MudMan

@MudMan@fedia.io

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think they do probably think that having SteamOS perpetually be the holder for the "most popular" slot in the Linux category is not what the survey slot is for.

  But then, they could have also finally provided a historical chart of OS usage, or a different category of SteamOS altogether.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, hey, it is. Why the hell would it work that way? It seems to be manually excluded from the unfiltered list despite being by far the biggest usage.

  So the data exists but it's weirdly buried for no reason.

  Still, thanks for the pointer. I genuinely didn't know they had it set up that way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, you do you, but I don't see any of the things that you want requiring active surveillance. That all seems very attainable by having decent search, filtering and categorization tools.

  If anything, I find myself now seeking "hidden gems on Steam" despite Steam knowing everything about my gaming habits. And that's on Steam, which does have a semi-decent crowdsourced tagging and categorization system. Their main page recommendations for e have consistently been either generically popular shovelware or insistent recommendations for games I do like but already own in other platforms that I can't tell Steam to stop shoving down my throat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Is it listed? Do you have a link to that? Checking the latest survey the Linux section shows

  "Arch Linux" 64 bit
  0.32%
  +0.01%

  Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit
  0.24%
  +0.04%

  Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit
  0.14%
  0.00%

  Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS 64 bit
  0.12%
  +0.01%

  I don't see a SteamOS segment listed as a non-Linux OS anywhere, either. If they do provide the info I'd love to see it, but it doesn't seem to be shown at a glance in the OS Version category.

  Tracking game use by device isn't any more or less "crazy" than anything else they store. It's just telemetry. It's noteworthy that they share it in the format that they share it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Nnnnah, the hardware survey is a wildly different number. That's what OS each account was using when they filled the survey.

  This shows they have data on what OS each user is using at the time of running each game, on both a per-game and a per-hour basis and that they can tie all of it to each account across games and OSs. Which raises the question of why they run the hardware survey OS numbers in the first place, but I suppose if you're sharing the survey results you share the survey results, even if you have more accurate data on the same stats elsewhere.

  That'd be a very interesting, very different stat, though, because it means they know what percentage of Windows/Linux users go back and forth, and CAN separate Linux usage from Deck from other OSs, which they very pointedly do not do on the survey, where SteamOS doesn't have its own entry. That's unsurprising but notable, along with the fact that they don't really report on their own hardware sales, either, despite being a main source of info about GPU and CPU vendors.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I'd say I'm more lenient about big data profiles than most people around here. I'd also say I understand why the reaction to the very real, very obvious overreach in the process of creating and using those profiles is radically opposed to any sort of personal recorded info.

  The part that's weird is the cute little exception we make around the December holidays to get weirdly invasive infographics to share on social media.

  For the record, I'd dispute that I prefer personalized recs to general ads. I already know the things I like that I want to buy. I'd much rather get a poke on things "I'd never consider".

  I was on some social media site today and noted that there are some controversies going on where I only ever see the pushback and entirely infer that the people holding the opposite stance do exist, but they never show up in my channels. This is not unexpected in an algorithmically curated info landscape... but it's kind of bad and dangerous.

  Ditto for only ever being served media based on the media I already like. Again, obvious but important: that's decidedly NOT how I got to like the media I already like.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I've said this elsewhere, but December is quickly becoming the time of the year when all the corpos tell us just exactly how much they spy on us and we all collectively go "Cool!" and tell each other about it for some reason.

  FWIW, the median number of games played is four. Not forty, not fourteen, just four. If we're going to get spyware stats, at least let's put them in context. As it turns out, half of all Steam users are only playing the one game (given the numbers we know on concurrents, that'd be CS2/DOTA/PUBG or Apex, in most cases.

  The play-everything, strong opinion haver user is a fraction of the userbase.

  Also interesting, Steam is telling people how their playtime splits between Windows/Deck/Non-Deck Linux... but they pointedly don't share those stats platform-wide. Sometimes silence is data, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK to “encourage” Apple and Google to put nudity-blocking systems on phones⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I genuinely don't know that I follow that explanation. For one thing, what reasons would there be to ban paid blind boxes, online or offline, while allowing outright games of chance with a monetary payout? In what world is a Magic the Gathering blister more of a problem (for a consenting adult, anyway) than an online casino?

  But also, by the larger point you're making it seems like you'd be fine with a government saying "porn is banned for everybody because reasons" but not with "porn is banned for kids", at least in a scenario where that comes with age verification.

