This is it. Yes, a registration/ID system can make the tasks of a tyrannical government slightly easier, but not having one didn’t exactly stop ICE raids. On the contrary, having such a system would make it much easier for legal immigrants to prove that they are legal and it could help them against illegal deportation due to misidentification.

And in any case the problem is the tyrannical government, not the ID system.

Beware, there’s a difference between “push notifications” (which is what your links are talking about) and “notifications”, specifically with the “notification history” feature.

Push notifications are a mechanism to transport messages over google services. What that does is that the backend service of some app (e.g. the Signal server) can send a message to an app that’s currently not actively running to tell it that there’s something new happening, e.g. a new incoming message. This goes via Google services because that way, the app doesn’t need to be constantly running. Google services then wakes up the app and allow it to do something with that info, e.g. display a notification.

The alternative is that the app is constantly running, constantly actively checking for new messages and thus constantly consuming power.

This can be e2e encrypted by the app, and then Google can only see metadata.

Notifications, on the other hand are the things that show up on your phone when you swipe down from the top navigation bar. These notifications can be read in plain text by any app on your phone, including the OS. If you have Notification History enabled, they can be backed up (again in plain text) to Google’s servers. And any old app you have on your phone can silently do the same. That’s why Signal allows you to hide the text content and/or sender name for notifications.

Google backs up a history of your notifications, so if you have signal setup to show notifications, that’s on Google’s servers.

I got you beat with my HP Mini running a 32-bit Intel Atom N270 that I use to develop games for the open source physiotherapy gamification device I made for my kid when I’m on the train.

Don’t want to carry my full-size gaming laptop to work just to do some light lua coding.

And that’s 60W while charging. In idle with the screen off, low end laptops often consume as little as 2-3W. Which is not far off from a pi.

• People who don’t play games because they are too grown-up to have fun aren’t grown-up but sad.
• Catch-up mechanics even the playing field, so that people of different skill levels can have fun together.

Amazon games does it too.

Pokemon games also routinely come close.

I get what you are saying, but unless you buy a specific linux phone with some semblance of professional support (e.g. Pinephone) this won’t really get better. The best time to buy a Linux phone was a bit over 10 years ago when Canonical still actually supported Ubuntu Touch. That was pretty much the last time there was any serious effort in that regard. Since then it’s just been hobbyists doing hobby things in hobby quality.

Tbh, unless you want to suffer A LOT, the best option is to get any Android phone, install Termux and on top install any Linux distro you like (if you want easy mode, pay for Andronix which helps with installation).

Then you just run your Linux distro in a container on Android and view its virtual screen using a VNC viewer app.

That way you get a fully-working Android phone that can run most Linux apps without breaking your main phone use case. The only thing you are really lacking is low-level access because it’s running in a root-less proot container. So no hardware acceleration or other fancy hardware stuff.

I’m very open to being an early adopter of mobile Linux phones.

vs

the rest of your post

What you are trying to say is you are very open to be a late adopter of mobile Linux phones, adopting a Linux phone when it actually works.

Early adopters are those who tough out the crap. The issue with Linux phones is they’ve been stuck in early adopter land for the last 20 years.

Judging by the fact that I have never heard of the game or the company before, I guess it’s tiny and obscure, meaning it would have either been completely ignored by hackers or some hacker would completely flatten it with hacks.

Probably nothing about that has hanged by open sourcing it.

Tbh, immigration isn’t the worst “solution”.

We do have an overpopulation problem. Well, an overconsumption times overpopulation problem, really.

We could fix that by either consuming less (which we apparently, as a species, really don’t want) or by having fewer people (which we apparently really want).

So, in the end, reducing population isn’t a real problem. Even if the population shrinks by 50% each generation (~25 years, for the sake of the argument), there will still be 250mio people left even after 5 generations. The trend should probably be reversed sometime then, but until then it’s really not an issue on the species survival aspect and it would actually be really good for the planet and our long-term survival.

