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Comment by self_awareness | Hacker News Reader

I kind of have mixed feelings about this, because from one point of view we're fighting the corporations, but from another, Valve is a major force in pushing Linux gaming so that more gaming can be done outside of big corpo operating systems.

It seems to me that fighting with Valve is like fighting against what we would want to have.

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> fighting against what we would want to have

One giant megacorp with a benevolent dictator? Well, maybe you want that - but I do not. And we have a couple of examples of how it goes.

I guess a comparison would be: a megacorp invests in children in africa (schooling, money) so later they can hire them and make more money. Should we support this or resist?

If a false comparison in the first place but you/we already have a such megacorp! Sure, sure, benevolent dictator is judicially removed from the leadership for 30 years and no longer guides the megacorp in any meaningful way... but he does invest in kids in Africa.

You can have a whole one try to guess who is this.

And if you guess it right (I doubt you can answer wrong, lol) you would know a whole bunch of different reasons - including personal qualities of that "benevolent dictator" too.

NB honestly, if anything it's "his" OS what gave a lot of opportunities to the kids in the developing countries everywhere, not just Africa alone - just by providing the means to run the apps and games on almost anything. OLPC on the other hand provided an example how a specialized device made with the best intentions was a piece of shit.

A benevolent dictator who is already old and whose lifestyle-induced organ damage won't be fully undone by recent drug-assisted body changes. It's anyone's guess how things will go once Gabe passes the buck.

Mind you Valve has done equal amount of bad as well by inventing the whole battle pass system and thus bringing even more FOMO to games, and making unregulated gambling available to millions which is still going strong and surprisingly no one cares about it. There are some lawsuits here and there but they focus on the lootbox gacha element and not the whole gambling market running on the Steam API

Valve could shut it down any single day just by disabling trading but hey, that doesn't let you buy a 110m long superyacht (; https://www.yachtcharterfleet.com/luxury-charter-yacht-53601...

Valve isn't a saint. They are using Linux because it currently fits their goal and not because they are your ally.

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