  To be clear, I agree that both of those are... not good. I just don't know that I can wrap my head around the logic of thinking the more extensive issue is more acceptable than the alternative. You could argue that the porn ban is an excuse to add mass surveillance, but at that point we're not talking about the porn ban, we're talking about the mass surveillance.

  Oh, and for the record, there is plenty of will someone think of the children regarding loot boxes. Both on its own and bundled together with a blanket assessment that gambling is immoral and/or illegal. It's actually a fairly close match to the porn issue, where concerns about children are being wrapped around a more targeted hostility around the concept from both sides of the political spectrum.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨THIS is a real test of how old you are. If you score 20 your future is short⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Waterbeds also not a thing.

  Not being American gets you 3 extra... years? decades? life units? Which does seem still accurate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK to “encourage” Apple and Google to put nudity-blocking systems on phones⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I... don't know where you're from, but actual gambling is legal here for adults. Are you suggesting that people should be able to place bets on actual sports but not buy a random loot box in a game? That seems incredibly extreme.

  Which still leaves a bunch of other stuff people have used kids to attack on all sides of multiple political aisles, but hey, if that's the one you want to caveat I'm happy to flag how weird the caveat is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Denmark wants to ban VPNs to unlock foreign, illegal streams – and experts are worried⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I read about some of the tightening at the time and I'm not disputing that there are technical ways of... you know, making your country's Internet a mostly separate bubble for non-techie users.

  The point is it's both hard and extremely invasive to get there. You can't just wish upon a star for VPNs to not be used for a particular application without going to those extremes. Especially if the thing you're trying to prevent is people watching Superman two weeks early or wanking to a mainstream porn page.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK to “encourage” Apple and Google to put nudity-blocking systems on phones⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It's kind of unfortunate how much this has been encourage by petty online fights. People were very excited when "will somebody think of the children" was applied to, say, some social media content or gaming loot boxes because the Internet did not like those things, so they were very happy to ignore the pre-existing parental control devices and request blanket bans. Then people remembered that a bunch of old, prudish people on both sides of the political aisle don't like porn and it was too late.

  Man, people love the "they first came for" argument online and I should have guessed the first time it really pays off in the 21st century it'd include the absolute most depressing things possible instead.

  Anyway, this is bad and I don't like it, but UK politics are almost as bad as US politics, so I'm happy to let both stew in their own cautionary tale juices.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Denmark wants to ban VPNs to unlock foreign, illegal streams – and experts are worried⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess that works for VPN services offering servers outside the country. That's not what VPNs are, though, and you still can't ban the concept of VPNs having a connection outside the country. VPN software is available open source and all it takes for it to connect abroad is my phone with a VPN connection to my home computer being abroad.

  I mean, Russia (and even China) still have people using VPNs all over the place. This (and a lot of the push for age verification and comms backdoors) reeks of barely understanding the desired result and entirely misunderstanding how the tech works.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Denmark wants to ban VPNs to unlock foreign, illegal streams – and experts are worried⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  How do you "ban VPNs"? That's not how software works, and VPNs are... you know, a key part of a bunch of online infrastructure. I get that they mean "ban them to bypass restrictions", but the entire point of a VPN is you can't tell from the outside what it's being used for. You may as well ban thinking about butterflies. You can write it down, but you can't enforce it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An Apple fan says they lost '20 years of digital life' after using an Apple gift card⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  He doesn't say he doesn't, so I assume he does.

  The problem is the way he got banned also blocks him from his shared auth, which in turn blocks him from purchases and device functionality:

  The Damage: I effectively have over $30,000 worth of previously-active “bricked" hardware. My iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Macs cannot sync, update, or function properly. I have lost access to thousands of dollars in purchased software and media. Apple representatives claim that only the “Media and Services” side of my account is blocked, but now my devices have signed me out of iMessage (and I can’t sign back in), and I can’t even sign out of the blocked iCloud account because… it’s barred from the sign-out API, as far as I can tell.

  Seriously, it's like a one page blog. You could have read it in the time it took you to make me read it for you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An Apple fan says they lost '20 years of digital life' after using an Apple gift card⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed 100%. I think it's understandable to feel schadenfreude on someone this deeply embedded being bit by the arbitrary business practices of big corpo in a worst case scenario type of situation.

  But the problem is the business practices, not the person being affected. The guy's job feeding Apples gargantuan content engine doesn't make this alright.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An Apple fan says they lost '20 years of digital life' after using an Apple gift card⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Because it was a 500 dollar transaction and the card they purchased was an apple-branded product in a major retailer.

  It was a 500 dollar transaction because this guy is a pro developer in Apple's ecosystem and apparently uses a 6TB plan for both personal and professional storage.

