Another view point: if you want to compete in the big leagues, you need to have "fuck you" levels of money. You can be happy building indie games for desktops as a career, but if you want to compete with Nintendo, Sony, and Meta then you need to take out your checkbook and write lots of zeros. So stop trying to compete with them if you don't have the capital! Build great games that aren't AAA-style FPS, BR, Minecraft/CoD/Halo clones.

This is about hardware, not games

Yup. I'm pretty sure the indie games we all know about made good money. Enough to have continued growing a business without copying any AAA games and avoiding getting bought out or aped.

The dev(s) just chose not to go that route. It makes a lot of sense why not. They don't want to betray their audience and they want to keep having fun making games. Success is not necessarily "competing" with the big companies. There's always room for more types of games.

> Yup. I'm pretty sure the indie games we all know about made good money. Enough to have continued growing a business without copying any AAA games and avoiding getting bought out or aped.

That is only true if you have't heard about most indies. The are plenty of great indie games that just didn't manage the marketing gamble and faded into obscurity without much financial success or even making a loss, especially when you consider the developer's opportunity cost. Then there are even more where the developers gave it their best for years but ultimately failed, either releasing a mediocre game or nothing at all.

Indie game dev is absolutely not something that you should be getting into when your primary interest is financial return. The ones that make it big are a tiny minority.

> despite what gnome and apple proclaiming such a goal is impossible.

GNOME? The great out the box experience... that also allows power users to deeply customize it? It is dishonest to lap GNOME (extremely popular free software) in with Apple (king of proprietary software).

Gnome and customise? The DE that hates giving users any options to change stuff because they (Gnome) knows best?

That is why there is the Gnome Tweak tool and Gnome extensions. You get a great out-of-the-box experience for regular users and good customizability for advanced users. If you want extreme customizability just don't use Gnome. IMO Gnome gets way too much unwarranted critique here.

I don't use Gnome because I find its out-of-the-box experience to be pretty horrible. I couldn't figure out how to fix it, and didn't know about these tools. But it's fine, I'm really happy with the DE I use.

The problem with fixing all its problems with extensions is that they aren't always updated in time for new releases.

And the tweak tool, sure but really the options in there should have been standard settings from the start. This is the core problem with this product.

Sadly, the settings app crashes if you choose the performance power profile... Tweak tool, otoh, works fine.

Gnome removed most buttons and menus that allow customization. You may be thinking of kde plasma instead

It's going back a few years now but the gnome 3 debacle is a reasonable example of not respecting users https://felipec.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/the-problem-with-gn... . I think in subsequent years the devs have been worn down and the community solved the missing features in other ways, but some people have long memories. gnome 3 is the primary reason Ubuntu got its own desktop system, it was that divisive.

The Steam Deck is uniquely positioned to allow people to do potentially hazardous things like install software from unknown sources, and that is because it's primarily a gaming device. People aren't doing banking and work stuff on it, so what is the damage if it gets rooted? Valve could have easily screwed it up by building a walled garden anyways, just to satisfy corporate greed in the name of "maximizing ROI". Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all have their walled gardens for gaming. The fact Valve hasn't (yet) is refreshing.

Apple is that stoic palace guard at Buckingham palace who says nothing and doesn't move or smile but won't let you leave the appointed tourist areas and bother the queen while GNOME is your obnoxious aunt who is always judging you.

You know its wrong to want to theme your distros desktop don't you? It is such a bother that you always ask your file manager to wear green. You know he doesn't like that can't you see how uncomfortable you're making him?

Prominent developers have variously spoken out against various user and distro customization suggesting that all theming and extensions be removed and even in one notable instance attempting to bully an app that supports many desktops to disable traditional tray icon functionality on other desktops using the dystopian phrasing something on the order of you should decide if you are a gnome app or a XFCE app. Another suggested that it would improve brand awareness if distros couldn't theme their version of gnome. Phrasing only a soulless marketing manager could possibly love.

There can be little doubt that IBM/Red Hat is about as hostile to diversity of options on the Linux Desktop as Apple and not without cause. There are legitimate arguable benefits to a homogeneous ecosystem. They just aren't in quite the same position to dictate options. For instance killing the extension/themeing ecosystem would have empowered forks and as few people would be running gnome as run Fedora.

Since being a pessimst turned optimist (by years of working) i'd replace "sad this only really" with "great this". Sorry for being obnoxiously posive.