It doesn't even just have to be about money, Valve is one of the only major tech companies I can think of that seems to actually care about customer feedback. They don't acquiesce to every request and complaint, it's unrealistic to expect any company to do that, but just in general, Valve genuinely seems to listen more on the whole.
Too many tech companies have convinced themselves that the silent majority's silence equals approval, and therefore the "vocal minority" of complaints need never be taken seriously. But what they don't appreciate is the most vocal criticisms tend to come from enthusiasts, and when you cater to the average users only, you are slowly making your product less remarkable.
Steamdeck feels like a product made for that "vocal minority". It addresses so many concerns that other tech companies would hand wave away because "most people aren't complaining".
No more forced junk and changes I have to undo? My computer can stay the exact way I like it for a long period of time without Microsoft fucking it up? Sounds like a dream.
The whole issue revolves around the fact Google is presuming a device is compromised or being used for illicit shit simply because root access is possible. If they put in effort to detect/prevent the actual problems they're concerned about, this wouldn't be as big a deal. This broad punishment for simply having root access is lazy and ridiculous.
It's like if Windows apps just stopped working if they detected a local admin account. It's patently absurd to assume the ability to access anything means the device is inherently "unsafe".
When you root, you're creating more flags for apps to detect, so you have to put in more effort to hide them all. That means a greater likelihood of something being detected if you missed it. It's a trade off. You do have to learn a bit about what you're doing and do some trial and error.
But the greater point is, if banking apps and wallet are important to you on that specific phone, you can either root and put in the effort to make it work, root and just do all that stuff from a browser, or not root at all.
Yeah, it's annoying, but it isn't the fault of Magisk or the rooting community, it's Google and your banks fault for actively punishing you for using your own device the way you like.
Personally, I have two phones now. My main one is rooted, and if I need an app that breaks on root, I pull out the "clean" one (my old phone after factory reset). Use a hotspot if mobile.
The human brain is powered by calories. Food is a renewable energy source.
But we decided they weren't efficient enough and now we want to replace them with LLMs, powered by orders of magnitude more electricity than the workstations the humans would use.
And no one stopped to think "Hey maybe adding significantly more power usage isn't the best idea right now."
Oh yeah, if there was ever any reason to take their "advertising helps keep YouTube free" shit and tell them to blow it out their ass, it's the sheer amount of hateful garbage that they let those ads run on.
Just think of all the right wing bullshit and "anti-woke" content creators there are nowadays popping out bullshit. Look at all the YouTubers that have just gone full mask off because they found it's actually profitable.
Go search for X-Men, and look how many videos have come out in the last week that are nothing but commentary on the news about the non-binary character. Appreciate that that level of content is being produced with every headline. Think about the money being made there, by both youtube, and those content creators.
This is a hate machine that YouTube is directly funding. And until they stop that, they can take their whining about ad blockers and fuck right off.
Careful. There are quite a few terms of service that you've agreed to over the years that if certain aspects of them were enforced, you wouldn't think they were very reasonable.
I honestly don't know why there are so many people around here willing to back apple on this kind of shit. Who cares if they had the right to do it? The inherent problem here is that they had that right, when they really shouldn't.
Regardless of the irony, someone needed to start this fight with Apple, so it might as well be them.
Between the two of them, I'm not willing to "support" either, but I'm slightly more inclined to hope Epic comes out on top because they're not also in a hardware dominance position. Epic can be as shitty as it likes about certain platforms, but they at least can only affect their games. They aren't gatekeepers to a massive audience of users, and by far one of the largest gates at that. The Epic store actually has competition.
Between an abusive developer and an abusive gatekeeper, the gatekeeper is the bigger issue.
It doesn't even just have to be about money, Valve is one of the only major tech companies I can think of that seems to actually care about customer feedback. They don't acquiesce to every request and complaint, it's unrealistic to expect any company to do that, but just in general, Valve genuinely seems to listen more on the whole.
Too many tech companies have convinced themselves that the silent majority's silence equals approval, and therefore the "vocal minority" of complaints need never be taken seriously. But what they don't appreciate is the most vocal criticisms tend to come from enthusiasts, and when you cater to the average users only, you are slowly making your product less remarkable.
Steamdeck feels like a product made for that "vocal minority". It addresses so many concerns that other tech companies would hand wave away because "most people aren't complaining".