But until then we have mainly one problem: our economic system is based on infinite growth, which can’t work. So again there are two main solutions: either we bring in people from other countries, who benefit from a higher standard of living here while supporting our economic system, or we get rid of the real parasites and freeloaders in our societies: the ultra rich. And again, for some reason we really don’t want to get rid of the rich.

When two men love each other very much, they host a freetube instance where they upload their videos.

Beware, what you are comparing vsync off with vrr.

You have four options when it comes to screen refreshes:

• Vsync off, VRR off: you get frames as fast as possible, no latency, but also tearing
• Vsync on: the frame rate gets synchronised with the screen refresh rate. That means, sometimes the game will wait for the screen, leading to a lower frame rate (limited to the refresh rate of the screen) and slight latency, but no tearing
• VRR: the game can lower (not raise) the refresh rate. Compared to Vsync maximum refresh rate it will lower power consumption and do nothing else
• Triple buffering. Needs to be implemented by the game, not by the OS. Provides maximum frame rate and no tearing with minimal latency.

because all games on PC are free if you want them to be

If you include piracy, that’s available on the Switch too. Worst case you have to chip in €10 for a mod chip, but that’s it.

Lmao so you include all the deals for the switch with your “mario kart upgrade”, but not the steam deck?

Yeah, find me a deal to get Mario Kart for the steam deck legally.

Then you consider it’s also your laptop/main PC too…

You want to use a steam deck as a laptop? Do you really have no self respect?

That also isn’t the point I was even disputing, it’s precisely that the ownership is more expensive because PC gamers buy more games, but either way you’re wrong.

That was exactly my point. Steam Decks/PCs and consoles are used differently by different people, and in the end a Steam Deck is not cheaper than a console, even if you never pay a cent for a game (but then again, why are you buying a Steam Deck?)

But if we keep going

I get the feeling you don’t actually want to discuss or talk about the topic, you just want to win. So yeah, no point in continuing the discussion.

If it’s too much for you, then don’t pay it. It’s not like there are no alternatives.

I usually just buy games years later for a fraction of the price. Or wait until a platform becomes abandonware and I can’t buy a game in retail any more (meaning the publisher doesn’t want to take my money), and then I pirate it.

There are a couple hundred of thousands of great games, I don’t need the flashiest, newest thing.

I’m just saying that the €80 pricing isn’t that crazy, it’s just inflation adjustment. In fact, the €60 price point for full-price games has been around since at least 2005. Adjusted for inflation, that’s around €100 in today’s money.

In fact, SNES games even cost up to €80 in 1993, which would be ~€180 in today’s money, and even the cheapest titles back then (akin to our current low-budget indie titles) started from €40 (~€90 today).

So, the price is really not that bad. And, as I said, you can just wait for the sale and get it cheaper anyway. Full price is only for people who need exactly this game exactly right now.

Price of the middle version of the Steam Deck: €569

Price of the middle version of the Switch 1: €284

So we got a price difference of €285 here.

€50 for the bundled Mario Kart upgrade plus 3 other full price titles, leaves us €55 to spend on another 5 indie titles, and then you got the average total cost of ownership for a switch for just about the price of the Steam Deck with a whopping 0 games on it.

The difference becomes starker if you go for the top-spec version: €679 for the Steam Deck, vs €329 for the Switch, a whopping €350 difference. For that difference you can afford Mario Kart plus 4 full-price titles and have another €60 remaining for a few indie titles.

You are fighting windmills, capische?

You made up an argument that I never made and now you are fighting against it.

Well done, Don Quijote, the windmill is destroyed and you can go home claiming you defended the land from evil giants.

That is true, of course. But that’s a vulnerability from Nintendo’s perspective, not from a customer’s perspective. As in, if this exploit gets improved on, it might lead to people running unlicensed or pirated software on the switch, thus potentially hurting Nintendo.

It’s not something that might lead to people getting their Nintendo-accounts hacked or stolen or something like that.

On a Steam Deck, the former concept doesn’t even exist. There’s no Steam Deck vulnerability that might lead to people running non-steam software on the Steam Deck, because it’s allowed usage.

What I’m trying to say is that vulnerability is not negative for the user or indicative of bad platform security for the user.