Most of us in Lemmy know the importance of privacy and owning your devices in a big tech owned world (me included) but for once I thought to make the opposite question and ask if there are products by them that you actually use and enjoy them.
Important to say, I mean products you use even though there are alternatives, not monopolies like YouTube.
Steam.
I fuckin’ hated it and even the idea when it was new. I liked updates and being able to download my games (even though I just had dial-up at the time; it was slow, but at least I could get any game and not just what was available at the local EB). I didn’t like the idea of not having it stored off-site, though. I didn’t like the interface or having to run an extra thing. I especially didn’t like not being able to use the online gaming services I had been using for years because they shut down WON.
But now I would be lost without it.
The thing I like most about Steam is that games under Linux just work, for the most part. I don’t play AAA games online multiplayer which is, I believe, where that falls down, but other than that it really is pretty seamless
Even then with AAA multiplayer, it’s not a guarantee it’s unplayable. Every Halo game on Steam works just fine, and Apex Legends was one of the first AAA MP games to support the Deck.
This, my dad refuses to download proton or lutris and prefers to use wine baseline, and he has been waiting for months now for his game to be playable again, meanwhile I’m over here installing games right and left and just playing them, even newly released games, it just works (most of the time)
Agreed. I hate, however, that I don’t “own” the games, I can’t play game A on computer 1 and game B on computer 2 at the same time even though I bought game A and game B.
You can with Family Sharing. It also can be done a bit easier with some games that are otherwise DRM free by just running the executable from its install directory instead of through steam. Like Kerbal Space Program.
The latter method will even sometimes allow you to play the same game on two machines over the internet. I don’t know if you can do that with Family Share.
Back when I tried it you had to go offline on one of the computers for that to work