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Unwillingly consented, that's the vast majority of Chrome Sync users. Unless you enable the end-to-end-encryption (for which they require a second passphrase, so probably less than 0.1% actually use that), they will use your data for ad profiling etc.. Yes, that is on page 1312 of the Chrome Sync privacy statement. (They're only required to write it into there, if they do it, so it is quite certain that they didn't just want the bad PR for nothing.)
Is consent required? Assuming they actually do collect this data from their Chrome Sync data or through similar personally identifiable ways, consent would be required in many jurisdictions, especially the EU.
However, if they cared enough, it would be possible for them to collect this particular data point without personal identification. You could for example create a UUID per installation that's only associated with this one data point. Or you could have a time-based solution where each Chrome instance goes out to "vote" for their default search engine e.g. every 4 weeks. If you then look at the statistics on a weekly basis, you can just take these values times 4 to even roughly correct numbers. It's certainly going to be representative enough, you don't need every browser instance to have their vote in every week's statistic.
It takes like two seconds to go from desktop to in-game, continuing your previous run, and saving your progress + closing is just as quick, so I often just launch the game when I have to wait a minute for something to finish.
It's also really good at keeping up tension. It rarely feels too easy, if it does and you start playing careless, that's when it gets you. It also rarely feels too hard, it's almost always your fault when you lose.
And it has a few mechanics to cut out the boring parts, like auto-explore which explores the dungeon until it finds an item, enemy or something else of interest. Or auto-combat which automatically walks up to enemies in sight and whacks them, however is entirely stupid at it, so it's only suitable for encounters where you see no risk of dying.
And it has a crapton of content, and is really good at combining this content to form all kinds of interesting situations.
Could cut straight to the GNOME logo after that sentence. This is sort of what they do, yeah. And they do have their niche with that, which is big enterprise-y, centrally administered systems.
If the user doesn't need to administer things themselves, then not exposing ways of administration in the GUI means less ways for the user to hurt themselves. Or rather to do something not so smart and then need tech support to fix it. Can't accidently hide your panel, if you actually cannot hide your panel at all.
I have no problem with one of the many desktop environments specializing in that, but the Linux desktop is mainly controlled by companies who then develop and set GNOME as default on their distros, which are also used by people who do need to administer their PC.
Ubuntu and Fedora have GNOME as default. Debian, too, which doesn't really have an opinion, but it's what they've always used and it's stable. Arch and Gentoo don't have an opinion at all, for obvious reasons.
openSUSE is still holding against, but SUSE uses GNOME in SLED, too, and has been spreading a sort of "We like all desktop environments in *SUSE-land"-mentality, which makes me feel like they're wanting to swap out KDE here, too, at some point.
But yeah, if you haven't yet, do yourself and the Linux desktop a favor and give KDE a fair try. Or pretty much anything else than GNOME.
I'm not saying it's impossible for you to like GNOME better, but there's so many desktop environments out there that are developed from users for users, which are actually objectively better than GNOME in so many categories. Even the most lightweight of desktop environments like LXDE/LXQt often have more features than GNOME.
And KDE is what you get when you take this feature per resource usage ratio of these lightweight environments and then multiply it by the resources that a modern system can easily provide. If you ever wanted to have all of the features and options that a desktop OS could have, KDE comes far too close to that. It's the flagship experience for power users (not the type that only ever wants to see a terminal).
If you're lucky, your customer notices that files are missing, understands that it has to be a bug in the operating system and maybe even has a rough idea what they were doing that caused the bug to occur, then calls up support and your first-level support is competent enough to direct the problem to the filesystem people and then it's still going to require a lot of luck for that department to reproduce the problem and to actually find out what in the code is causing it.
Well, exactly that is debateable. Sexual appeal is often coupled with a completely flat or acted personality. And if they have somewhat of a personality, then usually the stream is constantly interrupted by them reading out donations or whatnot.
And this discussion is not just about the rest of Twitch. Some people would actually like to use the IRL section to find streamers whose personality they like. Having the top-viewed streams there being focused on sexual appeal generally makes it harder to find actual personality streamers. It also means that actual personality streamers often avoid IRL.
