There are still some factors providing weight on the other end of that lever. Valve is doing good things with Steam Deck and the popularity of it is keeping developers supporting lower spec hardware. Remote play codecs (both Steam’s own and Moonlight/Sunshine) reduce the need to have more than one capable gaming computer as you can just stream from the one you do have to any others. Raspberry Pi is a great way to access non-gaming computing cheaply. Arduino, even though the company itself is kind of doing some shit, still has an ecosystem big enough to survive even if the company itself completely sabotages it. And of course the used/surplus PC market is thriving, even more than ever before with Windows 11 forcing millions of PCs into early retirement for no good reason. They’re still perfectly capable machines that will run Linux without an issue and you get them cheap as a song or even free if you play your cards right.
I’m not saying any of this to dispute anything you’re saying, I’m just pointing out these resources we still have so that we can take advantage of them while we still can and protect our continued access to them. It’s clear the claws are coming out to start locking down consumer computing, but people need to know there is a resistance to it and there are ways to resist. And we should.
There are still some factors providing weight on the other end of that lever. Valve is doing good things with Steam Deck and the popularity of it is keeping developers supporting lower spec hardware. Remote play codecs (both Steam’s own and Moonlight/Sunshine) reduce the need to have more than one capable gaming computer as you can just stream from the one you do have to any others. Raspberry Pi is a great way to access non-gaming computing cheaply. Arduino, even though the company itself is kind of doing some shit, still has an ecosystem big enough to survive even if the company itself completely sabotages it. And of course the used/surplus PC market is thriving, even more than ever before with Windows 11 forcing millions of PCs into early retirement for no good reason. They’re still perfectly capable machines that will run Linux without an issue and you get them cheap as a song or even free if you play your cards right.
I’m not saying any of this to dispute anything you’re saying, I’m just pointing out these resources we still have so that we can take advantage of them while we still can and protect our continued access to them. It’s clear the claws are coming out to start locking down consumer computing, but people need to know there is a resistance to it and there are ways to resist. And we should.