Yeah, I think it’s important not to lose perspective here and let expectations slide just because Nvidia are being more awful right now. Make no mistake, value went out the window a long time ago and AMD are also fucking us, just a little less hard than their main competitor. Even adjusting for inflation, what used to get you the top of the line now gets you last-gen midrange.

I agree that this happens to an extent but Digital Foundry in particular makes a point to take into account performance of the cards most used by regular people and are one of the biggest forces in that space pushing people to not just hit “ultra” and move on as you can see with their optimized settings series and the like, as well as getting the best out of older games as in their retro series. They like games that look good and play smoothly, of course, but I don’t think it’s fair to associate them with that kind of ULTRA MAX OR DIE attitude.

I think there’s sometimes an overcorrection from the “gameplay over graphics” crowd. I’ve been part of that group before and get it, it’s frustrating when from your perspective the industry is ignoring the parts of games that you care about the most. But it’s a strange thing to pick on because at the end of the day pretty things that feel smooth to play are wonderful! That can be done on a toaster with beautiful pixel art / low poly 3D models, but it can also be done in dramatically different ways by pushing high end hardware to its limits. There’s room for both and I adore both. Games are art like anything else and it’d be strange to tell people who appreciate going to a beautiful movie shot on particularly nice film on-location in expensive places just because it’s still a good movie if you watch it on an old laptop with awful web compression or because an underground mumblecore film from 2003 is also great.

Graphics aren’t all that matter to me but if the primary joy someone gets from gaming is seeing ultra-detailed and perfectly rendered scenes the best way they possibly can, good for them. Personally, I like getting good visuals when I can but my primary concern is always framerate, as particularly in first person games even 60fps often triggers my motion sickness and forces me to stick to short sessions. Ultimately I see the this whole debate as a relic of the past that only made sense when the only games the average person had access to were AAA/AA releases. Low-spec gaming is better than it has ever been, with the indie scene continuing to go strong like it has for the past 15+ years and an ever-expanding backlog of classics which now run on just about anything every year.

I can imagine a reasonable user who doesn’t look into it beyond the old warning text being aware that incognito’s purpose is to not store browsing history and therefore assuming that somehow impacts Google’s ability to know where you’ve been. Like, they might know it doesn’t stop trackers but assume not having the history logged means it’s not there for Google to take. Or speaking more generally, they could’ve taken it to mean “we won’t track you, but we can’t do anything about others doing so.”

I wouldn’t say it just relied on basic reading abilities, as you could easily be misled if your mental model for how tracking and data collection works was just a bit off.

What launcher do you recommend? I’ve been using Flauncher as it’s the only decent FOSS one I’ve found, but it’s pretty barebones.

That’s fine, just let the rest of us do the same.

The best I can say is that it technically does the job, just slowly and not particularly well. There really isn’t anything which even approaches the search quality and featureset of Kagi. I don’t even have the strongest opinion on working with Brave even though they’re clearly awful given how monstrous both Google and Microsoft are (who are both part of the core foundation of their search), but their approach to this whole situation leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I turned off auto-renewal of my subscription but I really hope they take a step back and realize how much goodwill they’re destroying for a significant part of their userbase so I can resubscribe. There’s no suitable replacement.

I have mixed feelings about this whole thing. It’s weird to me that Brave is a line too far for people when the scale of evil that Google and Microsoft has brought to the world is so much larger and Kagi was already sourcing from them, bothering no one who chose to use the service. Don’t get me wrong, Brave sucks ass. I’m queer and homophobia is of course a very close issue to my heart, but I can’t find any framing that makes Brave a bigger issue than fucking Microsoft. That said, I’d ideally like to see a response focused more on a pragmatic look at possible sources than a blanket “we won’t get involved in politics.”

I’d prefer a totally independent search engine ran entirely according to my principles if possible, but uh, have you used them? The search quality is horrific. I don’t think I’ll cancel yet, but the iffy response does put them on shakier ground.

They only support Pixel hardware because it’s currently the only line that meets their list of requirements. I’d guess that if something came around which beat the Pixel line, they’d support it…but I also don’t see anyone positioned to do that right now.

Though it’s worth mentioning that the developers don’t emphasize degoogling all that much and their community often have a bit of tension with degooglers who come to join them. The OS certainly meets the needs of those of us getting away from Google but the developers have no problem recommending workflows that go through Google (albeit with regular app access rather than the privileged and deeply integrated access on stock Android) when they’re more secure than the alternatives. For example, they’ll regularly suggest using sandboxed Google Play over F-Droid or Aurora Store, again because of their stance of prioritizing security above all.

It can sometimes be a bit annoying when your priorities are more about avoiding corporate surveillance than protecting yourself from attackers or a snooping government, but their work ends up supporting both regardless.