But then they don't avoid it completely either. Some artists now stream in IRL instead of Creative. The section Music has been pretty much dead since the introduction of IRL, because people making music now pretty much either choose between Creative or IRL, leaving Music for completely personality-devoid streams of pre-recorded music.
* Queries other search engines besides just Google.
* Has more search options.
But that's different from helping an (OSS) application look good. For that, you have to make tons of mockups, iterate again and again, until you have something that looks good and consistent across the entire application. Ideally, you'd also want at least one other person to bounce ideas back and forth, and have an opinion about what you're doing.
This is real work, which requires a lot of commitment upfront. The equivalent of requiring a programmer to lay out the entire architecture before they write a single line of code. That's also something that mainly happens in a corporate environment, whereas for hobby projects it tends to lead to frustration.
Basically, if you offer me the service to protect my IP address and don't even have the decency to let me inform myself about your offering without handing over my IP address to Google et al., then I'm not using your service.
Unfortunately, VPN providers collectively don't seem to be aware of this presentation layer, so it's neigh impossible to find one which doesn't violate privacy here.
So far, I've found exactly two: azirevpn.com and airvpn.org
They load in Piwik, which I'm okay with.
These two providers also check a lot of other boxes for me, but yeah, it's still just two providers after hours of research, so if anyone knows any other VPN providers with privacy-respecting webpages, please do tell.
Now you just say "DRM this" and it does it, and you have the security issues whether you use DRM or not.
As a result, webpage owners might start DRMing things that were previously just not worth DRMing. Like images, text.
If you want to cite a news article in the future, you might have to type it off by hand instead of copy-pasting the part.
Also, just like DRM has done before, it's going to make content inaccessible for those who want to view that content at a later point with different technology, except that this time around it's not just going to be Netflix, it's going to be a good portion of the web.
So, yes, DRM has been part of the web for a long time, but how big that part is, is going to dramatically change.
Minecraft was simply never intended to be this big of a game. It was initially designed to be really just a game where you place blocks on other blocks. The Survival-mode, fighting against monsters etc., that was all gradually glued onto an architecture which wasn't intended for it.
One example that I happen to know, is that they never intended to have all these effects like smoke, water drops, the swirls from drinking a potion. All of this was pretty much just a hack for the longest time with no real place for it in the architecture. Eventually they fixed that and added it to the architecture, and could improve effects-performance massively with that, but there's probably still loads of things like that in the game.
Another big part of this is that Minecraft generates and loads its map in 2-dimensional chunks, or pillars if you will. So, when you move through the world, it always has to load in and keep loaded the entire height of the map, no matter if you're scraping along the clouds or if you're deep underground. If you're traveling into new terrain, it has to generate the entire height all at once, as well.
Minetest instead uses 3-dimensional chunks, i.e. cubes, and can just load/generate those freely how it needs them. So, if you're standing on a mountain and look down, it loads all visible chunks, but can just leave out those which are underground. Or if you're underground yourself, it can leave out really pretty much just all chunks altogether, except for the few which are directly around you.
This also has the effect that Minetest-maps can be unlimited in height, whereas Minecraft-maps need to be limited (currently 256 blocks; it started out at 128 blocks), as otherwise Minecraft would really just need infinite RAM and never get done with generating the map.
Minetest has for one a stable modding API, meaning that mods generally don't break left and right with each release. If you find a mod, chances are that it's going to work, even if it hasn't been maintained for a while. The whole game content itself is also built using this modding API, meaning that there's nothing stopping you from making mod-content, which has just as high quality as the built-in content. Or you can write your own game completely from scratch. Or you can create mods which have then again other mods as dependencies.
Minetest also has what's probably best described as "Modpack as a Service". When you connect to a server, your client downloads the mods that the server has installed and applies them. This means that you can play on a modded server without making any changes to your client. You can just connect to random servers to take a look at the different mods that exist, without any hassle whatsoever.
This also works in singleplayer, i.e. you can play with different sets of mods on different maps, again without hassle. You just use the built-in mod manager to enable the mods that you want on a per-map basis.
For me, it was 34 links. And that 34th link was the Wikipedia-article for cheesecake...