Any service requires investment, though. What pays Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.?

I’d imagine it’s a way to sift normal users that might turn into power users, so they stay in Google’s controlled environment. Or, since apparently Google can modify programs in the Play Store if they so desire, maybe it’s a way to increase the chance the user will keep using approved backdoors/tojans/spywares. Either way, I can’t recommend enough for people to use vanilla phones, and have some cheap, second hand one just for stuff you can’t use without Google Play.

Can’t give precise numbers, but at least that I can notice, despite greatly filtering what I check, there’s enough stuff to make running out of stuff to check rather unlikely. Besides, as I started using RSS feeds a lot recently, mainly for federated platforms (not just Lemmy ones), and the reader I use can hide posts marked as read, it’s being a struggle to lower the number of posts to read in comparison to the sum of posts automatically pulled during the set up of each link.

An AI is as good as its sources, and skimming through the domains from the posts, quite a few of those don’t seem like very reliable ones.

Doesn’t appear to have a RSS feed either, and doesn’t seem like Nitter supports it. 😔

Is your drive where you install games automatically mounted by the system? In case something changed in your system, does it have the same path as Steam expects it to? And is the drive a separated storage? And though it may sound like a stupid question, I think it’s important to ask also, are you sure it’s on the storage you think it is?

I think that, while, yes, fragmentation hinders a system, it is also its saving grace, as it also stops a given family of systems from growing into what made the competition problematic.

Taking the Program Files folders as example, they have limited read/write permissions on Windows, so whenever possible, I try to install them onto a folder I make in the root of C:. But more and more, since at the very least Windows XP from what I could observe, Microsoft is training users into using only the users folder, and less and less programs give an option to install elsewhere, installing only on the Program Files folder instead. Meanwhile, on Linux Mint (my distro of choice), if AppImage (my to go medium of programs) isn’t working well, I can always fallback to other means, such APT directly or downloading its .deb files then extracting them, getting from flatpak, compiling it myself, building a custom AppImage, running on a VM or emulator, or in the worst possibility, I make a dual boot between Mint and some other distro.

Also, although there are many package managers, from my experience, they usually work similarly. Some changes in syntax, options and names, but nothing outlandish. It would be, I think, like someone learning a close language to his/her mother tongue. And from experience, you can even organize installations in a more standardized way, although it will take some effort from your part to figure out how, since some adaptations may be needed (java 8 and sdl ptsd intensify).

And lastly, from what I can observe, stuff in Linux more often than not share logic or even methods with a lot other stuff in the system. Dunno if it’s a bit of a bias of someone that’s using Linux for a few years already, but the fragmentation usually feels superficial to me, with distros being more tweaks of the ones they stem from, and major changes being better observable when distros are sufficiently far apart.

Didn’t quite follow 3DS emulation development, so correct me if I’m wrong, but it would seem mostly done. Only StreetPass and multiplayer seem to be a question mark currently.

Afaik, without power being a concern, pretty much anything until the PS3 that ever got an emulator for it, no matter whichever “host system” (borrowing VM thermology) it got released for, can be emulated on modern computers and systems.

Biggest caveats I can think of would be the options available, and how to run them.

For example, I try to avoid Retroarch when possible, since, to me, too many systems in one interface are a limiting factor, but the only stand-alone emulator that can decently run (imo) the Metal Slug games, of which I love, was some old Windows build of an arcade emulator, so I have to run it within Wine. Similarly, if you wish to run Java Phone games, afaik, you need to run them on a Java Phone emulator for the PSP within PPSSPP.

And on another example, PC-98 emulation is usually accessible only through Retroarch, but it doesn’t seem to be able to mount multiple disks at the same time, and some games need that, so, from what I could find, either you need to figure out how to use DOSBox-X as a PC-98 machine, or you need to figure out how to compile Neko Project II Kai for recent systems.

Old PC games that require Windows’ hardware acceleration and/or 3D libraries may also be problematic to run due to VMs’ development for old system being rather slow. Android also seems to be finicky, with either emulators being full of ads, privacy issues, moody compatibility with proper VM softwares, or taking a comically large space in Android SDK’s in-built emulator.

And progress on emulators for newer systems such as PS Vita, PS4 and Xbox One are slow, progress for Switch appears to be halted thanks to Nintendo, and heard iOS emulation is possible but it is still elusive to me.

So, to sum up, most of the times, even if with varying results, from what I tested and from what I saw being reported, most systems can be run, but may take some case-by-case setting up and testing.

If you want to gradually move away from closed and/or paid software, afaik, the only way is through unlocking the bootloader and uninstalling programs through there.

Alternatively, there is the nuclear option, to replace the whole system, and start from zero with a distro as close as possible from AOSP. Worth noting it also requires unlocking the bootloader.

About the tool, thanks. I’ll keep it in mind.

About Heroic, it allows installing several versions of a few forks of Wine, Proton and Proton-GE included, and it’s installed on a folder specific from Heroic, instead of installing on the whole system.

Alternatively, or perhaps even concurrently, you can have a Proton instance without having Steam installed. Dunno how it works on Lutris, but besides being able to install Proton manually, you should also be able to install a few different versions of it through Heroic too. Dunno other means for that but probably are.

So untrustworthy company is even more centralizing now?

Sadly I couldn’t think of a better way yet. 😔

Though not due to piracy, I also end up with a lot of repeated, redundant and/or unwanted files, so I’m often having to delete them.

I see. That’s sad. But thanks for clarifying it!

Not ideal, but what I do is to load all musics onto VLC, open the list view (Ctrl L on Linux), let the list fully load, sort by song name and check what appears repeated or that I don’t want for other reasons. It also helps if the songs are metadata-rich, such as the ones bought from Bandcamp and ITunes (not Apple Music), so it’s easier to differentiate them (given this community, I have no clue how/where from yours are). And lastly, there’s a little plugin I found a while back that helps a bunch, vlc-delete, which adds the option to delete the currently playing file, and that, at least in the Linux version, benefits from motor memory since it can be executed with a quick succession of 2 Alt shortcuts.

The Reddit-inspired instances like the Mbin and Lemmy-based ones may be of interest for you. The Lemmy ones, from what I can tell, always hide the follower list, and the Mbin ones allow the user to choose between showing and not showing. Also, both seem to be able to connect to Twitter-like instances, though UI for that part in the Mbin ones is pretty barebones and the Lemmy ones mix them up.

But what if you try to navigate through the archived pages? The lack of direct links is something that also happens in some Microsoft pages, but some times Internet Archive manages to archive such pages anyways.

Not familiar with LG’s site so I don’t have any links quickly available. But if it helps, and if you know the link or roughly where in the site the file was, maybe you could try checking Internet Archive, Archive Today, or, if the site has an Australian equivalent, the Australian Web Archive / Trove? Don’t know other page-archiving alternatives, but if you do, I would also suggest checking on them.

I can conjecture some things, though I can’t be 100% sure on either:

First, maybe it’s fanatics/fanboys that don’t like competition making their platform less relevant. Second, it’s paid actors complaining. Third, it’s robot accounts making posts. Fourth, as proposed in the OP, people are getting the wrong impression due to noisy and problematic bubbles. Fifth, people being scared of leaving their comfort zone. Sixth, a mix of either some or all the previous possibilities.