorythmically placed addresses are off. Then I moved to OpenStreetMap (Organic Maps on Android) and everything is exactly where it should be. But it relies on people adding all the things to it and some places are missing a lot of stuff, but it’s also easy to just add it yourself
I feel like it depends on where you are. I used to travel a lot for work and Google maps would be less reliable than Here maps. Kept taking me to unpaved roads that no one used or like dead-ends. It was even more useless in a lot of third world countries I went to. They are really good at navigating around traffic and their POI data is way bigger than any other mapping solution.
Honestly… I might get some pushback for this but Chromecast audio. Being able to get full home audio streaming for a fraction of the cost of a normal system with a few of those and a few old hifis. Worth it for me
They have, but you can still find them on the second hand market. I m not looking forward to the day they stop supporting them however
Where I am, your ISP always provides a free TV streaming box with your router. They’ve been Android for years now so my Chromecasts have been stuck in a drawer gathering dust