  The Trigger: The only recent activity on my account was a recent attempt to redeem a $500 Apple Gift Card to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan. The code failed. The vendor suggested that the card number was likely compromised and agreed to reissue it. Shortly after, my account was locked.
      An Apple Support representative suggested that this was the cause of the issue: indicating that something was likely untoward about this card.
      The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale), so if I cannot rely on the provenance of that, and have no recourse, what am I meant to do? We have even sent the receipt, indicating the card’s serial number and purchase location to Apple.
  

  Much as I do think mixing pro and personal accounts is a mistake, as a person who has to pay several major corpos for subscription plans for professional software that include cloud storage, I admit I get it. Receiving spam about how full your free personal Google Drive is kinda sucks extra if you are already paying a bunch for an enterprise account with a bunch of storage on the side.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An Apple fan says they lost '20 years of digital life' after using an Apple gift card⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Not an "apple fan", an apple-focuse software dev deeply embedded in their dev community.

  Which I suppose goes a long way to explain them being multiple terabytes in the hole inside Apple's ecosystem without a separate backup, but also why even having a separate backup would definitely not fix their problem in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That's not true at all. Synology will sell you 24 bay rack mounted devices and 12 bay towers, as well as expansion modules for both with more bays you can daisy chain to them.

  Granted, I believe those are technically marketed as enterprise solutions, but you can buy a 12 bay unit off of Amazon for like two grand diskless, so... I mean, it's a thing.

  Not saying you should, and it's definitely less cost effective (and less powerful, depending on what you have laying around) than reusing old hardware, but it does exist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I'm currently running some stuff out of an old laptop which I also have tucked away somewhere and just... remote desktop in for most of the same functionality. And even if you can't be bothered to flip it open in the rare occassion you can't get to the points where the OS will let you remote in, there are workarounds for that these days. And of course the solution to the "can't hook it up to a keyboard and mouse" in that case is the thing comes with both (and its own built-in UPS) out of the box.

  Nobody is saying that server grade solutions aren't functional or convenient. They exist for a reason. The argument is that a home/family server you don't need to use at scale can run perfectly fine without them only losing minor quality of life features and is a perfectly valid solution to upcycle old or discarded consumer hardware.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the self-hosting community needs to be more honest with itself about separating self hosting from building server hardware at home as separate hobbies.

  You absolutely don't need sever-grade hardware for a home/family server, but I do see building a proper server as a separate activity, kinda like building a ship in a bottle.

  That calculation changes a bit if you're trying to host some publicly available service at home, but even that is a bit of a separate thing unless you're running a hosting business, at which point it's not a really a home server anyways, even if it happens to sit inside your house.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean... my old PC burns through 50-100W, even at idle and even without a bunch of spinning hard drives. My actual NAS barely breaks that under load with all bays full.

  I could scrounge up enough SATA inputs on it to make for a decent NAS if I didn't care about that, and I could still run a few other services with the spare cycles, but... maybe not the best use of power.

  I am genuinely considering turning it into a backup box I turn on under automation to run a backup and then turn off after completion. That's feasible and would do quite well, as opposed to paying for a dedicated backup unit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Frustrated users crowdfund a $2,000 fix for Lenovo Legion ‘speakers not working properly’ error — bug bounty posted, coder wins the cash by fixing complex audio annoyance in just a month⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No.

  I had that laptop before I tried to move it to Linux and I'm not buying a new one. It does work under Windows.

  This is not my laptop not supporting Linux, this is Linux not supporting my laptop. Because I already own the laptop. If people weren't trying to cheerlead for their preferred OS for other reasons than... you know, whether it's good or not, this wouldn't even be a discussion. In fact, half the "Windows sucks" angles these days are down to "Windows 11 doesn't support specific pieces of pre-existing hardware". Which, you know, is the exact problem I'm having here.

  Now, would ASUS finally paying attention to the ecosystem make it easier for a whole bunch of people to move over? Sure. Of course. But that doesn't contradict my previous statements.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Frustrated users crowdfund a $2,000 fix for Lenovo Legion ‘speakers not working properly’ error — bug bounty posted, coder wins the cash by fixing complex audio annoyance in just a month⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have an ASUS laptop that maps its multiple speakers incorrectly under Linux, it's been killing me for months and I'm now considering it. I was not prepared for the realization that the Linux path forward would be to just pay by the bug fix.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, but nobody would argue that GameStop was dying in 2002, which is seven years into GameFAQs existing and very much the heyday of Prima and other dedicated print guide writers. Seriously, it just doesn't line up. GameFAQs and print guides were servicing the same need.

