pop [he/him]

I wonder how much of this has to do with the currency change in late 2023. I used to buy lots of tiny indie games, which offered a couple of hours of entertainment, and didn’t cost more than a few cents.

Then they complained to Steam, others abused VPNs, and Steam itself didn’t enforce tying the payment methods to the country, therefore they had a lot of people buying from places like Turkey or Argentina (as in, pretending to be from those places).

But much like the piracy debacle, does someone cheating the price translate as a potential buyer at full US price? I don’t think so. I imagine only a small percentage would have paid full price, and only for big or well promoted games (aka Big Name Devs). I can’t imagine how having a handful of “correct” buyers vs a ton of “incorrect” buyers would tip the scale in favor of the former.

Edit: And for the record, I’m from the LATAM region, so I was buying legitimately.

Just a suggestion. You might want to look into getting a decent chair and foot support first. Something like a cushioned office chair, the more “executive” looking ones, where even the arm support is cushioned.

Sit at your current desktop with what you currently have, and write down all the measurements that feel comfortable to you. More important: floor-to-butt, butt-to-head, and butt-to-elbow, width of chair (space between elbows). Whatever chair you get, make sure your head and arms are supported. With that, you can look for a good office chair that fits your particular measurements.

The leg-foot support, if it doesn’t exist for your measures, can easily be done with wood.

I had this stuff done, and nowadays I “lounge” on my desktop. I tried the handheld way, and ended up hating it. The couch makes me lean forward, my arms can’t hold the device for long, and most of the games I play look too small on the screen.

The only thing I actually liked from Cosmic is the ability to remove rounded corners, which is something I hate that we’re forced to endure in every single UI at every single level. Even KDE seems to lack that, even though they give a few options for the UI. (Edit: I mean, as far as I saw on Plasma, KDE doesn’t have the option by default. Maybe it can be added or something, but I didn’t see anything in the settings to indicate I can remove rounded corners.)

Tiling is just not to my liking, but maybe it’s because I don’t use huge monitors, so every time I tile a window everything gets bunched up or cut off. Maybe I’ll think differently when I move from 24" to 27", who knows. I ended up disabling tiling and stacking in Pop! OS 22 and just use vanilla GNOME snapping when needed. Stacking also adds a horrible tab UI that can’t be edited (say, make it vertical instead of horizontal), as far as I know.

So, to me, the DE just doesn’t add anything different or extremely necessary. But of course, I can only speak for myself, my tastes. I’m generally very picky and an outlier in most things, so I’m not surprised other people find those things to be essential.

I feel like it was a huge mistake on their part to try to make a whole DE rather than work on a bunch of GNOME extensions, but now they’re trapped and can only keep working on it. I don’t dislike Cosmic, but I just keep asking “why?” every time I look at it.

DualSense (PS5) for me works right out of the box, especially in PC ports of PS games. It’s USB-A to USB-C, so no prop cables.