I don’t even want to visit the US and I live here.

Maybe I oversold it but I definitely noticed a difference in both performance and battery life. Windows has no profile for handheld devices and assumes they’re a laptop. With SteamOS it seems to have better battery management, with the added bonus of not being spyware vibe-coded garbage. My wife encountered a handful of “yep that’s Windows for you” type issues and now those are reduced to zero.

I recently dumped W11 off my wife’s ROG Ally handheld and replaced it with SteamOS. It’s a day and night difference in performance. ASUS is absolutely fucking themselves by shipping it with this vibe-coded trash OS. W11 is total dog shit. The only good thing it does is drive a lot of people into the arms of Linux.

Texas is really striving to make itself as unappealing as humanly possible. The cameras will magically have a feature that ignores any crime by Ken Paxton.

If you want real Quake, just get Quake 3. Tons of people still play it. Or snag Xonotic.

There is so much far better content out there to absorb other than Harry Potter. I can go without and be perfectly fine. I think we already have some of the books and DVDs from ages ago. So if my wife or I suddenly have the desire to revisit, we’re not consuming anything HBO or anyone else can even remotely trace.

This could be shortened to

US being left behind

This country doesn’t give a shit about doing anything good or right.

It’s not a bad plan at all and I touch more grass with every new thing that enshittifies.

Anyone have recommended alternatives?

I think this is also tied to a decline in mental faculties. My mom had dementia and I had to dig her out of various situations, like having multiple car warranties, and destroying her inbox by clicking on literally anything. She hit a point where the gates that would validate or invalidate a decision vanished entirely. If a salesperson came to her door, the chances they left without landing a sale were slim to none. They just had to be charismatic and sound positive. It’s the reason she got stuck with one of those whole-house water softeners.

I think AI slop hits similarly. It’s made to tap into their most basic hooks. Religion, family, cute stuff, etc. Their brain drives past any of the gates that we have where we ask why anyone would watch this over actual videos of animals, people, etc. They’re a deer in headlights being entertained by the rudimentary dopamine hits, while all of the technical details go over their heads.

And Axon already has a long history of supplying cameras to police, so this is going to lead to an even worse enemy holding the mass surveillance reigns.

One of the things I recently said to friends was:

At the end of all of this, every corporation is going to become either a surveillance company, or a military tech one.

I hate that this keeps turning out to be accurate.