There are benefits, no doubt, but personal experience tells me that the risk for a personal computer is more heavily leaning towards anything else happening, with the drive being the only recoverable bit. (This is reflected in how I choose and manage my machine, but may not be reflected in how people in higher theft areas choose and manage their machines. For obvious reasons.)

I'm not saying don't make it available - just have the user turn it on at some point. Then if customers make a bad decision, at least then they'll have made a bad decision and understand why there's now a bigger problem.

Hard drive encryption is GREAT for business who have an IT team. (Even just one guy who knows to back up that password.)

But for consumers? That shit shouldn't be on by default. The user has no clue what the risks of it are, and no warning that there are even risks to account for.

Oh yeah and because of pins, the chances of forgetting your windows account is HIGHER.

Because you aren't USING it.

The internal hard drive is what I have popped out of the system and put into a case for data recovery.

And if you can't decrypt an external without a pro account, that makes the problem WORSE not BETTER.

What part of the look do you dislike? There are different UIs, and gaming has gotten better (not 100%, but better)

I would change from any to most. There are a few that won't run and a few that are really broken.

Still, I can see real effort on Steam's part.

I primary Linux and try not to complain about my work machine because I understand it is the company's, not mine but dw I have complaints.

Oh no Oh no

Oh no no no no no

Consumers should not have that by default do you understand how many hard drives my family has had to access via external readers this is a bad bad idea so much data is gonna get lost

I think I was calling about my retirement fund when I was enrolled and had to explicitly be removed from it

... They missed the hype train a while ago. Tumblr's over here making them all rainbow and letting people send them to each-other.

I mostly hear you, however... I think it matters whether "ending support" means "no further advancements including bugfixes" or "your device is bricked".

Because you MUST sign in to Facebook to use the hardware (a fact I hate on its own), I expect this to be more of a "bricked" situation.

Yes police unions can work like that... But I feel like the police union works that way because most police are that way. The union doesn't just get that way, the way the union is needs to be supported by its members. Most game studio developers are not gonna be happy with a system that works that way.

It also has the disadvantage of being the only union that all police are part of.

I would rather point to the USPS union for an example of a union with massive problems, and given how often I read "Grieve it" on that subreddit, I'd say the union has a very different set of issues.

... Where do you get your information about how unions work?

That wasn't sarcasm. Development isn't just about the hours worked - creative freedom and the state of the developer make a HUGE difference in code quality.

A unionized game dev workforce could bring the devs closer to the design and marketing process and help to allow game companies to utilize the reasons these devs went into game development in the first place. It could also give them the tools to push back against monetization models that make the game unfun.

I bet unionization will have a massive positive impact on game quality!

... okay a virtual stack tool would be neat. Like don't make me run the code to try to reproduce it, start building the state backwards and let me start to see what it would take to get there.

That sounds less like AI though and more like a comprehensive carefully built tool.

Sometimes code is gonna smell.

As long as Steam pushes to use primarily libraries that other distros can get (meaning avoiding proprietary packages), I'm good with that.

Those who have never used linux are always worried about which distro to support (completely missing that usually supporting any means the community can usually port really easily)

Steam OS may be a contributor, but so is Steam taking over the DRM mess and convincing developers to use wine-compatible DRM systems while also conveniently rolling out Steam Play (Wine, but with some additional setup).

Seriously, the ability to launch a wine-based game straight from my normal launcher is a GAME CHANGER.