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Head Cleaner unironically sounds like something a group really would’ve called themselves.

Stuff like this is a good ad for Pixelfed.

The fact that Nintendo is trying to bring back literal license dongles with their Game-Key Card, when dongle DRM died in the '80s for games for a reason, eg. what if you lose your dongle? You can’t play your game that uses it anymore, don’t help matters.

Discs on PS4/XB1 and PS5/Series X are figurative license dongles, which is probably worse as a 50GB or 100GB disc respectively will have been wasted on DRM for a game you still have to download anyways, but Nintendo is using literal license dongles.

Phoronix seems pretty solid, although they’re primarily Linux-centric.

https://www.phoronix.com/

The ‘not leaving centralized services’ thing isn’t really helped when there’s basically no other viable alternatives, like is the case with YT. PeerTube exists, sure, but it’s a content desert, sadly.

Now, if PeerTube had more content to choose from…

Really though, Reddit, Meta, Twitter, and Discord all have viable decentralized alternatives in the form of Lemmy, Pixelfed, Mastodon (Mastodon serving as an alternative for both Facebook and Twitter), and Matrix respectively, why can’t PeerTube serve as a truly viable decentralized alternative for YT?

Even Linux is in its glow-up arc as a viable Windows alternative lately ffs, and I’m glad to have been on that bandwagon for years before that platform started gaining mainstream attention.

Google’s been attacking those lately, mostly to success (Piped and Invidious are effectively dead, ViewTube is also dead, and FreeTube’s a target now).

Nothing’s stopping you from nuking your Windows install and installing some Linux distro though, at least on a normal PC. Surface products tend to be more locked to Windows though. I haven’t ran Windows as a main OS in years and don’t plan on going back, and Windows has gotten so user-hostile lately that I don’t even trust it enough to dual-boot it anymore, LTSC included.

(so far LTSC has dodged most of MS’ worst atrocities but it’s only a matter of time before that version starts getting compromised in some way too, so I don’t trust Windows outside of a VM, period, anymore, at least if I virtualize it, whatever stunts it may pull are isolated to that VM and won’t affect the host generally)

Blender at least has gotten to the point where an indie flick made with it actually won some Oscars and other big awards, so that pretty much put it on the map as a viable Maya or 3DSMax alternative, so there’s that.

No it’s not, multiplayer games with anticheat that hard-locks you into Windows and productivity software with DRM that hard-locks you into Windows is still a thing, if that were to stop being a thing, then Windows’ dominance on the desktop might finally be threatened, but until then, sadly, no.

That applies for PeerTube, Matrix, Pixelfed, and Mastodon as well.

I’d argue Lemmy and other decentralized platforms are the last bastion for free speech instead of Reddit though.

Like, since Lemmy, Pixelfed, Mastodon, PeerTube, and Matrix are decentralized, that naturally shields them from censorship somewhat compared to centralized platforms where you’re ultimately at the mercy of whoever runs that platform.

I’m not and never was banned from there, however I left on my own accord after this happened, as if all their other enshittification didn’t reinforce that decision.

And my Reddit account is now gone, I nuked it.

Even for Doom3, both vanilla and BFG, and RTCW, Steam versions included, Lutris allows you to install native community ports for those pretty easily too.

The current American regime is a good reason for them to not only move to whatever the data storage equivalent of a tax haven is, but also move fully to Tor/I2P to cover their tracks against any enemy powers, assuming Trump and Musk don’t figure out how to deanonymize Tor and I2P.

One more reason to use Lemmy.

Framework’s doing a pretty good job standing out for laptops anyways, with their user-repairability focus.

Then it’ll support Rockbox. I would recommend flash-retrofitting it for long-term reliability if it hasn’t been retrofitted already, though, the spinning rust is a known weak point on older iPods.

Even on older kernels, if anything hardware like GPUs will benefit more from running newer drivers than a newer kernel, ie. AMD cards from GCN1 up to present-day RDNA3 are actively being supported by Mesa and the dev branch generally tends to have more optimizations especially for newer cards but also older ones as well, than the latest stable branch.

The EL distros - CentOS Stream, Alma, and Rocky, all have a package which allows you to install a manufacturer repo that lets you install the latest AMD drivers from, for example, and CentOS Stream 10 and Alma 10 are both on the 6.12 kernel now.

Like I said, it’s rare especially for games, it’s more common in productivity software though…

cough Adobe… cough

The current standard DRM for the games industry, Denuvo, will work in Proton.