  Again, I'm not saying it didn't have an impact. I'm saying if Prima guides existed as standalone publications in dedicated gaming stores it's partly because GameFAQs had killed monthly print magazines as a viable way to acquire strategy guides for games, so you instead had dedicated guide publishers working directly with devs and game publishers to have print guides ready to go at day one, sometimes shipping directly bundled with the game.

  And then you had an army of crowdsourcer guide writers online that were catching up to those print products almost immediately but offering something very different (namely a searchable text-only lightweight doc different from the high quality art-heavy print guides).

  Those were both an alternative to how this worked in the 90s, which was by print magazines with no online competition deciding which game to feature with a map, guide or tricks and every now and then publishing a garbage compilation on toilet paper pulp they could bundle with a mag. I still have some of those crappy early guides. GameFAQs and collectible print guides are both counters to that filling two solutions to the equation and they both share a similar curve in time, from the Internet getting big and killing mag cheats to the enshittified Internet replacing text guides with video walkthroughs and paid editorial digital guides made in bulk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, I'd argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn't have purchased GameFAQs. At the very least it served to bring people over to their media ecosystem, and I wanna say they did serve ads and affiliate links on the site proper (but adblocker is also old, so it's hard to tell).

  Video contributed, for sure. This is a process of many years, the whole thing was evolving at once. But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn't fit the timeline at all. It's off by 5-10 years, at least. Guides weren't residual in the 00s when GameFAQs was at its peak and being bought as a company, they were doing alright. It'd take 10 years longer for them to struggle and 15 for them to disappear. You're two console gens off there. That's a lot. If guide makers like Prima were pivoting to collectible high end books out of desperation you'd expect that process to have failed faster than that.

  Instead they failed at the same time GameFAQs started to struggle and get superseded, so I'm more inclined to read that as them both being part of the same thing and the whole thing struggling together as we move towards video on media and digital on game publishing. That fits the timeline better, I think.

  In any case, it was what it was, and it's more enshittified now. I've been looking up a couple details on Blake Manor (which is good but buggy and flaky in pieces, so you may need some help even if you don't want to spoil yourself) and all you get is Steam forums and a couple of hard to navigate pages. The print guide/GameFAQs era was harder to search but more convenient, for sure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It's not a "even if some existed" thing, Prima operated until 2018. I personally remember preorder bundles with Prima guides for 360 era games and beyond. They published incredibly elaborate collector's hardbook guides (that honestly doubled as artbooks) for stuff like Twilight Princess and Halo 3, all the way to the PS4 gen.

  Even granting that "booming" is probably a bit hyperbolic, if GameFAQs being free in 1995 was going to kill them, bleeding out would probably not have taken 23 years. The death of retail, print and physical games probably hurt print guides way more than GameFAQs ever did. You didn't buy those because you were in a hurry to solve a puzzle or look up a special move. They were collectibles and art books first and foremost.

  FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn't as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think. At least that's what IGN was doing, and they're the ones that went hard on that front first. Also for the record, that probably had something to do with IGN and GameFAQs being affiliated for a while. GameFAQs was bought off by CNET in '03, it was definitely part of the big online gaming press ecosystem. I can see how IGN thought they could do better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don't know that the timeline works out there. GameFAQs is, as this post reminds us, pretty old. Even assuming that it didn't break out until the very late 90s or early 00s as THE destination for guides, there was certainly a booming editoral market for highly produced guides all the way into the Xbox 360 era.

  I'd say it was responsible for the press not focusing on guides as much and instead refocusing on news and reviews. And then news and reviews died out and the press that was left refocused on guides again because by that point the text-only crowdsourced output of GameFAQs was less interesting than the more fully produced, visually-driven guides in professional outlets. And now... well, who knows, it's a mess now. Mostly Reddit, I suppose?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean... MK1 predates it by what? 3-4 years? Which in 90s tech time is an eternity.

  MK fatality guides were mostly in print. Magazines were all over that type of stuff at the time. But it wouldn't have been strange to get a familiarly formatted ASCII guide for them with, say, your pirated floppies of the DOS or Amiga versions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To the rapidly aging person reading this: GameFAQs is 30 years old, and people are sharing their memories of the venerable guide hub⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hm... I'm a bit mixed on that, because GameFAQs became relevant a bit later than that, but at the same time that type of format for ASCII game guides predates GameFAQs being the main place you went to get them, so... it evens out?

  I probably didn't start going to GameFAQs for this stuff until like 2000, but I certainly was using text guides for games in the 90s.