Don't Ask My Name
My point isn’t that valve is our friend (they’re not), my point is that they’re more easily able to make decisions that aren’t purely driven by short term gains. Decisions like that are usually better for the consumer. They’re still a company and companies exist to make money, but they have a lot more freedom to choose the ways in which they go about that.
The Linux investment, yes was made out of a fear of windows, but is also not something most other companies would be able to do with how long term it is. It’s not out of altruism but it’s a lot more beneficial for consumers then the short term focused investors that drive most other companies.
Capitalism. Companies go public (or already were public) and then they can no longer be happy with what they had and need to acheive infinite profit growth. That’s partially why companies like Valve, that are still luckily entirely private, can make seemingly consumer-focused decisions and not just chase infinite profits. That’s how they’ve been able to invest so heavily in Linux with such little short term gains. Valve still makes shitty decisions sometimes but it would be 10x worse if they decided to go public.
Find it hilarious how perfectly this solution solves all of the problems reddit spoke about.
Reddit not profitable enough? Not enough premium subs? Third party app users can’t view ads? Api use is too high and you’re not making money off of it? Making premium a prerequisite for third party app use hits all 4 birds with one stone lol.
I mean, why not just use PopOS? It’s not my first choice but a lot of people like it.
Fedora is the other obvious choice, perhaps even silverblue for that nice immutable ecosystem if your apps can all be obtained via flatpak.
I also really like endeavour due to how minimal it is out of the box an AUR access.
It’s fairly safe to assume that all third party reddit apps will be shutting down. The price they’ve been quoted for API access is simply too high, and I don’t think any of the devs are rich enough to keep it running out of their own pockets. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some apps try to stay up, but I highly doubt they can last long term.
Either that or they’d have to start charging each user tons of money, and/or disabling free users entirely.
In the recent AMA it was said that apps that focus on accessibility might get free access, but based on what devs are saying about having trouble getting in touch with anyone at reddit, I wouldn’t get your hopes up.