I don’t even want to imagine what is going to be the price for it here in Brazil. After the ps4 launched for nearly $2000 I haven’t even looked at any console retail prices here again.

If every game had patented everything that they came up with, we probably wouldn’t have reached 1000 total games by now.

Some early game would probably patent “revealing more of the world as you move horizontally/verrically” and we would probably be confined to a single screen for every other game for decade.

Then some other game would patent “using an input source to move a gun’s aim/targetting on the screen” and we would never have had any fps. A “first person view” would probably be patented soon too. Leveling up? What a cool concept that I wish more than one game ever used.

At best, companies would all be paying licenses to each other for all of those mechanics - just like it works on hardware today where Samsung (for example) for a long time made a ton of money out of their main competitor’s sales. And games would probably be so expensive that a lot of them could even have their own dedicated hardware made specifically for them, without affecting the final price that much.

Modern day Nintendo would surely enjoy that. They could make gimmicky hardware for specific games and simply call it a toy. Games like Guitar Hero would probably only be playable on toy guitars (as some other game would’ve already patented translating basic inputs into something rhythm related).

In a way I could see some pretty cool games being invented for a while in this parallel reality, with the patent restrictions forcing people to think of new stuff like the hardware restrictions used to do last century - but we would never had Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Rimworld, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress and 99% of the most beloved games out there.

Even Nvidia drivers have come a long way recently. I used to always have a windows setup and used it more than Linux whenever I was off work, but this year I was finally confident enough on Linux to ditch it. I have Nvidia gpus on all my PCs, with both Intel and AMD cpus, and they are all working perfectly fine with multiple 4k screens.

So far there were only two games I was unable to play on Linux - Demoncrawl and Inzoi. And the second is filled with reports saying it works ootb for other Linux users, so if I had tried to tinker I could probably get it to work. (I haven’t had to tinker with anything else tho).

I agree with you in general, but there are people out there making specific distros with that sort of stuff in mind too. Ublue’s OSs is pretty much that: “just use it and leave the tinkering to us”. And I would argue if you’re not a developer doing advanced stuff, those work just as smoothly as windows does.

In most of the US they have HOA who likely forbid such things for an absurd fear that a slightly uglier house down in your street will tank your property’s value.

I agree about the Democrat party, but I wonder if the regular people of those states aren’t closer to Canadians in their views. If they were to join I imagine the existing party wouldn’t carry over and new ones would need to be organized.

Because the US doesn’t have any opposition parties or any local leadership that can organize anything. Protests in other places are usually organized by unions, for example. In America everyone just sits at their own couch thinking “someone should be doing something by now” and it never crosses their minds that they should be that someone.

I ditched my laptop for a steam deck. I use a desktop at home and whenever I need to go to the office I just bring the deck and some peripherals.