No, this isn’t something you can expect.

There used to be a distro called Gallium OS, but it’s been dead for a couple years now.

There are actually Chromebooks with very solid specs, but no, it isn’t that simple. They have custom firmware and components that often don’t play well with Linux, or Windows for that matter.

I’d gladly agree to pay more in exchange for a legally binding agreement that higher prices mean video games free of predatory monetization and reasonable pay and job security for the people making the games. But we both know that they have no intention of doing the right thing, no matter how high the box price. They’re already raking in record profits while laying off huge chunks of their workforce and giving the c-suite ever-increasing annual bonuses.

They’ve perpetuated the lie that microtransactions were a necessity and the $60 price was unsustainable for such a long time that people actually believe it. Now they want to increase the box price while keeping the predatory monetization, having their cake and eating it too.

This. I genuinely believe that in the near future indie games will be the sole torch-bearer for what I would call “traditional gaming”. Tighter, more focused experiences with no microtransactions or sanitized, inoffensive bloat. Games that are offline and don’t require any server handshake to function. And as the technology available to them advances, it will enable indie devs to be more and more ambitious with their vision.

Your point isn't without merit, but your framing of it certainly is. The comparison made in the initial post is apples to oranges, but your experience is nothing more than anecdote and implying digital is universally cheaper is absurd. Allow me to counter your anecdote with one of my own:

Only a few months after release, I picked up an Xbox copy of Cyberpunk 2077, brand new from a big box retail chain and with a complimentary steelbook case, for $5.

Ah yes, let's patch a harmless exploit in our purely single player game. Surely that's far more important than any of the gameplay-degrading/breaking bugs the game carries, many of which have been carried forward from Skyrim. Can't be giving the player the freedom to choose whether or not they want to accumulate credits faster than intended.

Even if your PC isn't up to the task of running the game, it's worth a shot to install it and see if you can do just enough to open the console, even if it's at 2 fps. Unless you're running a Celeron processor or something, in which case don't bother.

That's a valid point. Games released in the next 2-3 years should be probably be given a pass. My admittedly layman's perspective is that any indie game deep enough into development that switching engines isn't feasible most likely wouldn't require another 4 years to ship.

Apple is no doubt considering moving more heavily into the gaming space. They're looking for more revenue streams to keep feeding the corporate fantasy of perpetual growth, and there are only so many sweat shop laborers they can exploit. Wouldn't surprise me at all for them to buy a publisher like EA and create some steam competitor (or just leverage the Mac app store).

Every accusation is an admission.

Let me preface this by saying I would not be in favor of this acquisition, even though Nintendo are a bunch of overly litigious pricks that abuse the copyright system in the name of profits and treat their partners with open hostility and their eShop is a shovelware shitfest running on hardware that was already antique by the time it launched. But I really don’t see how this is anything more than Phil Spencer being a bit too transparent. Jim Ryan and Sony would jump at the chance to acquire Nintendo just as eagerly. Both PS and Xbox have been aggressively pursuing acquisitions and consolidation for years now, and Nintendo would be a crown jewel in any gaming publisher’s portfolio.

Sony and Nintendo are both terrible, hypocritical companies in their own right. That by no means absolves Microsoft of being who they are, and the pro-consumer tactic Xbox has employed for the past 5 or 6 years is definitely a calculated move and the result of them falling hard after the Don Mattrick era, but to say that Microsoft (and by that I assume you mean Xbox) is terrible for gaming is a bad take. The gaming landscape is better because Xbox exists. Competition and choice empower the consumer. If you think Sony wouldn’t be an even shittier company without the competition Xbox provides, you really don’t understand how these avaricious corporate conglomerates operate.

I can download my playlists for offline playback, which is good enough for me. That isn’t the case for everyone, of course, but the question was about one’s personal philosophy.

I never pirate games from indies or smaller publishers, but from the likes of EA, Activision, Take Two, etc? Since they’re always going to use, abuse and discard their workforce so they can keep giving the C suite their multi-million dollar annual bonuses, I will pirate their shit without an ounce of remorse.

With music, I never pirate simply because it’s more convenient to stream the music at a reasonable price. If there’s an artist or album I really love, I will buy it and/or some merch to support the artist directly.

Keep an eye out for Dell Refurbished to run one of their 50% off deals. Recently they had 9th-gen i5s with those specs in that price range, and they’re refurbished business laptops so generally higher build quality than consumer hardware.

When we get in that state of a technology, we should definitely be looking at how to make our devices last longer instead of renewing yearly / bi-yearly.

Won’t somebody please think of the children profits?

Linux seriously needs to figure out laptop battery life. Not much chance of going mainstream when installing it means a 50% drop in your battery life. Until then, I’ll use Linux on my desktop and just disable all the adware spam shit in Windows on my laptop.

You don’t have to buy a computer so old that it requires a lightweight Linux distro. You can find quad-core i5s with 16GB of RAM for around $300. That will run Windows 11 just fine.