The chad Windows equivalent:

winget install Mozilla.Firefox

(Or something like that. If in doubt, winget search firefox and use the ID. Use Ctrl+Insert and Shift+Insert to copy and paste it in cmd or a different terminal)

How silly of us to assume.

Resistance is futile. Becoming a vtuber is as inevitable as evolving into a crab.

Okay, I see your point, but I’d still say it’s a better license than Steam’s/Epic’s, because the games are DRM free (unless they’ve changed that and I’m not aware of it) and so once I’ve downloaded them, I can then play them whether or not GOG still exists or my “license to use GOG services” was revoked.

you can run most Steam or EGS games without having their respective clients installed

This is not consistent with my personal experience (though admittedly it’s been a while since I’ve tried – maybe a lot of games on Steam are now DRM free).

I’m using Aegis Authenticator and I regularly back up my list to an external file uploaded to my NAS. If my phone dies (which has happened before), I can then just restore the list from the backup ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Are they insane? I already have a free tester – the device I want to use the cable on. I would pay maybe $15 for this, but perhaps I am not part of the target market

As a clueless gog-game-buying normie, can you elaborate?

do a barrel roll

perfect

Thanks for your comprehensive reply.

First off, I am not an Apple hater. I see merit in their products, especially for non-techie users. But I don’t see myself using any of them.

Yes, customizability is a trade-off, one which I am not willing to make :) For me personally it justifies the choice of a different product. I’m not only including launchers and icon packs in this, it’s for example much easier to install e.g. an alternative YouTube frontend on an Android than on iOS, or to use an alternative app store (I’m assuming Android doesn’t have anything like F-Droid or Obtainium, both of which I use to get free and mostly open-source Android apps). You could say that’s a trade-off again, which it is, but I believe I should have the freedom to make that choice. It’s not like I couldn’t stay in the confines of Google’s ecosystem and have a largely similar experience to a closed off Apple-like system, it’s just that I don’t want to. But perhaps I’ve strayed from customizability back into the openness territory with this argument.

If I understood your example about fine-grained and extensive customization, I think you’ve identified these possible challenges:

• ease of access to needed settings
• consistency of application

I think both of these can be solved by the manufacturer of the OS. Google has been streamlining their settings menu with every new version of Android and extensive developer guidelines about how to make 3rd party applications consistent with the rest of the system are now the standard. In other words, I believe ease of use and consistency don’t have to be at odds with customizability, in fact they can reinforce and improve each other (example: setting a system-wide color tint that is then applied in all supported applications).

Slight tangent here, talking about consistency makes me think of another thing. I don’t know how it is today, but when I last tried using an iPhone, there was no consistent way in apps to go “Back” from an activity. Most of them had a top-left arrow that took you back, but definitely not all, and the experience was all over the place. Sometimes you had to swipe right, sometimes press an arrow in the bottom left for some reason… For all the talk about iOS’s consistency, it was not a consistent experience at all, and I believe Android had it figured out much better (not to mention that having a Back button on the bottom makes much more sense, esp. with larger screens).

And lastly to the marketing point. Look, I know the reality of selling a product is paying a lot for marketing so that you can actually sell it. I understand that. I am just psychologically resistant to ads (I am less likely to buy something I see an ad for), and I hate giving into trends. I think it’s part of my particular flavor of neurodivergence. And since having an iPhone is promoted as trendy and a status symbol or whatever, and seeing people give into that hype, that just makes me unlikely to ever buy one, and psychologically resistant to supporting these marketing practices with my money. Plus, the larger the corporation in general, the less likely it is to get a lot of my money if I have other choices.

who on earth is listening to hi-res wireless audio and not a song off of Spotify, YouTube, etc?

The decision not to include hi-res audio support out of the box is more baffling when you learn that Apple Music in its basic package offers high-quality lossless audio for streaming. Why have this, and make your users jump through extra hoops to take advantage of it?

To answer your overall question, I am one of the Apple dislikers and with me it comes down to openness and customizability (I like to tinker with my electronics and computing devices, and I can do that much better with an Android device), and not wanting most of my money that I spend for the product I’m buying to go to marketing.

It’s a different joke tho

Ouch! (Great song tho)

Good, let’s all make sure it stays right where it is

I think the average Joe doesn’t really understand or care about the security risk of such a feature, because they assume that there are competent people at the company who have considered the security risk and took sufficient steps to address it. It’s not by accident that there’s a meme about some guy having a smart fridge and watch and everything, and his friend the IT expert, who doesn’t have a single piece of smart tech and keeps a gun in the kitchen in case the toaster makes a wrong move…

Even assuming that they themselves knew where to go, that only works if it’s a guy

Yes! I came here to shill for Comic Mono! I don’t use any other monospace fonts since I started with it.

Relevant John Oliver

You spelled TempleOS wrong

Try installing and running a game on GOG through Epic Launcher on a Steam Deck. I have done this in the past haha (it was Witcher 1)