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I think it's one of those things where people only care about a small percentage of the features, but which small percentage varies.

For example, I used the example of remote play together, which is very neat and a lot of people love it, but I personally don't use it.

On the other hand, I make extensive use of Steam's gifting feature, including its ability to handle multiple gifts to multiple people in a single transaction, and to schedule exactly when those gifts will land. And this is something that the other major stores don't seem to support at all, a big advantage for Steam for me, but I'm sure there's many people who don't care at all about gifting.

Yeah, that's how it usually works.

It used to be that you could get gift keys/links that worked just like any steam key you can buy outside Steam and you could gift those to people in whatever manner and on whatever schedule you wanted. I liked that a lot more than a gifting feature built into the store no matter how well designed it is.

You can still get Steam keys, I usually buy them from Loaded (formerly CDKeys.com).

Microsoft is focused on AI and enterprise sales. I don't think they're institutionally capable of making a good end-user experience. You might just as well ask why SAP makes bad UIs - it's because the executives just don't really care.

Azure is laughably bad. I'm genuinely at a loss to name a good recent Microsoft product.

I still love developing for the .NET Framework using C#. However, the number of reasons to keep using anything made by Microsoft continues to dwindle with each passing year.

As you already said, Azure is awful and only in second place behind AWS because of how much worse Google Cloud Platform is. Windows is back to sucking again, this time so hard that I'm seriously considering learning Linux and/or switching to macOS on my home system, & playing games on SteamOS instead. I almost never use Microsoft Office anymore, outside of household budgeting spreadsheets that I could easily work with LibreOffice instead.

> As you already said, Azure is awful and only in second place behind AWS because of how much worse Google Cloud Platform is.

I expect Azure is in second place because Windows-only shops use it because of the Official Microsoft Active Directory integration (which might be called Entra now?).

For basic "Create a VM, attach disks and networking, and use it as a computer." tasks, it is my professional experience that Azure is the worst of the Big Three US "cloud" providers by far. Their "control plane" is flaky and unreliable, so it's something that you'll probably only notice if you create, destroy, or modify VMs a lot. [0]

If you have a support contract, Azure makes it much easier to talk to a human than GCP does, but I never encountered an issue that they were able to solve. "File a ticket, but don't expect support to be able to help because they won't understand the problem, and it will eventually go away." was the lesson I eventually learned.

[0] And the word on the street is that a huge chunk of Github's reliability problems are caused because of the move from AWS to Azure. Having used all three pretty extensively, I believe the rumors.

Still prefer to use it to AWS complexity, or "talk to a bot" GCP.

> The Steam Deck is the only device I've seen that works 100% perfectly with Airpods, for instance, including Apple devices.

Oh weird, mine have always made weird clicks and dropped audio here and there and shit like that when using them with my Deck.

They don’t do that when I use them with my Franken-PC bazzite machine. Instead, that one disconnects my BT mouse a couple times an hour and sometimes seems to stop processing BT keyboard input and “queue up” my presses instead, to be processed at random intervals over the next minute or so. Both of which are fun when playing games.

> Steam Big Picture turns my big Windows machine at home into a game console and does the same for my Mac Mini.

Well it turned mine into a 2000s linux/wine debugfest flashback when I wanted to play GTA IV: Ballad of Gay Tony... Also don't get me started on having to keep the poweroff button pushed on the xbox controller for mouse emulation for games not having controller support in the menus. It is far from the polished experience you had, but possibly I just held it wrong.

GTA IV: Ballad of Gay Tony is listed as silver on protondb, meaning 'works with tweaks', so that sounds about right. Things obviously aren't perfect. That last 10% of games is a massive pain, since every game is different (all the ones that are well behaved are in the first 90% that already work).

GTA IV even on regular old Windows is a shitshow to get working to be fair, so I'm not too surprised that it's not great on the deck

yeah like i assume this is better by now, but when gamepass was relatively new i got a free month with my laptop but just installing games would frequently fail, same with updating them. same with epic games for that matter, though not that bad. also at the time the xbox app would install everything in this readonly directory that you couldnt even access with admin rights, which ofc made modding impossible and also after reinstalling windows left me with an external harddrive where i wasnt allowed to delete a huge folder of games... fixed this by mounting it in linux.....