People keep saying that they verify your age at the super market and I keep trying to remember the last time that happened to me and I just cannot. Nor, for that matter, at bars or coffee shops (for after lunch chat chilling before returning for the afternoon stint).
It may just be my corner of the European Union being much more lax than others.
I think that with enough community effort, it could.
Some of what I think is missing is just community documentation (manuals, tutorials, troubleshooting pages) that are easy to find and recent. While yes, solutions from 5 to 10 years ago still work, they often don’t reflect the full recent reality, never mind the tendency for CLI solutions (which are great, but plenty of people are intimidated by the CLI).
The other thing that I think is missing is polish around things that are just off the beaten path… the kinds of things that not everyone will do, but that most will do at least one of.
The issue with “children” local accounts (assuming they ever remained 100% local anyway) is that for it to be effective, you would have to control who install the OS for it to be effective.
I have been managing my own OS install since I was a teen, so I could have just created an adult account for me. But, okay, you could say that you could just regularly check your child hasn’t reinstalled the machine.
Well, see, they could just install a Virtual Machine. There is plenty of Virtual Machine software out there, and then we’re back at whoever installs it being responsible for filling in that information. And Virtual Machines are very useful for a bunch of things: from running software not made for your hardware (see Android emulators, WSL), to being safer around dodgy software.
You could counter that by not letting them install things with your permissions… but there are portable versions of software that people make for a bunch of reasons which don’t recall an installation. And I am not talking about hypotheticals: back when I was in school people would carry portable versions of games in USB sticks to copy around school machines so they could play video games during IT class.
Never mind that it means that whenever they want to install something, they will poke you about it, and now you’re on the hook for reviewing that. Which you should already be doing because you care about what your child does and they don’t have the years of experience to not break their OS.
But if you are doing that, why not use proper parental control software that let’s you have much finer-grained control over what they can see or not online, along with other controls around how much time they can spend on the machine and a few nicer things?
I missed not having to think about Samba to share a drive with a Windows machine.
On the other hand, I was rightly pointed to better alternatives for my use-case, so perhaps the learning will make the pain worth it?
That is silly, though, since that’s something that each developer should be arranging for as part of obtaining the rights to use the music. Either the developer has the rights to use the music as part of the game (and thus sell the game with the music), and by extension Valve can be granted the limited right by the developer to transmit and/or perform the music (in trailers), or the developer does not have such rights and they should not be selling the game in the first place.
There is much to critique Steam for… This? This is nothing but a cash-grab, in my opinion.
Standardized parental controls would be great, actually. But it should be proper parental controls, not whatever this is. Because at the end of the day, the parent* should be involved in what their child is up to, and allow (or not) based on what the child needs and/or wants, instead of whatever we are doing now.
Or, to put it another way, if your teen has read Games of Thrones (the physical books), I don’t see much of a point in forbidding them from going to the wiki of it, and I’d be hard pressed to justify stopping them from talking about it online with other people who have read the books. The tools should allow for this kind of nuance, because actual people are going to use it and these kind of situations happen all the time.
* some parents are awful and would abuse this, see LGBT+ related things, but that’s a social issue, not a technological issue.
Just a small note around the Qwant and Ecosia index, because I spent some time looking into the European index recently:
As far as I can see, at least Ecosia has started using it (2025-08-07), and they are using the same service to power their AI Overviews (2025-12-02). The index seems to be under the name of Staan and the website claims that Qwant, Ecosia and Lilo are using it.
However, staan’s plan for web search says “French only (EN and DE soon)”, so it seems like a limited rollout for now.
Facebook tried the whole real name thing, and it did not do much to stop people from being cunts with impunity. We have been over this.
Never mind that you also have to account for people who would rather not be under their legal name for a variety of reasons, ranging from being victims of stalking and abuse, to artistic reasons, to simply preferring another name than the one their parents chose for them.
I am not sure Spain is the right country to make considering the laws they have and how they have been used (spanish wikipedia).
There are a multitude of reason why I like it.
The most important is that I am not wasting an hour and change commuting. I don’t need to worry about train schedules. Commuting by car would have been worse: I’d spend hundreds of euros on gas and tolls, never mind parking. I also don’t have a bunch of dead time I cannot really take advantage of. Sure, some of it I could use to read in public transport, or listen to podcasts, but there is a limit. I am prone to motion sickness, so there are limits to when I can do it and for how long. And during peak hours? The experience of getting on a train is, sometimes, not great. Too many people, too hot. As much as I love public mass transport, the experience during peak hours is miserable.
The other thing about WFH, in my current setup, is that… I can just step away? I have gone to a friends house to give them and/or deliver something during work hours because I just have enough time. I have driven parents for appointments because it was quick enough, or I could just take my work laptop with me and work from the car. I have worked from another country entirely, and the biggest difference was the timezone. And if I really want to, I can visit a teammate and work from his house instead!
There are few other reasons why work from home is great, though they are not that important in the grand scheme of things. In the places I have worked, we have had open spaces. This means noise. Others might need to be on a call, or you might need to be on a call. It means that multiple people in the same call is now an exercise in mute discipline so you don’t distract others hearing themselves through your microphone. It also means I cannot just pace around while on a chat, which I sometimes do thanks to the wireless headphones I invested in. Actually, it means I need to use my headphones much more because if I want music, I need them on, whereas at home I can just use speakers instead?
We do get togethers once a month, though I don’t go to all of them. We also are relatively liberal with audio chats for not so serious subjects. I don’t feel lonely for two reasons: I just deal well with calls and other such ways of interacting with people; and I can use the extra time I don’t commute to actually go out with people I like after work.
We have had similar reactions to things like tracking by websites and other such cases. And to a certain extent, I get it: sometimes you just want your tools to work and move on with your life. And if that means that something you don’t particularly use or immediately care about is worse, then that’s just the cost of doing business.
Specially around “NSFW”, a lot of people just don’t engage with it in “public”. They leave “NSFW” stuff to one on one conversations with people they are close with, if at all.
The thing is, I say “NSFW” in quotes because we have seen, repeatedly, that what might be NSFW is not just porn. It has been extended to things around identify, sexual health and so on. Never mind that “you don’t care about privacy” until you realize that you were in a data breach and you now have to worry about malicious people getting you into financial peril by abusing your identity. Or worse.
I’m not sure how you get people to care, though, before things get bad enough.
While I understand it is non-standard, I am currently stuck with having a two person server, so this would certainly impact me.
And why do I have a two person server? Because we like to share things about a variety of subjects, and you don’t really want to get a face full of porn in public transit, all because you got a notification about the noodles I had for dinner. It’s something that has not been solved elsewhere (unless you want to deal with group chats as a workaround, but that’s more of a hack than using a server for 1:1), so Discord was the better option here in that regard.
I love this! I love that it’s getting more attention and cross-platform support.
I just wish it wasn’t yet another launcher, and that all these companies got together to develop the one Open Source version everyone writes adapters for. Galaxy, at the time it was released, promised to be a way to have all of them… and then I discovered playnite (which worked better and has more options) and I cannot help but wonder if GOG’s efforts wouldn’t be better directed that way. Specially since my understanding is that the tool is undergoing a rewrite for cross-platform support.
Experience (see Facebook, in general, and the real name experiment) says that no, your last point does not hold. As it turns out, people are more than happy to be assholes with their names attached, never mind the many others who don’t want to make drama and are more than happy to keep hanging out with them.
If you roam around the internet for long enough, in the right public areas, you are bound to find plenty of tales of families choosing to keep hanging out with abusers over the victims, never mind people who are just “being mean on the internet”.