No worries! It made me honestly consider my opinions in broader, more real sense, and they still hold, so you did give me food for thought. So no offence taken.

Tbh I have no idea what the current situation of Proton is. I thougjt it’s FOSS, but most of the development is/was done by Valve employees, so people paid for their work, that they made open source, instead of hoping for volunteers.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I assumed the situation is still the same - most of Proton development is done by people with Valve’s resources, and the general public contribution is small-ish --i.e people who do GE-Proton, or other runtimes.

But the core is work paid for by Valve. Of course, ot might live on wirhoute Valve support, it is a FOSS project, but what I understood, currently, the majority of development time is on Valve payroll.

True, and I use it whenever I can, but GoG is (as far as I know, maybe they contribute) not working on making sure games run on Linux (Proton), or increasing the Linux market share.

I feel you, I’m working in gamedev, and the worst thing is that it’s for a small indie studio that does have cashflow issues right now, while also being a co-development studio that sells me to a large corporate.

So I work fully integrated into a corporate I’m not a fan of (it is a pretty good game, though), doing 1:1 the job others are doing there, for 1/3rd of the pay while also getting late paychecks.

But the indie studio is cool and I like the people there, it still has a startup vibe and they do work on cool stuff. And I mostly just don’t want to deal with the bother of getting a new job and a project. Plus I have a side job for ocassional cybersecurity tests, thst pays like 4x as much so if I do it here and there I’m fine.

I am looking around into other fields, and don’t k now what to pick. Currently signed up for a sound engineer courses/classes, because I do volunteer for a promoter doing local subculture events and shows, including DJing for them, and having an in-house sound engineer sounds cool. But that also doesn’t pay, they are a no-profit and have it as a hobby (I am sure, they are my friends for years, we are mostly in the red or barely even after shows/festivals).

I’m not saying they don’t have problems, and you’re right.

It’s still the best we have, while GoG is awesomer, they don’t have everything, plus there’s also the massive work done for Proton that singlehandedly saved Linux gaming, that they could have made proprietary, especially for SteamDeck.

As a developer, they also do take a massive cut.

But I’d say that’s minor compared to how it would look if it was owned by i.e Microsoft. And in how capitalism os turning out, it is a pretty rare sight.

I hope Gabe will at least last through the inevitable switch to cloud based gaming, that will probably start happening soon. I wonder what will they do.

Honestly am not too worried about what you’ve mentioned.

Those things will upset my life so radically, that there’s no point in worrying about that, plus I have a lot of first world privlidge buffer before it realistically affects my life. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t suck, but I don’t care. A lot of things will go to absolute life-changing shit for everyone around me if it also affects me.

Steam getting majorly enshitified will affect the major thing in my life, that I rely on to be able to handle the rest and retain at least some of my sanity, while changing nothing about the rest of my circumstances. It’s something I interact with daily.

Yes, I am reasonable, this is the thing I worry about the most, but I do recognize that it’s a privilige.

Shocking, that when a company’s real purpose and focus is to make a product for customers, as opposed to making money for the investors, it is better for the customers…

Gabe dying is the major thing I fear in my life… It’s the last compamy I know about that’s not getting enshitiffied.

Few recommendations from the top of my head, from skimming the post.

I’d recommend checking out QubesOS (https://www.qubes-os.org/), especially since it seems you switch between ToR and already use Silverblue, which is AFAIK similar, but why not go all the way in?

Also for VPN - I’ve switched Proton for Mullvad VPN, because I really like the idea they are going for - if you pair Mullvad browser, that is designed to have the same fingerprint for all users, with a VPN that’s from the same company, you can kind of expect that most of the Mullvad VPN users will also be users of Mullvad Browser. Which means you will not be one of the few Proton VPN users with Mullvad fingerprint, but will have the same fingerprint as most of other users of Mullvad VPN. This will make it harder to fingerprint you based on your browser. One word of warning, though - don’t install extensions to Mullvad. If you do, you break the “same fingerprint” premise, and the more extensions you install, the more identifiable you are. Mullvad should be used without any extensions.

Another thing I see is music streaming - I think that in general I’d recommend just getting a cheap laptop/NAS and run your own Jellyfin, and slowly start building your own music collection. You can also run Matrix server as a bonus, and bridge all your communication (including Signal, even though that may not help that much) - but it does help if you need to use some kind of service, i.e Messenger, for group or work related purposes.

My approach to music was to cancel my subscription, and then use the money I save to spend on albums on Bandcamp, so I still support the artists I want. I make sure to do that every month. Since there’s just wast amount of music to get, I use Headphones with an account on redacted.ch to fill my library, but I still make sure to buy albums I like even if I already have them downloaded. The added bonus is that you actually don’t loose any of your music, if the artist decides to pull it off the streaming service, which has aready happened to me several time.

If you want hosting your own LLM, take a look at https://refact.ai/. But note that it’s not really cheap, I’ve recently upgraded my computer and decided to use my NVIDIA 1060 to run refact, and it still didn’t work well - 8Gb of GPU memory is borderline usable, and I couldn’t do the finetuning.