KssioAug

Microsoft is trying to "reinvent" Xbox every couple years, for the last 15 years. Not even themselves trust their own plans, since they never stick to it.

The only Microsoft service I was using was Game Pass. For me, it was never cheap... the price was fair for what they offered. But after they doubled it I cancelled immediately and never looked back. And I would not, even if they decided to drop the price back again to what it was. Because now I know it is unreliable, and they will raise the price again as soon as they feel comfortable.

Typical of MS though, so that didn't surprise me at all. They just can't keep a reliable and fair priced service for long. As soon as they believe they can fuck people up, they do.

But thankfully nowadays we have so many options, to whatever product Microsoft offers, that's actually not as hard to get free of them as they might think.

I don't know if Ubuntu has fixed it, because trying to enforce their Snap store was intentional. But I can't say for sure because there have been years that I don't use it.

But yeah, for anyone using it, I'd recommend to just remove Snap entirely, since it's totally unnecessary and goes against pretty much every Linux core concept.

Or just use something like Kubuntu or Linux Mint, that have Ubuntu under hood but are more community driven instead of relying on Canonical.

The country of free speech.

Mostly avoid downloading and running packages from sources you don't trust. And if you're going to run something you don't fully trust, try to run it sandboxed (like firejail or a vm, for example). Linux is generally safer than Windows because a lot of malware are created to exploit Windows weakness... also, if you use Flatpak (sepecially verified ones) or your distro package manager, you will hardly get infected.

I disagree with the anti-west part. Anti-USA (as government or as an example for ethical governance) then, sure, but with good reasons.

And regarding pro CCP views, it depends on the context actually. You can't just throw everything on a bubble... The thing is that for a LONG time we have been fed by North American or European media the idea that China = Evil and USA/EU = Good, but nowadays, thanks to the expansion of information and people accessibility to other sources (such as the Fediverse), we know that's simply not true at all.

When you see, for example, powerful countries allying to Israel genocidal acts, maintaining civilians under siege for almost 20 years, or just turning their back to it as if they can't see the fucking obvious, you realize these governments are full of shit.

But it's not that people here are anti-west, or that they don't like western people as a whole. In fact, I'm sure most of users here are westerns. We just don't like how big western governments deal with things, and here people can actually talk about it. When you say some of these things on platforms such as Reddit or X, the rigged algorithms will sure punish you.

This, AND the fact that companies usually don't give a flying fuck for developing countries. They want to sell their services for USA and European markets, and then they just make it "available" for the rest of the word with absolutely no regard for the monetary reality of each of these countries. You can't expect people to think it's fair to pay 70 USD on a game, for example, or 15 USD a month on a subscription service, when this translates to 30% of a minimum wage somewhere else.

I'm not banned but I haven't participated much there for a couple of years.

I've heard that Fediverse wasn't much better, but the fact that Lemmy, Piefed, Mastodon and pretty much any other Fediverse platform are open source, and completely ridden of ads, and data collection from giant corporations is already a HUGE difference.

Sure people are just people and you're gonna find toxic communities everywhere, but at least here you don't need to "fear" getting banned because you can choose an instance that has core principles you share, and through them you can access pretty much any community you want, and keep active.

On Reddit, you have no other place to go. You either shut the fuck up and accept their terms, or you, if you get banned, there's nothing you can do about it.

Also, a lot of communities here in Lemmy/Piefed are very active. I don't need to be drowned on an infinity number of posts when most of them are just silly repetitive memes or karma whoring, with zero meaningful discussion.