Valve earned a lot of goodwill by actually shipping things that made Linux gaming viable day-to-day, not just promising it

Steam does an amazing job at convenience, but GOG scratches a completely different itch

There's clearly a real segment of players who value ownership and longevity enough to vote with their wallets

Offline installers are the real line in the sand

GOG talking about preservation and ownership has always sounded sincere, but backing that up with independence from a public company structure makes it much more credible

The irony is that the same companies pushing us toward login-only everything are also the ones best positioned to survive it

There's a point where "privacy" flips into distinctiveness

What I'd really like to see is more honesty: "we store X because feature Y needs it, here's the risk we're accepting," instead of pretending every service needs emails, analytics, and cookies by default

This is what the GDPR requires.

Most people fixate on network-level anonymity and completely underestimate how badly a "tuned" browser leaks identity

People also tend to have very poor OPSEC which undermines their efforts in spite of the tools they used.

https://grugq.github.io/blog/2013/11/06/required-reading/

Unlinking one's identity from one's activity is only getting harder as surveillance gets more and more pervasive. Effective OPSEC essentially turns one's life into a living hell and it's only getting hotter with time.

Even if you don't want to live entirely on the anonymous web, it's useful to see how many products claim privacy while being structurally incapable of delivering it